The Genre of Trolls - Doria

in the countryside, while his brothers in their turn travelled to towns to woo. When he
was travelling, he arrived at a small crofter’s cottage in the forest, and he went inside.
As he came in, a mouse ran to and fro on the floor, and was in such a hurry as if it had
been the mistress of the house herself. By the hearth was a hole, and into that it bolted
when it had done what it ought to do in the cottage. When the prince came in, he
stated his business: that he was looking for a wife, and then the mouse thought he
might as well be allowed to propose to it. As he asked to buy food, it cooked food for
him. When he had eaten, it made the bed for him, so that he could go to sleep. When
it had done that, it bolted down into the hole by the hearth. In the morning it made
the bed once more, and when he was to go it gave him a chain of gold. When he came
home from his courting trip, he had a chain of gold to show, while his brothers in their
turn only got chains of silver from their brides. As he came back to the same place the
second time, the same mouse was running in a hurry on the floor once more, as if it
had been the mistress of the house. It cooked food for him, and it made the bed, and
when it had done its duties, it bolted down into its hole by the hearth. As he was to go
home, that mouse gave him a golden spoon to show when he got home; while his brothers
had nothing to show from their brides, the second time they came home. When
he went the third time to woo, that same mouse ran in the same hurry as the previous
times: it cooked food for him, and it made the bed for him, and as all work in the
house was done, it scampered off down into its hole by the hearth. As it bolted off
down into its hole as soon as it had done its work each time the prince was there, he
thought: “now I’ll go looking into that hole.[”] He looked into it, and beneath the
floor there were really splendid chambers, and fine damsels sitting there sewing, and
that mouse was the mistress. In the morning when it emerged it was a fine and beautiful
damsel, so that there could be none more beautiful. She was thus the bride of the
prince. When they were to leave, she pulled out her carriage, and took her own horses
and her own maids, and they were off. When he came to the royal estate, he had the
finest and most beautiful bride of all three brothers, despite her being a troll, and so
splendid driving equipment that the king didn’t have more beautiful driving tackle.
The opening formula Once upon a time immediately pin-points the generic
model to which the narrative is related. As a key to performance (Bauman
1984), it is an index of entextualization (cf. Bauman & Briggs 1990: 74). It
separates the text from the surrounding discourse, now lost to us. (What
we have is a doubly entextualized narrative, first made into a coherent
whole in performance, then in transcription.) On the level of structure as
well as content the text thus far accords with the model, and the intertextual
gap is minimized: in the register of wonder tale prose—register being
understood as “major speech styles associated with recurrent types of
situations” (Hymes 1989: 440; Harvilahti 2000: 68)—the carpenter Alén
describes the position of the reviled youngest brother, a common one in
the folktale genre (Lüthi 1994: 43, 47), the quest for a wife, the prime goal
Genre 223