An analysis of the problems associated with the word "Troll" require a study of the words etymology in relation to its origin and the way in which it has evolved and developed throughout the years. An analysis of the research available on the etymology of the word suggests Scandinavian origins that can be traced deep into the Scandinavian folklores. The word "troll" is, therefore, quite ancient as well as complex and contradictory in nature. The various Scandinavian countries identify trolls as mythological creatures in their literary cultures. However, trolls do differ in their nature from the various countries, meaning that the way trolls are portrayed in Denmark is different from the way they are portrayed in Iceland, Sweden or Norway. Despite the fact that the geographical position of the country had no effect on the overall Nordic culture, it has left its mark on the quality characteristics of trolls. As already mentioned, the word "troll" is fairly-valued and complex. One of these difficulties is the transformation of trolls themselves as creatures of folklore in fiction. One can assert with confidence that the word "troll" and its manifestations in culture reflect the linguistic picture of the world of the separate parts of a single culture. This indicates the complexity and contradictory perspectives of both the word itself and the entire Scandinavian culture which prompts an analysis and explanation of the origins of the complexities as well as possible solutions for the complexities.
The legends about trolls originated in Scandinavia. According to these legends, they frightened the locals with their size and witchcraft. However, according to other legends, trolls lived in castles and underground palaces and looked more like giants. "In Scandinavian tales, they are often trolls, since the difference between giants and trolls in the older folk stories is not very clear. Giants live in cold, wild, and remote places, and in mountains, while trolls prefer forests and mountains closer to human homesteads where they are sometimes connected with rocks and ravines in the landscape" (Beveridge 93). In mythology, the trolls are not only huge giants but also small, gnomish creatures which usually live in caves. Thus, "the term ‘troll' seems to have become almost an all-purpose word for supernatural beings who may be large or small, solitary or social, real or imagined" (Lindow 51). Hence, the details of the trolls' images in folklore are heavily dependent on the country. "In the old literature, the homes of giants, trolls, elves, and dwarfs reflect these traditional mythic worlds: the shining world of the elves, the cave world of dwarfs, and the cold mountain world of giants" (Beveridge 219).
In addition, the troll is one of the most popular characters of Scandinavian folklore. The Swedish word 'troll' also means 'witchcraft'. "Trolls in more recent Scandinavian tales, especially children's stories, are generally depicted as small, with long noses and moss-like hair. Some of these trolls may seem quite good-natured and shy, living peacefully in the hills with their wives and families, but most of them, like giants, have dark tempers, and one should never dare to provoke them" (Beveridge 93). According to researchers, the progenitors of the trolls are 'Jötunn,' i.e. the mythical giants from the eastern mountainous country Jötunheimr or Utgard (Beveridge 218). The troll's functions in folklore fairy tale can be divided into several main categories. For example, there are trolls-antagonists, which act as the spirits guarding a geographical feature or a certain area. For instance, the legend "Some She-Trolls" dwells on a she-troll who used to guard the mountain called Blafell (Simpson 82). These trolls originally threatened the main character: "Twisted-Gob, I tell you plain / You'd better go straight home again! / Wipe your snotty little face; / And snuffle off to your own place!" (Simpson 83). They can act as the forest guardians and attack anyone who would break their rest. The victory over such an enemy is provided by overcoming one's own fears and cunning tricks: "The trollish magic of the old man was drawing the shiP' in, but Thorgeir stood firm against it" (Simpson 86).
A protagonist has to outwit a troll to get to the place where he was going or get the desired thing. The group of antagonists also includes trolls, which represent the hidden threat, and basically these types of trolls are female, as illustrated in the legends, "Some She- Trolls" or "The Shepherdess and the Trolls" (Simpson 82-84). According to Puhvel, the hidden threat came about due to the fact that the female trolls were always considered as harmless and able to co- exist with humans. However, they were just as dangerous as their male counterparts and could do a lot of harm when provoked. She- trolls became antagonists when their families were threatened or killed. They became ferocious as their male counterparts while in defense of their troll husbands or children (Puhvel 175-176). Another group of antagonists includes trolls, which act as the magical helpers, e.g. "The Old Man of the Cliff" (Simpson 85). In many tales involving trolls, they help the main character, giving him the services associated with witchcraft.
Being "unclean," the folklore and literature trolls (e.g. Edda and legends) can either eat "appropriate food" that causes disgust at people or are simply cannibals (Gundarsson 41-42). It can be assumed that such eating habits of trolls are designed to emphasize their belonging to the other world, the world that is opposite to people. Often trolls would try to eat the main character of the tales: "Near Hlíðarendi in Bárðardalur are some cliffs of which it is said that there are night-trolls and that they were struck by the sun up there while they were looking for people to eat" (Lindow 65). The key point in troll's appearance is his or her extremely ugly appearance. Ugliness is intended to emphasize the contrast between the miraculous character, i.e. the normal world of people. Bengt af Klintberg reports that in Sweden, "Popular tradition gives quite a contradictory picture of trolls' appearance. Sometimes they are described as dark and ugly, but from other data, one can conclude that they essentially looked like human beings.' The high medieval ethical view lives on: "What most clearly distinguishes trolls from humans is that trolls are outside the human community" (Lindow 53) much unlike the elves who are more often than not, portrayed in folklore as being inside the human community. 19th Century Icelandic folklore presents elves as a sort of human agricultural community which closely associated with humans as opposed to trolls who were to be feared and could only live outside the community. High medieval Icelandic folklore narrated tales of elves who lured and seduced humans into sexual relationships. This implies a closeness between the humans and elves as opposed to the trolls who were giants and magical and had to be feared. Also, the Scandinavian folklores of troll cats and troll hats that associated trolls with magic indicated an ‘outside the community' role for the trolls which was in contrast to the elves roles in communities as midwives and other functions that indicated their closeness to the community. In addition, a certain connection with the wolf world is designed to enhance the impression of trolls' maximum distance from human beings.
Thus, the antagonist is converted to an assistant. This fact is interesting, first of all, because a troll acquires the features characteristic of the character. Folklore texts about trolls often contain a theme of kidnapping: a troll kidnaps a child and puts his own cub in its place. "In the more recent folk legends of Scandinavia, trolls threatened or did all sorts of nasty things, of which the worst by far was ‘taking into the mountain': in other words, kidnapping" (Lindow 63). The plot of the majority of fairy tales does not repeat the traditional folk formula, and the characters are endowed with the tempers, which gives the opportunity to track what happens to the character, when s/he goes beyond the limitations imposed by the genre of folktales. Trolls, leaving the forest, are the personification of nature that destroys people. Accordingly, the change of polarity "one's own – someone else's" leads to the fact that now is not a troll that is dangerous for a man, but it is a man who threatens a troll. The mythological sources speak about trolls' intelligence in various ways, as well as about the trolls themselves. On the one hand, these beings inherit a primordial wisdom from giants; on the other hand, they are often stupid and primitive (e.g. Per Gunt). Subsequently, this utter nonsense becomes the hallmark of these fabulous characters. Usually, people defeat them with the help of tricks. The sharp minds of some trolls and utter stupidity of the others are present in the literary fairy tales as well. So, trolls are either wise and clever, or stupid and sloppy.
Summarizing the above, the following points are noteworthy. Appealing to the traditional folk images, writers endow a character with a certain temper. Trolls in the author's tales are usually anthropomorphic, that allows them to become the protagonists of the literary texts. Troll also becomes an allegory of the negative qualities of people, turning from a chthonic character into the personification of an evil man, or a coarse, stupid man. Trolls try to break into the people's world, but the tragedy of the situation lies in the fact that any effort ends in failure: the way in the world of people is closed for trolls forever, while a man easily captures the territory of trolls, blowing the mountains and cutting down the forests. Thus, the classification of a troll makes it evident that the word "troll" refers to a mythical, magical creature that has a fairly diverse nature. It can mean both good and bad, and sometimes a dichotomy of these two opposites.
In some editions of the Scandinavian legends, the life of a troll is connected with a bridge. "Probably the most famous troll is the one under the bridge in The Three Billy Goats Gruff" (Lindow 132). A troll is either involved in the construction of a bridge, or appears immediately after its construction, and a troll dies after the destruction of a bridge (Beveridge 194). Trolls are very different, and according to some sources, a geographical location is a major factor in those differences. Some of them look like rocks brought to life, others more like the gnomes, and the rest have some relevance with the elves. Anyway, they were designed as the embodiment of evil forces of nature, its dangers, and treachery. Meeting with a majority of them does not promise anything good to people. Living in the mountains, trolls vigilantly protect their treasures, and, therefore, at a later period, there were legends about their relations and cooperation with the dwarves, i.e. ""trolls and dwarves" is a generic for ill-tempered Otherworldly wights" (Gundarsson 7).
If one goes back to the etymology of the word "troll", it becomes evident that its original meaning is not quite certain. Some researchers believe that its etymology comes from the Younger and Elder Edda and is repeatedly mentioned in the Norse mythology (Gundarsson 20). Most likely, this word was multi-valued since ancient times, having a special place in the oral folklore. The original meaning of the word could denote something supernatural or dangerous. According to other sources, this word referred to someone who behaved violently and hostile to other members of the community: "it is also possible that this term could sometimes refer to the close personal relationships that occasionally occur between humans and troll-like land wights or even troll-like fylgjukonur or idises" (Gundarsson 20). There was a special kind of magic that was used to cause harm in the old Swedish law. This type of magic was called the word "trolleri" (Beveridge 102). Yet it should be noted that a term such as "trolldom", which means "magic," doesn't not imply a connection with mythical creatures, which again points to the complex problems of the word "troll," for example, "the word trolldom is frequently recorded for magic, the kind that is not permitted under Christian law" (Lindow 39). Nordic folk magical tradition used the word trolldom in relation to their widespread rituals and methods of curing their sick.
There is also a version that the word "troll" means "huge" and this value is the most faithful and accurate (Gundarsson 32). Norwegian land is quite severe: the impregnable cliffs, stony soil, and cold winters. All this contributed to the myth of huge and ferocious creatures-rulers of rocks (Gundarsson 11). Subsequently, this myth has been repeatedly reworked. The other countries, which had borrowed this image, altered it and identified in accordance with their views. It should also be said about the relation of the word and the concept of "troll" to the geographical location of the Scandinavian culture. There are many mystical creatures that are similar in nature to the Scandinavian trolls in other countries as well, but they look quite different: e.g. one can rarely find a mountain troll in Danish folklore. "In Danish a few have the troll prefix, meaning ‘magic', but the concept of the troll is hardly important" because Denmark has a small territory for such huge creatures (Lindow 102). Thus, it is simply a territorial cause. "According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls can sometimes take the form of cats" (Gundarsson 25). So there are many "kinds" of trolls, and comparing them, you can select one, really the right way of the troll. Interestingly, the possibility of the existence of the word "troll" in Germany was not the same as Scandinavian countries. The Germans had other lexical forms to define such concepts: "almost all, if not all, of the folk tales in which dwarves appear, come from Germany – perhaps because both the terms "troll" and "land-wight" are unknown there, so that German berg-dwellers are inevitably identified as either giants or dwarves". The main word for trolls is "jötnar, which is of uncertain etymology but which came to mean giant (that is, very large creature) in the modern Scandinavian languages" (Lindow 23).
The various complexities in the Scandinavian culture and the word troll are brought about, possibly, by the overlap and confusion in the use of the ancient Norse terms risi, purs, jotunn and troll. Lotte Motz classified the risi's as courtly and heroic beings, the purs as hostile monsters, the jotunn as lords of nature and the trolls as mythical magicians. Later, his classifications were termed as unfounded and without adequate supporting evidence. Others used the term "troll" to refer to various beings like witches, evil spirits, a berserker, a blamadr, a demon and so on. The overlap in the ancient terms led to different Scandinavian folklores that portrayed trolls in various ways. Some tales portrayed trolls as dimwitted, slow, strong but very old while others portrayed them as similar to human beings. Based on the various Old Norse terms available, the Scandinavian countries created their own folklore to suit their traditions and history hence the complexities and contradictions in the various meaning of the word "troll" (Lindow 16-18).
Also, the complexities were brought about by how the idea of the troll fit in with Christianity and Christian beliefs of the various Scandinavian countries. According to Lindow, some trolls got along well with Christian societies while others did not, depending on the Christian beliefs of the various Scandinavian countries. However, regardless of the differing Christian beliefs, trolls were seen as dangerous and as a symbol of evil. Others even used the troll to represent demons, heathen demi- gods and evil spirits (Lindow 16-18).
In conclusion, "troll" is a very ancient word that was transformed over the centuries, acquiring various forms. Hence, a set of the numerous territorial and cultural changes explains such a variety of beliefs and legends about trolls. In addition, trolls have penetrated from the mythology into the literature that also changed their character and significance. Thus, it is possible to state that the word "troll" is highly problematic due to the various factors. These factors are related to the nature, language, culture, literature and geography of individual countries, so speaking about its origin and meaning is challenging. However, an in- depth study and understanding of the Old Norse terms in their original form before they were overlapped and confused would allow for a possible study of the origins and etymology of the word as it should have progressed. Otherwise, the various meanings and uses of the word provide a rich history and etymology of the word.
Works Cited
Beveridge, Jan. Children into Swans: Fairy Tales and the Pagan Imagination. Montreal, CA: MQUP, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 June 2016.
Gundarsson, Kveldulf. Elves, Wights, and Trolls: Studies Towards the Practice of Germanic Heathenry: Vol. I. New York: iUniverse, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 June 2016.
Lindow, John. Trolls: An Unnatural History. London, GB: Reaktion Books, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 June 2016.
Puhvel, Martin. The Mighty She- Trolls of Icelandic Saga and Folktale. Taylor and Francis Ltd. Vol. 98, No. 2 (1987), pp. 175-179
Simpson, Jacqueline. Icelandic Folktales & Legends. Stroud: Tempus, 2004. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 June 2016.
