The Genre of Trolls - Doria

tions found spring from the same network of associations, and the parish of
Vörå is exceptionally rich in (recorded) supernatural traditions. Vörå may
also be said to represent the average Ostrobothnian parish in many respects:
chiefly rural, socially homogeneous, prone to religious revivals and
emigration. The choice of the parish of Vörå as the object of a case study is
mainly dictated by the availability of material and the existence of other
studies on the folklore and history of the community. For the discussion in
chapters 4 and 5 I wanted a corpus of texts belonging to the same tale or
legend type, and Vörå was the parish with the largest number of such texts.
The selected parish also had to furnish a substantial amount of other folklore
material, and once again Vörå was a good choice. In addition, I considered
it important to have other studies on the parish to consult, especially
in the reconstruction of the historical, social and religious context. A
more personal motivation is that my paternal grandmother was born in
Vörå, and therefore it has pleased me to do my research on her native parish.
However, if some other community had proven more useful for my
purposes, I would have opted for that instead. Vörå is not a romanticized
and exoticized Finland-Swedish Dalecarlia or Karelia, representing the
home of the genuine, Finland-Swedish folk, at least not to me.
Two groups of texts, both of which consist of narratives of abduction,
though the second adds the motif of the banishment of the trolls, have
been singled out as particularly suitable for an intertextual analysis as they
represent the nearest equivalent to a thick corpus (Honko 2000: 15–17) to be
found in my material. Lauri Honko glosses this term as the activity of
“producing ‘thickness’ of text and context through the multiple documentation
of expressions of folklore in their varying manifestations in performance
within a ‘biologically’ definable tradition bearer, community or environment”
(Honko 2000: 17). Collected within the same community, the
texts studied in these chapters may indeed be viewed as “part of living tradition
systems maintained by individuals and groups having the possibility
of social exchange” (Honko 2000: 16). Nevertheless, the thickness of the
material is mainly restricted to the textual level, while contextual thickness
is lacking; the latter was not a priority during the time of collection.
In chapter 6 I have concentrated on the repertoire of a single narrator,
another form of thick corpus, though with the same reservations as in the
previous case. As for chapter 7, the selection of texts has been guided by
the research problem posed, i.e., what effects the indeterminacy of the troll
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