The Genre of Trolls - Doria

considerable power over his parishioners by virtue of his social standing
and education. The stories serve to draw the parson into the network of
social relations and to neutralize his power (Brettell 1990: 68). Simultaneously,
the narrators exercise a linguistic power over the clergy by appropriating
them for their own purposes (Taylor 1990: 182). Nevertheless, anticlericalism
should not be automatically equated with irreligiosity; the target
of critique is mainly the parson as an individual and the church as an institution,
or specific religious practices which are felt to be incompatible with
“the true faith” from the perspective of the parishioners (Behar 1990: 105;
Brettell 1990: 64, 67). Official doctrines might also be reinterpreted, subverting
the meaning attributed to them by the church (Behar 1990: 97–98):
transposing the blissful afterlife in Heaven to an insouciant existence in the
world of the troll may constitute such a reinterpretation.
Thus, in this and the previous chapter I hope I have been able to indicate
the existence of intertextual relations between troll texts, other folklore narratives
and Biblical stories. These intertextual relations have occasionally
been established to voice ideological critique, as in chapter 4, or to express
social critique, as in the present chapter. To elucidate these connections, I
have applied Lotte Tarkka’s theory of metaphor and metonymy which
links the human world and the otherworld by stressing their similarities
and differences, and elements bridging the gap between them (for a discussion
of the definition of these terms, see chapters 1.1, 1.4.1, 4.1). The
generation of a series of metaphors, associated because of their common
theme—illumination and banishment, for example—has engendered a corresponding
series of interdependent levels in the narrators’ networks of
associations. Hence the three types of texts may be said to belong to the
same system of referentiality, and to be included in a larger repertoire of
cultural images and symbols available to narrators in the parish of Vörå in
this period (cf. Stark-Arola 1998: 188).
The concrete relation between the narratives has been explored in terms
of agreement, reversal or inversion, and negation of a whole series of events
(chapter 4), or of the evaluation of a single theme (chapter 5). All of these
relationships have been found to be pertinent to the interrelation of the
texts; notwithstanding, the relationship between a story and its intertexts
has often proved to be more complicated than this model suggests: a narrative
may agree with one or some aspects of an intertext, for instance,
while it rejects others.
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Intertextuality as Social Critique