The Genre of Trolls - Doria

the practice of changing babies; here the Devil (SLS 166: 687–689; SLS 37:
70–71), the earthdwellers (SLS 333: 208–210) and the brownies (SLS 166:
728–729) are the troll’s fellow culprits, in addition to nameless creatures
(Finlands 1931: 147–148).
No personal experience narratives of trolls have been recorded, but this
might be the result of the vicissitudes of collection. If we relate this fact to
the rest of the material on supernatural beings, we can see that personal
experience stories are rather scarce in general. There are a few narratives
about encounters with the rå, for instance, but the number of such texts is
marginal. Their inclusion in the extant collections may be as much attributed
to chance as to any conscious design, and it is possible that collectors
were biased against, or simply uninterested in, personal experience narratives.
Accordingly, I cannot make any pronouncement on the empirical or
fictitious nature of the troll in the Swedish tradition in Finland.
I have chosen not to make any wide-ranging comparisons with Finnishlanguage
and international traditions (concerning the former, see note 3 in
this chapter); it is my hope that anyone interested in this aspect of the troll
tradition in the Swedish-speaking districts in Finland will find what he
needs in order to draw his own conclusions. 4 Similarly, I have declined to
consider the extent of belief in trolls; as Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi
have shown us, belief is a volatile condition (Dégh & Vázsonyi 1976), and
the contextual information is too scant to give any indication of belief or
non-belief in any case.
A choice I regret I have been forced to make, but that I nevertheless
deem necessary, is the limited attention I have been able to devote to intertexts
from the field of wider folk belief, in chapters 4 and 5 in particular. I
have felt it more urgent to point to relations with religious tradition, which
is the prime contribution of this thesis to the study of folk belief, than to
provide an exhaustive account of the belief context to which the material
examined belonged.
In the present study the terms narrative, text, intertextuality and intertext,
dialogue and discourse will be liberally employed. By narrative I mean
the narration of a series of events, involving a process of communication in
which the narrative is told by a performer to a recipient using verbal means
4 He and his will be employed to denote any anonymous person, and both men and women
are included.
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Introduction