The Genre of Trolls - Doria

epresentation, embodied in the image of a speaking person, and more importantly,
it can be contested in a manner authoritative discourse cannot.
The latter is indivisible and has to be accepted or rejected as a whole, whereas
the former allows for acceptance or rejection of individual details. Resistance
to internally persuasive discourse can be offered by putting it in a
new situation to expose its weak sides, or to locate its boundaries (Bakhtin
1986a: 343, 347–348). That is how folklore proceeds in its dialogue with religious
tradition, transferring the Garden of Eden with its connotation of a
pristine, innocent state to the mainly pagan realm of supernatural beings
associated with glamour and illusion, which is clearly beyond the boundaries
of the religious discourse. At the same time it discloses the weakness
of the Christian doctrine, since it can promise salvation, virtually a return
to Paradise, only in the afterlife. Paradise on earth is beyond the confines
of its teachings, and that may have been perceived as a lack in the folk
tradition, which consequently produced its own version of the primeval
garden. Another example of the recontextualization of internally persuasive
discourse is the transposition of the Biblical discourse of exorcism to
the banishment of trolls. This transference serves to highlight the precariousness
of such a discourse in the mouths of those who are unworthy to
use it, hence to elucidate its limitations.
The instances of agreement with the religious tradition must also be discussed.
Here internally persuasive discourse has been persuasive, and the
narrators of folklore have adopted its viewpoint. In contradistinction to the
acceptance of authoritative discourse, it is a reasoned unanimity that has
been subjected to and survived the crossfire of other competing discourses.
Incidentally, those examples tend to focus on values that are social as well
as Christian, and therefore doubly significant, for instance the avoidance of
fratricide or the injunction against vanity (see chapter 4.1).
At this juncture it might be suitable to consider the link between power
and subjectivity. In his examination of power relations “from the bottom
up”, Michel Foucault has concentrated on the micro-mechanisms of power,
that is the workings of power in everyday life (Foucault 1980: 101). The
techniques of power employed by the church to constitute individuals as
Christian subjects consisted of forms of examination, for example. The
the New Testament, which uses the everyday language of the period, but regarding the
Swedish translations all but the most recent, Bibel 2000, have favoured archaic language.
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Intertextuality as Social Critique