The Genre of Trolls - Doria

ing to study. Notwithstanding, in the course of my work I have found that
the theme I picked out for scrutiny more or less at random, though with a
definite goal in mind (see chapter 1.5 on the selection of material), is connected
to a much larger complex of themes that appears to have been of
great significance in 19th-century rural culture; all of them centred on the
motifs of blindness and illumination, or some aspect thereof. In chapter
4.2, I treat this topic more thoroughly.
What I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters is that narratives
and narration, the worlds portrayed in them and the supernatural beliefs
connected with them, as well as folklore as a whole, are constructed in relation
to other texts, discourses and domains of culture, and that they gain
their meaning within this larger frame of reference. I believe that intertextuality
is a vital aspect of folklore and culture, and that it is instrumental
in creating the sense of the coherence of culture and society that human
beings seem to crave. I also want to stress that 19th-century rural culture
was permeated by the Christian tradition, and that the folklore of the period
cannot be understood in isolation from religion. The impact of Christianity
on folklore exists even where you do not expect to find it, and it is my
hope that the reader will be able to see this too in the course of my discussion.
For this reason, it is my ambition to broaden the scope of folkloristic
intertextualist studies to include the religious sphere as well; this approach
is not entirely unprecedented (see Wolf-Knuts 1991; Wolf-Knuts 2000;
Stark 2002), but it ought to be taken into account more frequently.
Concerning the depiction of the otherworld in narrative, I want to show
how the image of the supernatural sphere may represent an ideal unattainable
in the human world, and how it can be utilized as a tool for criticizing
aspects of the human sphere, either ideological shortcomings (chapter 4) or
social inequality (chapter 5). Scholars have pointed to this function before
(Tarkka 1998b; Stark 2002), but I wish to confirm and reinforce this hypothesis
as I think it is very important for the understanding of folk belief.
4.1 Blindness and Illumination
The first narrative of abduction to be treated derives from Jacob Tegengren,
and it is recorded some time before 1916 when it was published in Hembygden:
Blindness and Illumination 143