The Genre of Trolls - Doria

more of a running commentary on the Biblical text expounded. Regarding
the themes of the extant sermons, the atonement accomplished in Christ,
Christian conduct, the religious controversies of the time and admonitions
predominate (Dahlbacka 1984: 29). Wefvar also included folklore in his
speeches, which he attempted to make in the vernacular in consonance
with the local language (Dahlbacka 1984: 27). In a fragmentary manuscript
he relates the story of two girls kidnapped by the Russians during the
Great Hate, associating their exiled condition with the wretchedness of
mankind having distanced itself from God (IF 111: 74). Thus, Wefvar explicitly
made associations between religious tradition and folklore, and constituted
one channel through which his audience came into contact with
such a way of thinking. Notwithstanding, I do not believe Wefvar invented
this perspective on the relation between religion and folklore, but his
sermons may have reinforced any tendency to adopt such a point of view
among his listeners. To what extent his sermons might have resembled his
way of representing folklore in his records is difficult to tell; the extant
manuscripts of his sermons are in standard Swedish and are written in a
somewhat laboured style, and he could well have delivered them in this
form.
This manner of associating folk narratives with Biblical texts and hymns
is exemplified in a number of records. One mentions an old woman who is
being fed by three doves like Elijah was nurtured by ravens by the brook
(I Kings 17: 4–6; Nyland 1887, 114: 137–138), and another tells of a man being
thrown out of his drying-barn by a ghost; the narrator observes that he had
to “arise, take up his bed and walk” like the man sick with palsy (Matthew
9: 6; Mark 3: 11; Luke 5: 24; John 5: 8; SLS 98: 72). A man being hindered by
a rå on the road uttered a slightly modified variant of the first line of Psalm
23, “The Lord is my Lord [i.e., shepherd]; I shall not want”, and escaped
(SLS 217: 542). In one case the supernatural creature is the one to quote the
hymnal: a girl who was desperate to get married promised to wed a
merman, but asked to be allowed to visit the groom’s home before the
wedding. He consented, but ended up abandoning her on the shore, citing
the twelfth verse of hymn 205 in the old Swedish hymnal: “Here no-one
can live, for here no-one has peace. Where am I to find shelter for the
night? God [has] determined the moment in which I [will] sink to the bottom,
so great is my misfortune” (R II 28a; my translation). In another text,
the singing of hymn 456, “Now tears and lamentations await” in a mountain
Context 83