Viking Magazine - August 2022 - 19

ROOTED IN NORSE MYTHOLOGY, TROLLS WERE
POPULARIZED IN THE COLLECTIONS OF
SCANDINAVIAN FOLKLORE AND FAIRY TALES OF THE
19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES.
BY ROWDY GEIRSSON
T
he concept of trolls has occupied the
Scandinavian imagination since time
immemorial. The term " troll " itself is somewhat
amorphous and has evolved over the centuries but
has most often been used as a sort of catch-all for
mysterious entities that lurk in the darkness and, more
likely than not, behave maliciously. In this sense, the
idea of a troll ranges from the traditional, evil-doing
trolls of the ancient Norse sagas to the dimwitted,
hostile trolls of Tolkien's fantasy world (and others
directly inspired by his) to the toxic individuals who
presently poison the internet with their bad intentions.
With such a wide range of troll types, it naturally
follows that there also exists a wide range of depictions
of trolls. Trolls have been visualized in numerous ways
as evidenced in the " Harry Potter " and " The Lord of the
Rings " films, the Moomintroll works of Tove Jansson,
and even the bright-haired toys created by Thomas
Dam in Denmark in 1959. But the specific visualizations
of trolls that have most profoundly impacted our
collective notion of what a proper troll looks like
remain those that were popularized in the collections of
Scandinavian folklore and fairy tales of the 19th century.
Folktale Inspiration
In the 1830s, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen
Engebretsen Moe began to collect folktales from the
Norwegian countryside in a fashion similar to the
Brothers Grimm in Germany. They published the
collection of stories in 1841 as " Norske folkeeventyr "
( " Norwegian Folktales " ), which included stories now
known the world-over, such as " De tre bukkene Bruse "
( " The Three Billy Goats Gruff " ) and a smattering
of stories about the archetypical
Norwegian folktale protagonist
known as Askeladden-the Ash
Lad-who has more recently also
inspired a series of Norwegian
films that bear his name. Expanded
" Forest Troll, "
Theodor
Kittelsen,
circa 1906
@sonsofnorway
versions of " Norske folkeeventyr " and new collections
were published over the course of the following several
decades, and these began to include illustrations.
The first collection of Norwegian folktales to feature
illustrations was released by Asbjørnsen without Moe
under the title of " Juletræet " ( " The Christmas Tree " ) in
1850. The illustrations in this volume were created by
Johan Fredrik Eckersberg, who depicted the trolls as
hairy and somewhat deformed humans, rather than as
the bulbous, humanoid-but not human-monster-like
things that we now tend to generally associate with their
appearance.
The watershed moment for that style of troll depiction
came in 1879 with the release of " Norske Folke- og
Huldre-Eventyr i Udvalg med Illustrationer efter
Originaltegninger " ( " Select Norwegian Folktales and
Fairytales: With Illustrations from Original Drawings " ),
which featured illustrations by Peter Nicolai Arbo,
Hans Gude, Vincent Stoltenberg Lerche, Eilif Peterssen,
August Schneider, Otto Sinding, Adolph Tidemand and
Erik Werenskiold.
The volume provided a bit of a who's who among
Norwegian illustrators at the time; each of the
aforementioned artists was a formidable talent.
Arbo's and Gude's paintings of historic scenes and
landscapes in particular have remained among the
most noteworthy examples of Norway's National
Romantic style. While most of the illustrators involved
in " Folke- og Huldre-Eventyr i Udvalg " followed in the
footsteps of Eckersberg, portraying their trolls primarily
as deformed or oversized humans, Erik Werenskiold
blazed a new trail, portraying them as less human and
more monstrous-exactly how we, in the present day,
would expect trolls to look.
Evolving Illustrations
Werenskiold was a formidable artist in his own right,
creating a number of landscape and portrait paintings
during his lifetime as well as the illustrations for
August 2022
19
Viking Magazine - August 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Viking Magazine - August 2022
