The Genre of Trolls - Doria

ska du få si”, sa soldatn o uggd ywo åv an o sat nesdukin imillan, at int blodn sku flyt
ióp. men tongon talt i mun fast ywu va å: “detta skulle du ikke hava jort”. (SLS 137 I,
1: 9)
5) There was a king who had three princesses, and they weren’t to be allowed to go outside
before they’d turned seven years old, but one day they asked for permission to go
outside and got too. When they were outside a cloud came and took them away […]
Immediately the troll king came home and said: “[It] smells of Christian blood here”.
“That you’ll see”, the soldier said and decapitated him, and placed a handkerchief in
between so that the blood wouldn’t meet. But the tongue talked in his mouth though
the head was off: “Thou shouldst not have done this”.
The story begins with emphasizing the unfinalizability of the material shape
of the troll. In the guise of a cloud it abducts the three princesses, and it is
only later in the narrative that its “real” identity emerges. Insecurity about
its actions and designs, i.e., doubts connected to the unfinalizability of its
soul, has provoked the introduction of a taboo for the girls not to stay outdoors
until they have reached seven years of age. These precautions fail as
the princesses violate the taboo. When the soldier comes to liberate them
from the clutches of the troll, he gets more than he has bargained for. The
troll king does indeed die as the soldier beheads it, but that does not stop it
from talking. It is too stubborn, and too unfinalizable, for that. It refuses
to be placed in the category of the other, and demands to be perceived as
another, alien self. In other words, it overtly requires the adoption of that
extreme form of outsideness characteristic of polyphony (Emerson 2000:
211), or something akin to it. The humans never assume a truly dialogical
position vis-à-vis the troll, they never try in earnest to let it reveal itself in
dialogue, but they are forced to acknowledge the impossibility of consummating
it once and for all.
The troll disdains any attempt to reduce the unity of its life, which is a
unity of meaning, to a spatio-temporal unity. The death of its spatiotemporal
form proves to be irrelevant, since it is incapable of making the
exterior and the interior of the troll coincide, or of condensing and rhythmicizing
its life. No significant boundaries exist for it, as even death contributes
to its unfinalizability, and neither during its life nor after its passing
is any requiem needed. The troll is simply, and perpetually, a self. The
narrator exploits that fact, using the conventional story-line to stress the
utter unfinalizability of the troll and his own dialogical attitude to it, both
aspects conforming to the generic code.
Halting Unfinalizability? 273