The Genre of Trolls - Doria

hand along my side, you’ll know she’s there. I cannot tell, for then she’ll disappear.”
When she came one evening after that, the boy moved his hand along his side, and they
knew she was there. When the boy did that, the master of the house, who was the boy’s
father, gripped the poker from the hearth, and hit where the boy showed she was standing,
and dislocated her thigh bone. Then she became visible, and it was an old person.
Thus, whereas the superiority of the bride of the youngest brother is a matter
of course in the parodied discourse, her beauty is far more sinister in the
parodying discourse. 29 No wonder the bride of the youngest prince is more
ravishing than the other girls with such powers at her command. What she
might look like underneath the illusion, the parodying discourse darkly
suggests, is impossible to say. This specific intertext represents the most
serious attempt at undermining the positive image of the heroine by surreptitiously
inserting an element of doubt or apprehension. I believe Alén
actually strove for this effect, and I would argue that the intertext is invoked
by the parallel with the transformation of the mouse at the end. It is evidently
voluntary, and if she can assume any guise she wishes, why would
her “fine and beautiful damsel” shape be the true one? Yet there is no hard
evidence to prove that it is not.
If we are to follow this darker train of associations, the arrival of the
prince to the cottage allows some occasion for suspense, but the reader
realizes it only after the conclusion of the story. The inhabitants of troll or
rå cottages are not always keen to entertain uninvited guests, and apart
from being chased away in a most undignified and hostile manner, everyone
has not come out of such an encounter entirely unchanged. One of the
earliest records from Vörå describes such an encounter (cf. chapter 3.4.6):
9) I forntiden skall vid detta berg, en halfvuxen gåsse ifrån Tuckor by som vallat boskap,
och varit försedd(?) med en knif, dermed han åt sig löstskurit en käpp, och under vandringen
gått och snickrat denne käppen, och således kommit till Isomäki berget, hade
han derstädes oförmodeligen kommit till en Herregård, der han gått in på gården, och
der kommit att fästa sin uppmärksamhet å en der varande brunn, med vindställning,
och dersom brunnhinken varit utaf koppar blankskuradt, som han kände sig törstig
begaf han sig in uti Byggningen, i afsikt för att få sig något till dricka, inkommen uti
29 Here I am working according to the assumption that the preformed material is the text
being parodied by the comically refunctioned narrative, but in reality the relationship between
parodied and parodying discourse might be far more complicated. I have tried to
take this into account by paying attention to potential ambiguities in the identification of
the parodied and the parodying discourse.
Parody 239