The Genre of Trolls - Doria

etween the sexes and age groups. The sexual division of labour required
women to be active in their own spheres of responsibility, and, as the stories
testify, those responsibilities demanded that they left the shelter of
their own home, working in the forest and the wilds. Children also had
their duties outside the farm, herding animals in the forest, for instance.
They had to be able to take initiatives and react to unexpected events, or
the prosperity of the farm would suffer for it.
Secondly, the narratives could be interpreted in such a way as to expose
the limitations of this ideal, as it surrenders women and children to the
whims of the supernatural. Without the social and cultural permission to
be strong and to be able to defend themselves against aggressors, they have
to wait for someone, or even something, to come and rescue them. Occasionally,
they have to wait for a long time; some children taken by the troll
waited for a century until a rescuer came along, and by then they had no
life to return to—they turned into ashes as soon as they were baptized.
This situation is untenable, but whether the narrators actually intended to
point to this fact is difficult to determine.
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Description of the Troll Tradition