The Genre of Trolls - Doria

Some texts merely comment on the difference in religion and leave it at
that. In one story the female troll denies having attended mass the day
before (SLS 202 Sagor II, 28: 603), tacitly for the simple reason that she is
not a Christian, and in another the troll is prepared to marry off its daughter
to a Christian man who declines the offer because he wants a Christian
spouse (SLS 202 Sagor II, 1: 325). The human is the one to uphold the distinction
between Christians and non-Christians, while the troll can dispense
with such conceptual and confessional boundaries.
3.4 Breaking the Contact
In the preceding sections we have seen that the troll tradition is very diverse,
and there seem to be few common denominators shared by a large
number of narratives. One factor that is common to most or all of the
stories is that at least one character transgresses the boundary between the
human and the supernatural world, and conversely, one character or agent
re-establishes this boundary, separating the two spheres in a process I have
called dissociation. In this section I will therefore consider the dissociation
of the human sphere and the otherworld, focusing on the agent re-establishing
the boundary between them and the means through which the disconnection
is achieved. The discussion is based on the assumption that the
previous transgression of boundaries has temporarily united the human and
the supernatural world, or brought them into contact, and that this union
or contact has to come to an end in a renewed separation of the spheres. A
special case of encounter, what I have labelled “The Fateful Encounter”,
will receive a separate treatment (3.4.6). Protective and apotropaic measures
against the troll will also be examined (3.4.5).
3.4.1 Men Dissociate
In more than half of the texts, a man is involved in the rupture between the
human and supernatural realm; in the rest, the honour is shared by women,
children, animals, trolls and impersonal phenomena in roughly equal proportions.
The simplest way of achieving a separation is to leave the site of
encounter and the world of the troll (Fagerlund 1878: 178; Nyland 1896, 26;
SLS 21, 29; SLS 65: 45; SLS 202 Sagor II, 1; SLS 220: 240–242; SLS 280:
503–504). This strategy is employed in intentional as well as unintentional
encounters in which the man has crossed the boundary between the worlds.
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Description of the Troll Tradition