The Genre of Trolls - Doria

2.3.2 Religious context
One of my principal arguments in the following chapters is that folklore
and religious traditions are not as separate as we are sometimes led to believe,
and I attempt to demonstrate that narratives of trolls and Biblical
texts are part of the same network of associations. In order to substantiate
this claim, however, it is imperative to elucidate the ways in which the
Bible and other religious writings reached the rural population. The Bible
itself was an expensive article until the beginning of the 19th century, when
the Evangelical Association in Sweden, financially supported by the British
and Foreign Bible Society, started publishing cheap editions of the Bible
(Pleijel 1967a: 37–39). These Bibles also found their way to the Swedishspeaking
areas in Finland, and other editions were utilized as well. The
version of the Bible in use during much of the period under study was the
Bible of Charles XII, sanctioned in 1703, which is a very slightly altered
variant of the Reformation Bible of 1541 commissioned by Gustavus Vasa
Rex; this explains the archaic language of the translation, which was archaic
even in the 16th century (Olsson 2001: 58–59, 40). Toward the end of the
period, the translation of 1917 came into circulation, but it is uncertain
whether it had any real impact on the adult population: people tend to be
reluctant to abandon their old, beloved translation. 15
The Bible of 1703 in its 19th-century form has been called Sweden’s first
Bible for individual reading; previous versions were mainly intended for use
in service. A number of factors contributed to this development, in Sweden
as well as in Finland: new forms of production were introduced, distribution
was intensified, the economy of the masses changed, literacy increased,
and religious revivalism encouraged reading of the Bible (Olsson 2001: 62–
65).
Apart from individual reading, the message of the Bible was disseminated
in other ways: the Gospels and Epistles were read in church during service,
and as long as regular attendance was still a custom, these were commonly
15 It should be noted that the Swedish-speakers in Finland have always employed the
Swedish translations of the Bible; while Finland belonged to Sweden this procedure was a
matter of course, but even after the incorporation into the Russian realm and the Declaration
of Independence, it remained the case. Most of these Bibles were also printed in
Sweden, although a limited number of printings in Swedish were produced in Finland
(Huldén 1991: 344–345). Other translations than those authorized by the Church might
have been used as well (see Lindström 1991:208–210 on unauthorized translations).
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Material and Context