The Genre of Trolls - Doria

When the troll arrives to extend the invitation, the humans can barely be
persuaded to follow him. There is no trace of the open, generous atmosphere
prevailing between the women. The next crisis occurs when the
human woman has discharged her duties and they prepare to leave. The
fear of an unexpected attack, fed by the unfinalizability of the troll, looms
large until he soothes their anguish with the words “You needn’t fear, I’ll
take you back to the place where I took you”. The first part of the sentence
is a vernacularized rendition of the exhortation of the angel in, e.g., Matthew
28: 7 (“Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified”).
The humans are comforted by this assurance and consequently have faith
enough in the good intentions of the troll to eat and drink under his auspices.
After that, the troll rewards the woman for her kindness, and conducts
the couple back to their home.
Here dialogue is impeded by the lack of trust; the troll is doing his best
to keep it going, but he gets poor results. The problem is not really the absence
of responsiveness, for it is present, even though the answers are negative;
the crux of the matter is that dialogue is never given a proper chance,
unconditionally, it is not undertaken in earnest like the dialogue between
the women.
In sum, the female and the male troll represent different approaches to
finalization and unfinalizability: the former is consummated, while the latter
is characterized by negative unfinalizability. This has repercussions on
dialogue; in the former case, the interaction between the supernatural and
the human woman is dialogic, marked by trust and responsiveness, whereas
in the latter case, the relation between the human couple and the male troll
is distinguished by addressivity, to be sure, but not by dialogue. An interesting
detail in this context is that the woman, by assisting at the birth of the
troll woman’s child, has contributed to the propagation of the unfinalizability
she and her husband fear.
This text is very interesting due to this coupling of finalizing dialogue,
linked to the troll woman, and unfinalizable monologue connected to the
male troll. The situation is an inversion of the one encountered by Bakhtin
in his analysis of the polyphonic and the monological novel. Unfinalizability
may still be said to be the guiding principle, since the male troll dominates
most of the story. For the narrators, Maria and Sofia Bergström from the
village of Härkmeri in the parish of Lappfjärd, the emphasis on the indeterminacy
of the male troll entails a maintenance of their dialogical posi-
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The Problems of Unfinalizability and Dialogue