The Genre of Trolls - Doria

As for why the performers have made these connections between their
troll narratives and the Bible—assuming they were consciously made, which
I believe they were, at least to some extent—several possible reasons could
be adduced. Firstly, if folklore and the religious tradition formed parts of
the same network of associations, it might have been a matter of course to
link these domains in various ways. This network of associations could also
be glossed in terms of traditional referentiality as developed by John Miles
Foley. Foley argues that narrative elements, such as the phrases and themes
discussed in these two chapters, function as cognitive categories that link
the individual text to a larger body of texts, and guide the reception and interpretation
of a narrative (Foley 1991: 50–60). Thus, if we consider religious
tradition a part of the domain of traditional referentiality, the narrative elements
employed in a text would explicitly invoke the religious sphere as a
frame of interpretation, without which the reception of the text would be
incomplete, and perhaps even faulty. Secondly, the narrators are explicitly
incorporating religion and the church into the stories, and by doing so they
are invoking a specific frame of interpretation, inviting the audience to understand
the texts in relation to that particular sphere. Thirdly, the occasionally
critical function of the troll narratives requires that the object of
critique is evoked in order to be possible to criticize. Conversely, for those
agreeing with the tenets of the religious tradition, citing the latter in some
fashion lent authority to their own points of view. Fourthly, the words and
images of the Bible were a common resource, a language everyone could
understand, or were at least supposed to understand, and as such it was
valuable in communicative interaction.
In the identification of intertexts from the Bible and the local stock of
folklore, I have naturally depended on my own knowledge of these texts.
Needless to say, the resulting interpretation is my own, and even though I
have tried my best to keep a tight rein on my readings, attempting to avoid
making too tenuous connections between stories, the performers themselves
could well have had other intertexts in mind than the ones I have discerned.
However, folklore and religious texts also represent different discourses,
and their interconnection is therefore interdiscursive in nature as well. Interdiscursivity,
as it has been elaborated by Norman Fairclough, implies the
relational constitution of discourses, defined as specific ways of constructing
a subject matter or area of knowledge (Fairclough 1992: 128), that is as a
group of individualizable statements, the production of which is governed
Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity and Power 209