Trolls: An Unnatural History by John Lindow (review)

Trolls, those ugly trouble-making creatures, have inhabited the human imagination for a thousand years. They live in literature and in folktales, but they refuse to be confined to stories—people have had actual encounters with trolls for centuries. In Trolls: An Unnatural History, John Lindow traces a history of troll narratives from the earliest accounts from the Viking Age to their recent presence on Twitter. The trolls we discover in Lindow’s history will not be unfamiliar to a reader of J. R. R. Tolkien or even J. K. Rowling; in general, trolls are and always have been antisocial, ugly, and stupid. It becomes clear after reading the earliest narratives, however, that trolls have only recently become decidedly evil. In early incarnations trolls were both helpers and troublemakers, neither good nor bad. Lindow describes trolls as peripheral: they live outside society in the dark, unknowable realm of magic and the wild. He challenges the reader to consider why we are so drawn to these generally unpleasant creatures and argues that the human relationship with trolls has such longevity because they give us “a powerful image of the part of our world that we just cannot explain” (13). In Lindow’s book the historical relationship between humans and trolls becomes a parable for the relationship between humans and the mysterious.

Trolls is laid out more or less chronologically. Lindow begins by discussing the earliest appearances of trolls in Old Norse poetry. Next he follows their spread through Scandinavian medieval literature and legend and then pursues them into folktales, where they truly multiply, expanding beyond Scandinavia and going worldwide. Lindow witnesses their movement into literature, art, music, theater, and film, especially in Scandinavian countries, and concludes with a discussion of trolls in popular culture and their newest habitat on the Internet. Lindow’s book is academic, and his research is exhaustive. He analyzes each historical appearance of the word troll, either in believable legends or in more fantastic folktales and literature, and provides helpful historical context. For instance, the Old Norse tales would be nearly indecipherable for the nonexpert, but Lindow clarifies the nuances of translation, offers background on the Norse poetic tradition, and explains allusions to mythology so that not only the meaning but also the spirit of the lines is legible to the reader. Many of his selections of troll narratives are obscure, beautiful, and strange and include trolls that readers will be glad to meet: from the first recorded troll, a ninth-century bearded female who chose to reveal herself to a poet, to the trolls who were tricked into building Sweden’s Lund Cathedral in the twelfth century, to writer Yrjö Kokko’s troll, who finds love in the forests of war-torn Finland in 1944.

Lindow approaches these narratives primarily as a folklorist and a historian, but his analysis is equally deft in a variety of media. One of the strongest sections of this book is “Fairy-Tale Trolls and Trolls Illustrated,” which features nineteen black-and-white reproductions of troll illustrations from fairy-tale collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The selections are a wonderful and natural supplement to this history. After all, in many troll narratives, the story is not nearly as exciting as the description of the troll itself: their strange and dreadful appearance is a large part of their appeal. The illustrations demonstrate the mutability of trolls, which this book emphasizes: they range from cheerful and bumbling forest giants to unsettlingly terrifying sea monsters. Visually inclined readers will savor this chapter.

Another fascinating section is the final chapter, in which Lindow investigates the trolls of the Internet, those mysterious creatures that haunt Twitter. It is not a stretch to see the similarities between these trolls and those of ancient lore: both remain outside society, preferring to be unseen, and both take pleasure in stirring up trouble. Lindow does not belabor this parallel but uses it to illustrate one of the themes of this book: that there may be a bit of troll...