The Genre of Trolls - Doria

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Vöråbon är förbehållsam, reserverad mot främlingen och ytterst rädd för att komma
i tidningarna. Efter längre bekantskap och förtroligt umgänge blir han något meddelsammare.
Dock berättar han högst ogärna under arbetstid. Söndagseftermiddagen är
den lämpligaste tiden, och man kan då göra en rätt god skörd, om man lyckats ta
honom på rätta sättet. (FU 8: xxvi)
The inhabitant of Vörå is reticent, guarded toward the stranger and extremely afraid of
appearing in the newspapers. After a longer acquaintance and intimate intercourse he
becomes slightly more communicative. Yet he is most reluctant to narrate during work
hours. Sunday afternoon is the most suitable time, and you may get a pretty good harvest,
provided you have managed to tackle him in the right way.
The collections were praised as good and valuable in the evaluation carried
out by the Literature Society. Thors consistently omitted the names of the
narrators and more specific details of their residence. Ulrika Wolf-Knuts
suggests this might be due to the generality of the narratives, but Thors
could also have had other motives for leaving the provenance of the texts
less meticulously specified (Wolf-Knuts 1991: 28–29). Here I have utilized
sixteen records drawn from Thors’ three collections (SLS 22, 4; SLS 22, 10;
SLS 22, 11; SLS 22: 16–17; SLS 22, 21; SLS 22, 26; SLS 28, 3; SLS 28, 12;
SLS 28, 19; SLS 37, 3; SLS 37, 5; SLS 37, 6; SLS 37, 8; SLS 37, 11; SLS 37,
28; SLS 37, 98).
Karl Petter Pettersson (1857–1912) was the elementary school teacher in
Nagu, later in Iniö, and he also functioned as a parson, the chairman of the
local government committee and as the postmaster of the community. Of
his work as a collector of folklore Anders Allardt writes: “Det vilar en käck
omedelbarhet över hans stil, och en del av hans sagouppteckningar äro synbarligen
färgade av hans personliga gemyt” (‘A spirited immediacy suffuses
his style, and some of his folktale records are visibly coloured by his personal
disposition’) (Allardt 1920: 364–365). In other words, Allardt thought
that Pettersson directly influenced the language and form of the records he
made. In 1890 Pettersson donated two collections of folklore from Nagu to
the Swedish Literature Society (SLS 21; SLS 31), whence four texts originate
(SLS 21, 8; SLS 21, 29; SLS 31, 141; SLS 31, 146). In 1893, he submitted
another collection containing a record I have utilized (SLS 33: 201–207).
J. A. Nygren submitted a collection of miscellaneous texts recorded in
1892–1894 to the Society. One entry, copied from the songbook of the
singer Jakob Lassus in the village of Kerklax in the parish of Maxmo in
1892, will be quoted in this investigation (SLS 45: 136–137).
Emil Norrback delivered a collection from Sideby, Ostrobothnia, cover-
Material and Context