The Genre of Trolls - Doria

series of metaphors, to describe the intertextual relations between troll
texts, other folklore texts and Biblical stories. The primary material consisted
of two groups of texts on abduction and the banishment of trolls
collected in the Ostrobothnian parish of Vörå. I suggested that folklore
and the religious tradition formed parts of the same network of associations,
and that folklore could not be interpreted in isolation from Christianity
and the dialogue it pursues with it because of the sustained contacts between
the traditions. I also considered how other discourses affected their
relationship, utilizing the concept of interdiscursivity elaborated by Norman
Fairclough. The investigation of the power relations between discourses is
a crucial aspect of the theory, and I therefore combined it with Michel
Foucault’s conception of power which emphasizes the emergent nature of
relations of power and the inseparability of power and resistance. Thus, the
dominant discourse, the religious discourse, and the dominated discourse,
folklore, were in a constant struggle for ascendancy, and the labels dominant
and dominated are not absolute. The high status of the religious discourse
was reinforced by its institutional backing and its claims to knowledge and
truth, as it professed to offer an eternal truth of salvation in Christ. Here
the forms of intertextual relations discussed—agreement, inversion or reversal,
and negation—become important as they may indicate the relative
strengths of the two discourses. Agreement might hint at the dominance
of the religious discourse, while inversion or reversal and negation may represent
challenges to it, functioning as vehicles of critique of the religious
tradition, either an ideological critique as in chapter 4, or social critique as
in chapter 5. Although such a correspondence between intertextual relation
and power relation is by no means universal—there are several exceptions
to the rule—it works as a preliminary hypothesis which must be reassessed
in each individual case.
Some of the contemporaneous discourses influencing the power relation
between folklore and religion have been presented: the discourse of the
discipline of folkloristics which partially raised the status of folklore, and
the discourse of liberalism which advocated the detachment of the individual
from the authority of the church. The discourse of popular enlightenment
reinforced both the religious and the popular discourse in the beginning
of the period, but shifted more toward the popular discourse later on.
A potential development of the concerns of this study might be an extension
of the analysis to include the link to early modern contexts and
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