The Genre of Trolls - Doria

fied, for which he should be grateful as it saves him from the dire fate of
Cat-John. Once again, an interaction is perceived as highly inappropriate.
In the invocation of the name of Jesus, a third sphere, the divine, briefly
intertwines with the human and supernatural world to dissolve the unhappy
union with its might, whereby this world and the otherworld are abruptly
severed from each other. The divine powers are potent dissociators, as we
have seen. In the end, the boy finds himself seated on a rotten tree stump,
coming unscathed out of the ordeal, with his wits intact.
3.5 Encountering the Troll
In this part of my dissertation I have tried to delineate the relationship between
man and troll as evidenced in my material. I have restricted myself
to a largely descriptive approach, without any extensive references to the
sources on other supernatural beings or on other kinds of folklore. Nevertheless,
a broader perspective is needed in the discussion of my findings,
and in accordance with the overall theoretical framework of my thesis, it
will be intertextual. The corpus of material presented here can be regarded
as a large-scale intertextual network, and as such the interrelation between
the texts constituting it is characterized by association and disagreement;
sometimes they agree with each other, sometimes they disagree. The varying
construction of the relationship between man and troll in terms of conflict
and tolerance in different ratios is an example of this, as each text enters
into complex relations of agreement and dissonance with other texts.
Together they create a multi-faceted mosaic of divergent and convergent
points of view on troll and man, and on their interaction.
The texts also form intertextual networks with folklore, culture and society
as a whole, and the gender and age-specific relations between humans
and the supernatural are interesting in this respect. As stated before, only
men intentionally traverse the boundary between the human and the supernatural
world, and they are often more active in their dealings with the
otherworld, while women and children are portrayed as more helpless and
passive. Thus, women and children are perceived as more vulnerable and
open to attack, whereas men are depicted as more fearless. If this represents
the ideal in the narrative construction of gender in the Swedish-speaking
areas in Finland, two observations can be made. Firstly, if that is the case,
it is precisely an ideal, and not necessarily a description of real-life relations
Encountering the Troll 135