The Genre of Trolls - Doria

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under the bed. The boy was looking [for it], but the girl managed to keep it safe. When
the boy didn’t find anything, the troll said he could let it be unsearched for until more
was coming. At that the girl ran home.
The text contains several of the motifs discussed above; the girl tastes the
fruit of the otherworld, yet is not assimilated into the supernatural realm,
like the prince. She spots a large beautiful building, the sêma for a troll
cottage as the anonymous narrator overtly acknowledges, and the interior
of the house is much akin to the shop depicted by Tegengren (text 5). Each
category of items has its own place in the organization of the household.
Although it is not stated explicitly, these objects might be the trophies of
the troll, taken from the people it has slain. As Alén’s story is a story of
possibilities, the last intertext illustrates what could have happened had the
prince not been so lucky as to encounter only a mouse in the cottage.
The rodent shape is in itself ambiguous. In the “conventional” rendition
of the story (cf. the discussion of Berndt Strömberg’s variant above), the
mouse or rat sports a very positive image in accordance with the wonder
tale evaluation of this animal as identified by Jan-Öjvind Swahn. Swahn
argues that mice and rats are described in an endearing, often “sweet” fashion
in wonder tales, and that they co-operate with the human protagonists
to the advantage of the latter. There are no Scandinavian wonder tales in
which these animals are viewed unfavourably, he states (Swahn 1984: 21).
Nevertheless, in legends and folk belief, rats and mice are seen as disgusting
little creatures, associated with every conceivable calamity (Swahn 1984: 17–
19). Alén exploits the different perspectives on these rodents by creating an
interference between the positive wonder tale image of them and the singularly
negative one of legends, since his recontextualization of the mouse in
the narrative (see 6.1) subjects it to a reinterpretation in the light of other
generic models. The ominous qualities of the mouse are actualized in Alén’s
invocations of intertexts: the enthralling mouse/troll (cf. text 10: SLS 28,
3: 69), the devious mouse/troll (cf. text 8: R II 70), the punishing mouse/
troll (cf. text 7: SLS 22: 16–17; text 9: SLS 299: 34–35). The intertextual associations
of his parody thus “rub off” on the image of the mouse, giving it
other and more horrifying dimensions. The guise of the mouse was also
employed by those supernatural beings—trolls, witches and the nightmare
—which inspired most fear in humans (Swahn 1984: 18), and the sinister
connotations of the shape are present along with the positive ones in Alén’s
story through the intermingling of wonder tale and legend traits.
Genre, Parody, Chronotopes and Novelization: the Wonder Tales of Johan Alén