The Genre of Trolls - Doria

4 INTERTEXTUALITY AS IDEOLOGICAL
CRITIQUE
In this and the following chapter I propose to scrutinize intertextual relations
between the corpus of troll texts and other folk narratives recorded in
the parish of Vörå in Ostrobothnia, and the religious literature, Biblical
stories in particular, used in the area in order to investigate the texts and
discourses going into the construction of the image of the troll. Two groups
of texts have been selected as particularly suited for this purpose, as they
represent the closest equivalent to a thick corpus (Honko 2000: 15–17) to be
found in my material, as mentioned in chapter 1.2. Both groups consist of
narratives of abduction, but the second also incorporates the motif of the
expulsion of the culprits. My aim is to illustrate the interconnection of various
traditions, or, in other words, to demonstrate that folk belief and religious
traditions are not such separate entities in the sense that it is not possible
to disengage them from each other. The pioneers of the discipline of
folkloristics frequently attempted to remove the Christian elements of folk
tradition in order to bring out its ancient, pagan characteristics, while present-day
scholars have often neglected the Christian dimensions of folklore
in their analyses. Few have denied the influence of Christianity on folklore
—Gunnar Granberg, for example, readily acknowledged it (Granberg 1971:
218–219)—but equally few have demonstrated its profound impact on folklore.
Here I want to emphasize the necessity of taking Christianity into
account, even where apparently pagan elements are involved, when discussing
folk belief in particular, and folklore in general.
As stated in chapters 1.1 and 1.4.1, the concept of intertextuality was first
introduced by Julia Kristeva in her inaugural essay “Le mot, le dialogue et
le roman” (Kristeva 1978: 82–112), originally published in 1969. Before I continue
with the analysis, I will give a more thorough introduction to relevant
theory than I was able to provide in the research history. Proceeding from
the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Ferdinand de Saussure, Kristeva achieved
an intermingling of their ideas that is in essence independent of her predecessors
(cf. Allen 2000). Taking the Bakhtinian word as a point of departure,
Kristeva focused on the text as generated in relation to another
structure; the word “n’est pas un point (un sens fixe), mais un croisement
de surfaces textuelles, un dialogue de plusieurs écritures: de l’écrivain, du
Intertextuality as Ideological Critique 137