The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North by Ármann Jakobsson (review)

After reading Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North, there is a particular line that my mind keeps circling back to: "These two states of being, human and troll, are separated only by magic and the passage of time" (141). In Jakobsson's reading of the Icelandic Middle Ages it becomes clear from the outset that "troll" does not simply mean the hairy, brutish mountain giant of our shared popular imagination, nor does it refer to those cute plastic dolls with shocks of bright hair. Rather, "troll," in its original meaning in the sagas of Iceland, was a dynamic state encompassing beings like the aforementioned wilderness giants but also including ghosts, witches, demons, and beings that Jakobsson refers to as zombies and vampires. Trollishness labeled a blurry ecology of otherworld beings, and humans were tenuously protected from entering the troll state only by a thin layer of magic and time.

The ambiguity of the troll event is evident from the outset of the text. Jakobsson opens the book with a retelling of an episode from the Sturlunga saga, in which a group of men riding in the west of Iceland in 1214 see "tröll eitt mikit" (a great troll) crossing the path ahead of them on a mountain ridge. As Jakobsson relates it, the event in the text and its meaning for the men are both profoundly ambiguous: there is no way for the reader to understand or even imagine the being crossing their path, much in the same way that the men struggle to understand the meaning of the omen that walks before them. A troll is both a discrete being and a generalized state of uncertainty, wilderness, and danger.

The Troll Inside You is a reading of Icelandic literature from the Middle Ages, sagas that mostly date from the fourteenth century, while relying on and preserving some older traditions and material. The Troll Inside You is rife with readings of the tension between past and present in the sagas themselves, where the paranormal often achieves expression in the texts as the resurgence of pre-Christian lifeways and beliefs, a resurgence to be overcome by characters of a more modern and Christian disposition. Jakobsson's use of the concept of the paranormal is itself intentionally anachronistic: as a word that appears only at the turn of the twentieth century, "the term paranormal is fitting precisely because to the average reader it will not suggest the Middle Ages, and thus it cannot be taken for granted, dismissed as a traditional or conventional term that can be safely deployed without intense scrutiny" (22). Jakobsson's use of this term is designed to preserve and highlight the weirdness of a troll event, rather than submerge it within the cultural context of the text.

The Troll Inside You is not structured like a typical scholarly book. It has about thirty chapters, more like vignettes in length, that zoom in on a particular theme in reading the paranormal in Icelandic literature. The separation is not strict or consistent: often a previous text, character, theme (or troll) will reappear in a subsequent chapter. With quick, pithy chapter titles like "Cave" and "Don't Feed the Trolls," it would be difficult for a reader to try to selectively pursue certain themes or texts in their reading for research purposes. Still, the book can be read straight through rather quickly, and anyone with research needs is probably going to find the entire work of interest.

Jakobsson's methodological posture towards the texts reflects the uncertain genre of the sagas themselves. They are a mixture of history and literature, and they record the literature of a newly Christianized Iceland while preserving the traditions of a non-Christian past. Jakobsson reads the sagas as both a historian and a literary scholar, drawing out...