The Genre of Trolls - Doria

well. Finally, “3.4 Breaking the Contact” contemplates the agent effecting
the dissociation of the human and supranormal sphere, and the means
through which it is achieved, protective and apotropaic measures included.
A special study of a peculiar form of encounter, here called the fateful encounter,
is appended to this chapter. Individual records will be quoted as
examples. Hence chapter 3 deals with the construction of the image of the
troll, and of the relationship between man and troll, on a descriptive level.
In chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, the problem of the construction of the image of
the troll and the representation of the relation between man and troll is
approached on three levels. On the first level, explored in chapters 4 and 5,
I examine the texts and discourses out of which the portrait of the troll is
woven. In other words, I am undertaking a study of the web of intertextual
relations between different troll texts, between troll texts and other folklore
texts, and between troll texts and Biblical narratives. Other scholars have
addressed the problem of the relationship between religion and folklore
(see e.g. Bringéus 1997; Granberg 1971; Wolf-Knuts 1991; Wolf-Knuts 2000;
Dundes (1999) is exceptional in that the author discusses the Bible as folklore),
and my contribution to this debate centres on the more wide-ranging
implications of my research approach. For example, I will argue that scholars
need to pay attention to the ways in which Christianity influences folk
narrative and folk belief beneath the ostensibly pre- or extra-Christian surface
of traditional stories, because religion helps to shape these narratives
from within by furnishing intertexts for them, from the Bible for instance.
I will be adapting the theory of intertextuality proposed by Julia Kristeva
and reworked by the Finnish folklorist Lotte Tarkka (for definitions of
terms utilized in this thesis, see also chapter 1.2; for discussions of concepts,
see chapter 1.4). In her pioneering essay “Le mot, le dialogue et le
roman”, Kristeva construed any text as “a mosaic of quotations, any text is
the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1978: 84–85): a
writer constructs his text in relation to an earlier literary corpus. Tarkka
aligns herself with this definition in stating that intertextuality refers to the
idea of the text as a meeting point of different texts, where different points
of view intermingle and collide. By the same token, intertexts are the other
texts giving the individual text its meaning (Tarkka 1993: 171). For this
reason, no text is simple and uncomplicated, it has many layers that a conscientious
analyst should be aware of and strive to discover. Tarkka does
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Introduction