The Priest and the Troll : Folklore as Nation-building

Résumé

Depuis le Moyen Âge, l’imaginaire des pays Nordiques est hanté par des créatures surnaturelles représentant les milieux naturels hostiles, comme la mer, la forêt ou la montagne. Certaines, comme les trolls, s’opposent aux hommes dans les légendes et les croyances. Quand la Suède se christianise autour du xi^e siècle, puis s’allie à la réforme protestante au xvi^e siècle, ces êtres, pourtant voués à disparaître, restent bien présents, dans le paysage social et politique, dans une cohabitation étrange. En examinant l’étrangeté de cette coexistence, nous étudierons ce qu’ils représentent dans les contes et les ballades, ainsi que les conflits entre la position de l’Église et la croyance populaire. Nous affirmons que l’Église et plus tard l’état, a voulu s’approprier ces croyances populaires.

Abstract

Since the Middle Ages, the Scandinavian imagination has been haunted by supernatural creatures representing a hostile natural environment, such as the sea, the forest or the mountain. Some, like the trolls, exist in opposition to men in legends and beliefs. When Sweden became Christian around the year 1000, then became a Protestant country in the sixteenth century, these mythical beings, although destined to disappear, remained, in the social and political landscape, in a kind of strange cohabitation. By examining the strangeness of this coexistence, I will study what they represent in tales and ballads, as well as the conflicts between the position of the Church and the folk belief. I claim that the Church, and the state later on, wanted to appropriate this folklore.

Table des matières

In the history of Scandinavian countries, Christian and pre-Christian religions existed side by side for most of the Viking Age. The Christianisation of Scandinavia is traditionally associated with the end of the Viking Age, which began around 790 when the Norsemen launched their first raids against the shores of the West. A co-existence of Christianity and paganism took place when the Scandinavian countries became Christianised around the tenth century. Stéphane Coviaux takes the example of the god Thór to illustrate this interpretatio christiana: in ancient times, the monstrous serpent of Midgaard at the time of Ragnarök could symbolise “the Nordic version of the end of the world, […] presented as a foreshadowing of Christ fighting the Antichrist in the chaos of the Apocalypse2.” There are several examples of this cohabitation in the Scandinavian culture such as the relics of the stavkirke [stave church] in Hylestad in Norway3, the runes, drawn up at the crossroads of Christianity and paganism4, and finally the famous soapstone mould5, another proof of this situation during most of the time of the Vikings, just to name a few examples of the cohabitation of Christianity and pagan religion. The Christianisation of Scandinavia led to the gradual end of Nordic paganism as a religion, yet it survived as popular belief. Demonised by Christianity, the supernatural creatures nonetheless endured in folklore until the nineteenth century. If popular beliefs coexisted for some time with Christianity, why did priests talk about the small creatures of the folk belief all the way into the nineteenth century? Was it to be better understood by the Scandinavian people who believed in the presence of magical creatures, thought to live in nature, representing the often-hostile Nordic natural environment? Some, like the trolls, are enemies of human beings in Scandinavian legends and popular beliefs. The sources of Nordic Mythology – the body of myths belonging to the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Old Norse religion, speak not so much of trolls, but of the giants which would evolve into trolls. Thus, the trolls whose form developed after the Viking period were assimilated to the Jötunn, the “Giants” of mythology6. The trolls are already present in the sagas of ancient times (written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but drawing their material from a very distant past). “The Voyage of Skírnir”, which dates from around 1270, mentions a three-headed giant, and in “The Song of Thrymr”, it is an evil giant who steals Thór’s hammer to force the beautiful Freyja to marry him7. Scandinavia was Christianised around the eleventh century, then became a Protestant country in the sixteenth century; yet the creatures in Nordic folk beliefs after the Christianisation of Scandinavia, although seemingly destined to disappear, remained very present in the social and political landscape in a strange kind of cohabitation. I will study, through both ancient ballads and poems and tales from nineteenth-century Swedish Literature – folktales (folksaga) sometimes considered degraded myths, folksägen or legends, and magical ballads (naturmytisk visa), which tell of the encounters between human beings and supernatural creatures constituting the bulk of Scandinavian folklore – how the creatures of folk belief are rehabilitated by Christianity by means of their ambiguous aspect. Thus, folktales or “popular tales” refer to the tales collected in the nineteenth century by Nordic collectors from the peasants who had always told them. I will investigate the seemingly paradoxical presence of Christian and pagan elements in the Scandinavian countries in order to examine how a continuity could have occurred up to the nineteenth century, as well as discussing different examples drawn from nineteenth-century Swedish literature.

Presence of trolls in ballads

Folk belief and supernatural creatures are present in medieval Scandinavian ballads. The origins of the Scandinavian ballads are partly unknown for lack of reliable sources, but they were sung as early as the thirteenth century, according to Bengt R. Jansson8. Today there are 263 types of Swedish ballad, including thirty-six naturmytiska visor [magic ballads], featuring these creatures. The ballad is a song that accompanied the dances of the Middle Ages, widespread in the Nordic countries. Yet the content of the ballads has similarities on the one hand with older legends, coming from the Eddas, but also with antiquity, and can be found in many variations, all over the world and especially in northern Europe.

The small people: trolls, and other versions

By supernatural creatures, such as trolls, I refer to beings who, according to older popular beliefs, inhabit Scandinavian nature and who sometimes encounter people. After the Middle Ages, these creatures were believed to have ties with the devil and the natural world, a very capricious place of all mysteries. Thus the creatures of nature symbolised the dangers to which man is exposed. To talk about the dangers of the forest, the peasants talked about skogsrå; to talk about the dangers of water, they whispered the name of the water sprite. Thus, folklore established a figure of metonymy which, by its anthropomorphic aspect, helped people to better apprehend threats. These are legendary anthropomorphic creatures originating in Norse mythology and are endowed with magical powers9. In Scandinavian folk belief, they originally represent the natural element in which they live, such as the rock (the troll), the water (the water sprite) or the forest, but can live in parallel with people in barns, together with the animals, as does the Swedish gårdstomte (gnome of the barn). At any rate, the characteristics between creatures are often quite blurred and small creatures like vättar have features of both trolls, dwarves and elves and live underground as well as among peasants. Even if different creatures have divergent functions, they are originally evil ones and trolls are often confused with giants or dwarfs: some are small, some are gigantic beings like mountains, capable of lifting and throwing rocks and, like them, strangers to any idea of society, leading a solitary life in the mountains. However, the Scandinavian trolls have a strong predilection for gold and for children – they leave changelings, substituting a troll baby for a human baby10. There are dwarves with kinship to the evil troll, stupid and villainous, but there are also dwarves who are beautiful, attractive, and malignant, with kinship to the elves. Dwarves are sometimes mistaken for trolls who steal babies or lure a young person into their caves. According to Léon Pineau:

“such conceptions are common to all Indo-European mythologies: but they must have been, originally, foreign to the dwarves […] It was only later – having been confused with spirits of nature, and in particular with elves – that what had been said about one was attributed, without distinction, to the other11.

Thus, “when these supernatural beings, which people had believed to be real, no longer lived except as memories, tradition, imperceptibly, gave them all the same nature: to all of them it notably attributed the same home12.” Even if we still have distinct creatures, there has been a confusion between the creatures as they have evolved differently in different areas. Thus it was necessary to reduce the power of paganism in the eyes of Christians. The Church transformed and denigrated old beliefs in order to discredit them13, and the Church reduced the size of the giants, which were originally immense and could be the size of a mountain, “in accordance with the effort that it systematically undertook to devalue everything that came from paganism14.”

Erotic symbols

That the Church saw a real threat in these creatures is quite obvious, but more interesting still is how the clergy hijacked these creatures to consciously represent the threat against the benefit of the Church. Indeed, the creatures were not only a link with water and woods, but they were also the expression of a form of anxiety about sexuality. Erotic creatures are those which are not repulsive as trolls but beautiful and tempting and thus often represented nude, such as the huldra/skogsrå (forest nymph) or the Näcken (water sprite). Tales and ballads very often feature young people on the cusp of adulthood facing the various trials of life, including sexuality. Thus the works of Swedish scholars Ebbe Schön15, of Carl-Herman Tillhagen16, and more recently of Mikael Häll17, show an interesting link between popular beliefs on the one hand, and sexuality and the unconscious on the Other.

The Christian religion has always given an erotic meaning to demons, and the creatures from the Nordic folk belief are no exception. Indeed, in the eyes of the Church, supernatural beings embody evil and present a final avatar of fallen pagan deities. Their power is derisory but also seductive, just as sin or paganism can be. To follow them is not only to show one’s weakness, but also to succumb to the most dangerous of temptations; it is to apostatise, it is to commit the most serious of sacrileges18. The Church therefore fought the last survivals of the fabulous world. This explains why folk beliefs were used in the nineteenth century to counter the conservative message of the Church: “Tales and legends like ballads may have served as a kind of catharsis. They expressed, explained, and contained the anxiety that surrounds difficult and sensitive topics and times in people’s lives, especially when it comes to times of transition like marriage, engagement and sexuality19.”

These supernatural beings, most often hidden from humans, nevertheless sometimes come, according to the ballads, to abduct a young girl or a young man. However, elves, mountain kings and others rarely come to pester humans in their own houses or within the walls of their castles20. It is more often the human hero or heroine of the tale or ballad who enters the universe of fabulous creatures. In these ballads – like in the magic ballad number 29, Herr Olof och älvorna [Sir Olof and the elves]21 – Gravier formulates two hypotheses: either the human victim resists the seduction and is then molested, receiving blows and injuries after having faced threats and blackmail, or returns staggering to the castle to die in the arms of their mother or sweetheart. Another scenario is that the victim gets caught in the trolls’ cave and is made to drink a potion of forgetfulness, begins a new existence, and becomes the husband (or wife) of an elf or troll. In some cases, children are born from this union; there are even six or seven of them in some texts. This is a common theme in the ballads, a troll seizing a young lady to lock her in their caves like in Den bergtagna [Taken by the mountain]. In this magic ballad number 2422, a virgin finds herself captured by the king of the mountain. She gives birth to seven children over several years and eventually asks to return home. As always, the trolls let themselves be taken in by the human’s cajoling and she is finally allowed to visit her home if she does not say a word about the troll to her parents; but during the visit, she does not keep her promise. The troll appears and angrily drives her back to the mountain23. The ballads then often show a cruel episode. The human character either manages to escape or gets permission to leave. The unfortunate person reconnects with their human family. This period of freedom does not usually last long. The trolls, kings of the mountain, snatch the poor human from their euphoric reunion and the second separation is even more dramatic than the first.

Often representing eroticism, supernatural creatures have an important symbolic value:

The erotic natural beings appear in much of the natural mythical storytelling tradition as an embodied threat. These colourful warning figures and characters formulated norms and emotions around human duality, sexuality and reproduction, gender roles and not least marriage24.

People often got lost in the forest and, if they came back, they were said to be different. This folk belief was used to explain mental illness, fear and eroticism.

Cohabitation between folk belief and Christian motifs in the ballads

The cohabitation between a supernatural figure and Christian motifs are often blended in the ballads. Thus, in Kung Erik och spåkvinnan [King Erik and the fortune teller], magic ballad number 3, a fortune teller – in some versions a mermaid – is called to the court telling the king he is going to die but comforts him by promising that he will go to heaven. In Agneta och havsmannen [Agneta and the Sea King], magic ballad number 19, Agneta, after seven years with this sea-troll, as the young girl in ballad 24, demands to see her family. In some versions, when he comes to get her in church, the icons turn their back on the supernatural creature.

Some trolls rely on their treasures to win the hearts of young humans, but they are so ugly and mean that the Christians do not want them. Female trolls love humans too, but their folktales often end with the Christian knight killing the troll. Thus, in ballads 26 and 27 we see a similar pattern. In ballad 26, Herr Magnus och havsfrun, [Sir Magnus and the mermaid], the female creature, troll or mermaid – the difference is not defined – tries to convince Sir Magnus to accept her as his wife. She offers him abundant gifts, but the knight refuses as she is not a Christian woman but a troll, belonging to the devil: “I would accept such gifts/If you were a Christian woman/But now you are the worst mountain troll/By the sea king and the devil’s voice25.” The failure leaves her desperate, for by winning him, she had “lost her torment”, a theme that I will return to later in Stagnelius’ romantic poem. Finally, in ballad number 27, Herr Peder och dvärgens dotter [Sir Peder and the dwarf’s daughter], Sir Peder gets lost in the forest and is led into the mountain, where he is received by a beautiful troll girl who offers him gifts if he will stay with her, but he wishes to return to his human fiancée. The troll girl urges him to take her gifts and then return to the mountain, but Sir Peder kills her.

The coexistence between Christianity and trolls seems always to serve Christianity: a mermaid promising a paradise, a merman coming into Church but the icons showing him their back or trolls tempting a knight with gold or beauty. The moral is always that you should choose God. Here, the troll seems to represent the temptation of many young people on the road to adulthood, and the ballads always end with a moral. The troll is an allegory of paganism and the hero, the beautiful and honest knight, a good Christian. By killing the troll the hero shows his fidelity to God and does not allow himself to be led down the wrong path. The ancient beliefs endured for centuries. Thus, the troll whose “face is quite impure seems to testify more clearly than others to a Christian erasure, as reflected in certain relevant passages appearing in the sagas, equating them with a nation of ’devils’ as per the curse tröll hafi pik, meaning ‘may the trolls (devils) take you!’26”

Coexistence in Romantic poems

In early nineteenth-century romantic literature, there are other examples of this coexistence between trolls and God, which comes as no surprise to Scandinavians, in spite of the incompatibility of these figures. Thus, in “Näcken” [The Water sprite] (1821) by Erik Johan Stagnelius and “Den lilla kolargossen” [The Little Charcoal Burner] (1814) by Erik Gustaf Geijer, the image of God coexists with that of trolls.

In his analysis of certain Swedish writers’ use of supernatural creatures as a symbol of nature, Fredrik Böök also makes a connection with the Bible, and more precisely with the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans27:

19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. (Romans, 8 19-23)

According to this teaching of the apostle, all creation participates in corruption, which is the fruit of man’s sin. Nature has been subjected to perdition and servitude for the love of man, and with sighs and anguish she waits to be saved from her distress. This doctrine of the curse of nature is often found in lyric poetry in the Swedish literature of the nineteenth century, including in the poems of Stagnelius, Malmström, Rydberg and Geijer. Erik Johan Stagnelius even makes it a focal point in his imagination. Thus, in the famous poem “Näcken”, he depicts a creature who sings for his salvation until a little boy leads him to understand that he sings in vain. Thus, he plunges melancholically back into the water. Böök recalls that, for the poet, nature emits this anguished voice of one awaiting redemption. The sigh of nature is a motif from the Platonic vision. The message of the sighs of natural creatures is therefore the desire to find God, and Stagnelius thus tries to unite it with Platonism and the Christian dualism. What the water symbolises here is the myth of the Christian fall, the reversal from the ideological to the world of phenomena, as, according to Plato, every soul experienced it in pre-existence. It is this case which forms the precondition for the sigh of creatures inspired by Saint Paul: “groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies28”. It is therefore the transcendentalism of the Romantic epoch that can be understood in this Swedish Romantic poetry where the soul longs for redemption, for the upper world of Christianity and of beatitude. The soul is aware of its depression29. Contempt for the world and the desire for the hereafter, a Christian vision of life, are here pushed to their paradoxical point. Earthly existence is a meaningless illusion. The reality is unbearable imprisonment and suffering here below. Romantic suffering merges here with the biblical image of Christian pessimism30.

Fear

Geijer describes forest mysticism and fear when a little boy, the son of a charcoal burner, crosses the forest to visit his father. He is afraid of the dark and thinks he sees trolls. When he confesses this to his father, who is used to solitude and darkness in the woods, the latter advises him to read his Lord’s Prayer because God does not fear the devil nor the trolls:

And the shade falls so thick, so thick, / Like a blanket, over the lonely trail. / Pattering and trampling over rock and log, / And the trolls tread upon the heath. / It is so dark, far, far away in the forest. / “Oh God! One of them! Two of them! In their net.  / They’ll take me – How close they swing! / And wave! – God, comfort me, poor child! / Running for my life!”/ It is so dark far, far away in the forest. / ”My son! I sat here for so many years, / And with God’s help I am kept from harm, / The one who can read his Lord’s Prayer correctly, / fears neither devil nor troll. / But it is dark, far, far away in the forest31.

Geijer shows that fear and anxiety in life departs from anyone who can confidently throw himself into the arms of the Lord – this is the indomitable religious optimism that triumphs in most of his poems32. Like the father, a priest of the Scandinavian countryside parish saw the utility of threatening people with the more menacing side of folk belief. Certainly, the peasants, living traditionally close to their land, being afraid of hostile nature, often living obscurely in the counties of the far North, more readily feared the trolls than the more abstract devil of whom the Bible spoke. Thus, in Geijer’s poem, the son of the charcoal burner sees a troll in every snowy log or every strange root in the woods. In Scandinavian folklore, many creatures continued to endure, surprisingly little affected by the Christian faith.

To understand the cohabitation between supernatural creatures, such as the troll, with God and Christianity in Swedish literature, we must not lose sight of the fact that they are supposed to symbolise nature and that a figure such as the troll is an allegory of the forest and the fears of humans: “fairy-tale and supernatural creatures are the fruits of the imagination, the concretization of fears, dreams, thoughts, corresponding to a human need and to a given culture33”. In Swedish Romantic poetry, supernatural creatures are treated as symbols of nature which sometimes demands help from men to be reconciled with God. The link between a supernatural creature and God is paradoxical, but between nature and Christianity the link is more straightforward.

Cohabitation in literary fairy tales

Is there the same representation in konstsagor [literary fairy tales] between trolls and Christianity? A literary fairy tale is a fairy tale that, unlike the folk tale, has a famous author. While the folk tale is connected to oral culture, the konstsaga has an artistic and aesthetic intention. From Zacharias Topelius’ Läsning för barn II [Readings for children II] (1866)34 I will study two tales. In the short tale “Naturens hemlighet” [The Secret of Nature], a little boy, David Skog, helps the troll Gråskägg (Gray Beard) to find the secret of nature, that is, God. The troll searches everywhere, but he can’t find God because he can’t see him. The little boy consequently tells the old troll that God is invisibly in everything and everyone, even in the troll himself. Here we can read a shift in the meaning of Stagnelius’ poem, that is to say that the troll is no longer prevented from taking part in God’s wealth but can take part in Christianity, if he is ready to become one of God’s children.

In the longer tale “Sampo Lappelill”, in the same volume by Torpelius, Sampo is not yet christened and his mother worries that he is therefore vulnerable to magical forces. Against his mother’s orders, Sampo decides to set off into the mountains to find the mountain king who has collected all the animals and trolls and other creatures of the north. JoAnn Conrad read this literary fairy tale as an expedition: “Setting out on his own from home, accompanied by helper animals, and culminating with a showdown between Sampo and Hiisi/the forces of light and darkness, the story is also clearly a variant of the fairy-tale imaginary voyage—a quest35.” What strikes the reader the most is not only the importance of Christianity in the tale, but also its coexistence with folkloric magic: “They are also precariously susceptible to the magic that surrounds them in the uninhabited, natural environment and must turn to outside help (Christianity) to stay safe36”. Torpelius gives a clear moral tale, but the coexistence between the two different magic elements, Christianity and folk beliefs, represents an interesting setting. When Sampo challenges the Mountain King, he evokes the trolls’ full fury. He sets home on a reindeer, but the Mountain King follows him closely. Thus the animal suggests that they should take shelter at the vicarage because the Mountain King has no power over the Christians. This is clearly a “redemptive narrative” and Sampo is saved by taking refuge in the local parsonage, where he is immediately christened.

Ironically, the parson also engages in a kind of occult Christian magic in the vanquishing and (ambiguous) destruction of Hiisi: Sampo’s hasty baptism, with attendant ritual, competes with the magic of Nature and wins. Subsumed into this parable of the fight between the forces of light over darkness and Christianity over paganism is thus an evolutionary (and apocalyptic) logic37.

Christianity wins over magic folk belief in these tales, as in the ballads. As such, folk belief and Christianity are not compatible spaces, and trolls and priests should not be talking to each other because they come from two different and distinctive worlds: if you believe in God then you shouldn’t believe in trolls. Yet these creatures remained present in Scandinavian society as a part of Nordic culture. Indeed, the troll symbolised evil and various dangers. This idea was so embedded in the Scandinavian mentality that referring to trolls and the Devil interchangeably would never raise an eyebrow. But at the start of the nineteenth century, with the collecting of folktales, the image of trolls changed. They became the big, stupid opponent to the cunning hero. Not as evil as the Devil, these creatures could more easily symbolise the lesser dangers such as the depths of the forest or other indiscretions in rural society. The illustrations of the Swedish painter John Bauer in the beginning of the twentieth century put a final complexion on the troll as rather harmless. In today’s Scandinavian cultures, the image has completely changed: in children’s literature the troll is often completely harmless and for young adults the troll is often used as an ecological figure in films, such as Troll by Roar Uthaug (2022), and series, such as Jordskott by Henrik Björn (2015)38.

Since the Christianisation of the Scandinavian countries, instead of making the trace of magical creatures disappear, we find the presence of God in ballads and tales in a cohabitation where God means clarity, good knowledge and morality, and trolls darkness, ignorance and evil but also fear. In the Romantic era, these creatures, symbolising nature, acquired a new status and became a symbol in the era of neo-romanticism at the turn of the century thanks to the artistic tales and illustrations of John Bauer and Kittelsen.

The use of folk belief within Christianity and nation-building

The ballads show a presence of Christianity which indicate that the inhabitants are becoming accustomed to a new belief without completely renouncing the old one, but it is time to study the purpose for which authority uses popular beliefs in order to build a strong nation.

An easy conversion

The persistence of paganism after the installation of Christianity finds its origin in what is called typological reading, a mode of interpretation of sacred texts particularly common in the medieval Church which consisted of reading the Old and New Testaments in tandem, one being the foreshadowing of the other. These intellectual schemes seem to have been used for a long time by the men of the clergy in northern Europe, by the missionaries and other powers who worked for the evangelisation of these countries, “no doubt to facilitate the entrenchment of the Christian religion by softening the rupture constituted by the obligation to renounce Odin, Baldur, Njörd or Freja39”. Indeed, the use of paganism within a Christian society was employed at the beginning of this cohabitation for the installation of a new religion, as Stéphane Coviaux notes:

In this vast enterprise of sanctification at that time, the codes of law show that the authorities wanted to Christianise a certain number of ancient practices, to reinterpret them in a Christian sense, which evokes the advice formerly given by Pope Gregory I to the missionary Mellitus, in charge of evangelising the Anglo-Saxons. He had ordered him to transform the traditional sacrificial banquets into Christian feasts, a prescription that is widely found in the law of Gulating.40 41

Thus, Christians continued what was previously within the domain of mythology, that is, they maintained old Thór’s ancient struggle against the giants in the Norwegian mountains, their last refuge. It is said that Saint Olaf turned them to stone, condemning them to remain there, henceforth harmless, until the Day of Judgment42. The saints replaced the god Thór, the Christian holidays replaced the pagan holidays, and the Devil shared his place as the master of Evil with the trolls so that the new religion could be installed as easily as possible, without too many clashes. The use of magical creatures was thus a way for the Scandinavian Church to make the conversion of pagans less difficult.

Nation building

The folkloric imagination was brought up to date by the Romantics, a desire to exalt a national reference. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Scandinavians experienced a craze for the Nordic imagination and nationalromantik [national Romanticism] rooted in the national humiliation caused by Napoleon’s contempt for the autonomy of each nation, which awakened the patriotism of many European countries. This new nationalism saw the expression of the soul of the people in ballads and popular songs. Lis Møller recalls that the revival of the ballad was the decisive phenomenon of Northern European Romanticism43. The ballad is often called folkvisa from the German Volkslied, which is to say “song of the people”, and its popular origin was the most important aspect of these ballads in the eyes of Romantics. Thus folk belief was an important part of nation-building in the late eighteenth century. The identification of natural phenomena and Norse mythology was an idea that had now been introduced. It is a central element for the re-evaluation of mythology as national heritage, in order to detach it from its opposition to religion. The Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger is one of the main proponents of this idea throughout Scandinavia. The supernatural creatures had, for the elite, completely lost their religious status and symbolised only a “monument to the primitive”44. According to Claude Millet traditions had to go through this transformation so that “their irrationality ceases to discourage or amuse curiosity, to interest it”45 and that “scholars and researchers will recognise in it a poem, even poetry”46.

The aesthetic movement of nationalromantik in Norway has its source in the national humiliation felt by Norway in its union with Denmark from the fifteenth century until 1814 when Denmark lost Norway to the Swedes. The Romantic effort was sparked to collect and analyse folk art with the aim of identifying the cultural differences between us (Norwegians) and them (Danish)47. Devoid of aristocracy, the Norwegians consequently put forward a culture of the people and their beliefs, collected by Moe and Asbjørnsen. Hence, national Romanticism draws its inspiration from the storytelling work done in other European countries, the Brothers Grimm being the best-known representatives of this effort. In Sweden, it was Arvid August Afzelius and the history teacher Erik Gustaf Geijer, who published Svenska folkvisor från forntiden between 1814 and 1818. The fact that Afzelius was a priest was not an obstacle to writing about these creatures. In Norway, Asbjørnsen and Moe reinforce the dark humour and the independence of the female characters to accentuate the Norwegian specificity48.

Thus the political significance of their mythological and marvellous elements glorifying ancient times and the greatness of Scandinavia at a period when the Swedish and Norwegian population was leaving Scandinavia for reasons of poverty, in the hope of a better future in America49. It was important to make Scandinavians want to stay. For lack of rapid improvement and money, the powers-that-be tried to hold people back by appealing to their feelings. Folklore became a force to hold people back in a Grundtvigian spirit. This nation-building is seen in the turn-of-the-century literary fairy tales.

In another kind of nation-building – that of the twentieth-century social democratic ideology and its urge to rationalise everything – the supernatural was erased from Scandinavian culture for a time. Indeed, one may gain the impression, alongside Antoine Guémy, that the demand for social clarity, functionalism and standardisation, which characterises social democratic ideology, and the futurist vision of the Nordic welfare state consign folklore and supernatural creatures to oblivion as a decadent and bourgeois survival, incompatible with modernity50. Yet they continued to exist and were taken up in the 1970s when, for example researchers took a new interest in John Bauer’s illustrations, which even ended up being used for commercial purposes.

Today, it’s the otherness in the creatures that seems to capture interest and which allows them to live on in film and television. These creatures can represent the Other, and the Other inspired the creatures. Thus, according to Régis Boyer, “the giants have always been considered, up to the present day inclusively in folklore, as the long gone urtidsfolk (people coming from the original times, as per the prefix ur-) and disappeared a long time ago51.” It was said the geniuses of nature had an existence of their own. As for the giants and the dwarves, on the other hand, they are memories of the oldest peoples of the past. Thus, in the Slavic tradition, according to Léon Pineau, the dwarves mentioned in their legends descended from the aborigines that the ancient Prussians found in the country. In the Scandinavian countries the same comparison can be made with the Sami, who may have inspired folk tales about trolls52. It is undoubtedly deplorable that the Sami should be blamed as the origin of a certain vision of otherness, but at the time this was society’s instinctive coping mechanism for that which it failed to understand.

Conclusion

The Christianisation of Scandinavia did not result in the disappearance of supernatural creatures, for the Church adopted a certain policy of cohabitation. The Church reduced supernatural creatures, like the gigantic troll, to a kind of dwarf and at the same time warned peasants of the danger of the dark unknown in the deep forest and of lust, while maintaining these creatures so that the people could more easily orientate themselves within a new religion. Thus the Church attempted to demonise folkloric creatures and to blend them into a substitute or synonym of the devil. Yet it was unsuccessful,: the trolls kept their own magical and dangerous qualities. As seen, trolls and other magical creatures found in folk tales and folk songs had many different functions. They were dangerous, sometimes erotic creatures that were used as warning signals to people who were afraid of the depths of the forest or faced difficult life choices heading into adulthood. But these creatures could also stand for evil over which the good, the Christian, could win. In these fairy tales and ballads, good could stand for Christianity and, when evil was represented by trolls and not by the devil, this gave rise to a cohabitation that may seem paradoxical considering that in a godly world there should be no trolls. Yet this paradox is explained by a literary continuity. Thus, in nineteenth-century literature, the Romantic uses these creatures to symbolise unbearable suffering, and in literary fairy tales, the troll is no longer prevented from taking part in God’s wealth but can take part in Christianity, if he is kind. If the acceptance of popular beliefs was a way for the Church to make Christianity more easily accepted by pagans, the state also monopolised beliefs for the purpose of nation-building. Thus when people stopped believing in supernatural creatures, folklore became a positive symbol of the most traditional aspect of Scandinavia: its nature. The authorities would now use it to better praise Scandinavia, reaching the feelings of the people by seeing in folklore the purest and most original part of their culture.

Notes

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