The Genre of Trolls: The Case of a Finland-Swedish Folk Belief Tradition

Diss.: Åbo Akademi University.
The supernatural tradition that is the object of this study, the Swedish troll tradition in Finland as documented in archived material collected between the 1850s and 1925, has previously received little scholarly attention; apart from a few articles, this is the first monograph produced on the subject, and I will therefore begin my inquiry with a description of the folklore of trolls for the benefit of readers with a comparative interest. The troll in the Swedish oral tradition in Finland is a supernatural creature primarily associated with hills and rocks in the forest, but apart from that, it is difficult, if not impossible, to give a good definition of the troll. It is often a solitary being, but it may also live with others of its kind. Judging by the sources at my disposal, it is not chiefly an empirical being — I have not been able to find reports of sightings or personal experience stories, apart from a legend told in the first person singular, but that seems to be more of a narrative strategy—but this impression may well be false due to the haphazard nature of collection. Perhaps reports of sightings never happened to be recorded, even though they existed. Any definite conclusion cannot be drawn on the basis of the recorded material alone.
My basic research problem can be thus formulated: how do the performers, of whose narratives we have some form of transcript, construct the image of the troll, and how is the relation between man and troll represented in the texts? These questions recur in many guises throughout the thesis, and I find them important because they imply an examination of the world view of the narrators, and of what it means to be human in a world also inhabited by extra-human forces.