The Genre of Trolls - Doria

foster without acknowledging it (Oja 1999: 293–294). However, folklore
was not accorded any concrete truth value due to its rediscovery, it was
merely seen as the repository of a symbolic truth, much like literature (cf.
Mills 2002: 23). Furthermore, it had to be sifted by the researcher in order
to separate the recent, inferior chaff from the ancient and precious grain; to
reach the symbolic truth of folklore, one had to be doubly removed from its
present manifestation.
The discourse of popular enlightenment as manifested in history books
in use in this period is very interesting from the point of view of the power
relation between religion and folklore. The book on Finnish history utilized
in the beginning of the period, A. G. J. Hallstén’s Finlands historie och
geografi (‘Finland’s History and Geography’), mixed folkloric and religious
elements in the account of history: the land was first inhabited by giants
and hiidenväki (hiisi-people) which were supposed to have constituted the
indigenous population exterminated after the arrival of the Finns, and
subsequently mythologized in Finnish folklore. The Finns, in their turn,
were “led by the divine Spirit governing the peoples” to their present
fatherland. The presentation of Finland’s history ends with the exclamation:
“…we can and shall—steadfast in the conviction that God’s blessing
shall rest on our honest strivings, as it once did on our fathers’—work for
the victory of the true and the right, for the improvement of education in
the Suomi land, [which is] equally sacred to us all” (Hallstén 1852: 3–4).
Folklore is needed to supply the country with a past, but the guidance and
blessing of God is the motor of that glorious past, and of a similarly glorious
future. Hallstén is also referring to the rather common notion that
supernatural creatures were once the original inhabitants of a country. For
example, Jacob Neikter advanced a similar claim regarding the Swedish
trolls in his dissertation De gente antiqua troll (1793), 26 and in Scotland the
26 The following quotation is preceded by a discussion on various mythical peoples, of
which the trolls are one: “Quae et quales ceterae illae gentes, quas aborigines vel primos
Scandinaviae habitatores fuisse diximus, fuerint, in praesenti cum disquirere nequeamus,
de Trollis tantum, quae ex dispersis auctorum locis colligere potuerimus, Tuae B[one]
L[ector] censurae breviter submittere liceat. Constat gentem Trollicam usque ad Christianismi
tempora in Scandinavia superstitem et a ceteris discretam fuisse; deinde vero vel
exstirpatam vel sensim ceteris incolis mixtam defuisse.” (‘Since I cannot at present investigate
which these other peoples were and what they were like—those which I have said
were the aborigines or first settlers in Scandinavia—it is nevertheless possible to briefly
Intertextuality, Interdiscursivity and Power 213