The Genre of Trolls - Doria

6 GENRE, PARODY, CHRONOTOPES AND
NOVELIZATION: THE WONDER TALES
OF JOHAN ALÉN
In this chapter I focus on the stories of a single narrator in order to see how
he negotiates his relationship with tradition, what choices he makes in his
active construction of genre, and how these choices affect the actualization
of the narratives.
I first encountered one of Johan Alén’s stories when I was reviewing the
recorded material on troll tradition for my Master’s thesis. One day I happened
upon his “Three Princes” (text 1), and I felt like I had been hit by a
cudgel. It was a decidedly perverse twist on the familiar tale of the girl
transformed into a mouse, going against all the tenets of what I thought I
recognized as a kind of “folk ethic” regarding relations to the supernatural
realm. Readers will indubitably see why on perusal of the text. It was a
thoroughly shocking experience, from a traditional point of view, but the
narrative also roused my curiosity. Why did the narrator tell such a peculiar
variant of the story? What were the consequences for the genre of the
wonder tale, when the narrative violated its norms so blatantly? My mind
was teeming with these irritating little questions, and it has continued to
do so ever since. This chapter is my attempt to solve at least part of the
riddle.
From its rather modest beginnings, “the Alén question” has expanded to
include considerations of parody, Bakhtinian chronotopes, and even the
process of novelization. A diverse, and perhaps somewhat eclectic, array of
perspectives will be brought to bear on two of Alén’s narratives; however, I
feel this theoretical diversity is essential if we are to grasp the complexities
of these narratives. In the following, I will deal with each aspect, i.e., genre,
parody, chronotopes and novelization, in turn, and present my theoretical
premises in that context. I discuss the construction of the image of the
troll, and of the relationship between man and troll, on the second level as
mentioned in chapter 1.1, scrutinizing the generic components out of which
the image of the troll can be constructed, and how the manipulation of
these elements may change the conception of the troll. Therefore, intertextuality
is still a main concern, and to some extent I will cite intertexts to
Alén’s narratives like I did in chapter 4 and chapter 5, but I will do so pri-
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Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén