The Genre of Trolls - Doria

1.5 Method
The choice of material has been guided by a number of practical and methodological
considerations. Thus, in my investigation I have restricted myself
to trolls alone, i.e., to supranormal creatures explicitly designated by
that name, either in the text itself or in the headline supplied by the collector.
This is primarily to keep the corpus manageable; examining the folklore
of all supernatural beings is a task of considerable proportions, and
exciting though it might be, I cannot embark on such a project here.
A special problem in selecting the corpus of study, however, has been to
discriminate between trollgumma and trollkäring (‘old troll woman’) in the
sense of witch and the use of the same terms in the sense of troll. My pragmatic
solution to this thorny issue has been to check if these labels alternate
with troll or a synonym for witch in the text, and if the former is the
case, I have included the record in my material. This method is not foolproof,
of course, but there was no other option.
The selection of the period of study has also been dictated by rather
pragmatic concerns: the earliest archival text on trolls to be found in the
Finland-Swedish folklore collections was recorded in the 1850s, while 1925
is the date of the last record—at least as far as I know—to be noted down
manually. All texts were collected using a fairly uniform fieldwork methodology,
described in chapter 2.2. A comparison of audiotape recordings
and handwritten documents is a task in itself, which I cannot perform in
the context of this thesis (for such a study on the nightmare, see Danielsson
1992). Besides a consistency in the fieldwork methods used in the collection
of the material, my choice is also conditioned by the scrutiny of intertextual
relations which I have opted to analyze from a roughly synchronous
perspective in order to achieve some uniformity in the intertexts invoked.
A consideration of intertexts changing over time might have offered an intriguing
peek at the life of tradition from a diachronic point of view, but
then we would have had to contend with the different nature of the sources
as well.
Regarding chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, the material has been selected employing
the following criteria. In chapters 4 and 5 I have limited myself to the
tradition of a specific parish, the parish of Vörå, and its immediate neighbours.
Lotte Tarkka stresses the importance of working with material from
a single community (Tarkka 1993: 173) to ensure that the intertextual rela-
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Introduction