The Genre of Trolls - Doria

When they came to the castle in which the princess lived, the old man said to the boy:
“Now, when you guess what the princess is thinking: say that she is thinking about her
shoes, but don’t be afraid, ’cause she’ll immediately transform herself into wild animals
and snakes and worms, but go and draw a cross on her chest, and she’ll become human
again!” When it was morning and the princess came out from her chamber and asked
what she was thinking about, the boy answered: “You’re thinking about your shoes”.
As he had said what she was thinking about, she soon became a frog and fell down on
the floor. Then she was turned into all kinds of animals and worms; finally she became
a horse. Then the boy went to her and made a cross on her chest and soon she was a
princess again. The boy went into the chamber with her and they liked each other and
were married.
A fisherman begins the process of separation by speaking rudely to the troll,
which completes the process by withdrawing to its hill (SLS 374: 10–12).
The humans function as traversers of boundaries, and the encounter is unintentional.
The parsons in some narratives nurture the ambition of effecting a permanent
breach between the spheres, when the trolls distinguish themselves
by excessive misanthropy or womanizing (SLS 22, 11; SLS 213, 184; SLS
280: 635–636; SLS 338: 21–22). Here the clergymen achieve a double dissociation:
first on the personal level, as the abducted girl is liberated from the
unwholesome influence of the troll, and later on a collective level, when the
trolls are banished from the proximity of humans. After such an expulsion,
the human and the supernatural world can no longer come into contact.
Another priest is confronted with a somewhat different situation; he
needs to retrieve an abducted child from the domain of the troll. The abducted
women are at least granted the privilege of moving outside the supranormal
sphere, in the human world during mass, while still under the influence
of the troll, but the child is wholly confined to the otherworld. It is
not an easy task, but eventually it succeeds, as the power of the parson is
great; the abducted child, and all other children taken for the last century
or so, are rescued. In order to incorporate them completely into the human
sphere, he baptizes them. The elder children, who have outlived their
proper time while staying in the otherworld, crumble to dust and are
assimilated into their own time, whereas the younger ones start to live
(R II 325). The extraordinary power of the priest does not spring from
himself, of course, he is merely the intermediary of God. Yet through him
the human, celestial and supernatural sphere intertwine in the reading of
the sacred texts, and through him they are disengaged again. Thus, it is the
Breaking the Contact 123