“Slow-witted mountain giants who turn to stone at the first touch of sunrise.”
No creature is more Norwegian than the troll. Descended from the jötnar of Norse myth, trolls settled into folk tradition as the old inhabitants of the landscape — ancient, immensely strong and reliably dim-witted, living in cliffs, caves and forest dark, far from church bells. They range from the småtroll of the woods to towering many-headed giants, and in the old sagas the word troll could mean fiend, demon, werewolf or giant all at once.
Trolls matter because Norway wrote its identity with them. The folktales collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe in the nineteenth century — the three billy goats Gruff crossing the troll's bridge, Askeladden winning an eating contest against a troll — became national literature, and Theodor Kittelsen's illustrations gave the creatures their definitive faces. The map itself is troll-marked: Trollveggen, Trolltunga, Trollstigen, Trollheimen.
The Legend
The folk troll is a creature of borders — it lives where people do not, and everything about it is anti-human and anti-Christian. It cannot abide the ringing of church bells and hurls boulders at the offending buildings, almost always missing. It steals people away into the mountain, a fate the Norwegians called bergtagning, and swaps its own offspring for human babies in the cradle. And it belongs so completely to the dark that the sun is fatal: caught out at dawn, a troll bursts or turns to stone.
Against all that strength the stories send cleverness. In the tales set down by Asbjørnsen and Moe, trolls are outwitted rather than outfought: the billy goats talk and butt their way past the bridge, and Askeladden the ash-lad tricks a troll into cutting open its own belly to keep pace in an eating contest. The moral runs through the whole tradition — the old powers of the landscape are enormous, slow and beatable.
The Record
Trolls enter writing early. The Prose Edda's Skáldskaparmál preserves an encounter between the ninth-century skald Bragi Boddason and an unnamed troll-woman who declaims her own nature to him in Old Norse verse — the oldest and strangest troll self-portrait on record. Philologists trace the word to Old Norse troll and trǫll, 'fiend, demon, werewolf, jötunn,' and still debate whether it began as simply another name for the giants who fought the gods.
The modern troll canon was fixed by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, whose collected Norwegian folktales — above all the illustrated editions of 1883–87 — paired the stories with Theodor Kittelsen's art. Kittelsen's Forest Troll of 1906, along with the Swedish paintings of John Bauer, completed the image of the shaggy, mossy, big-nosed mountain giant that the world now recognises on sight.
The Lore
Older beliefs cling to the troll like lichen. Its fear of lightning descends from Thor, whose hammer hunted the giants; its hatred of bells was said to have driven the trolls out of settled country as the churches rose. Folk memory even preserved troll society: unlike the solitary nøkk, trolls kept families and households inside their mountains — and the changeling belief, painted by John Bauer in 1913, made every sickly infant a possible troll deposit.
Norway never let the troll die. It survives in place names from Trollveggen to Trollstigen and Trollheimen, in souvenir shops and Kittelsen reproductions, and in the 2022 Netflix film Troll, which woke a mountain-sized specimen under Dovre. Even the internet troll owes the creature its name — a small, mean afterlife for a being that once threw boulders at churches.
Field Notes
- ✦ Bursts or turns to stone when caught by sunlight — a fate many jagged Norwegian peaks are said to record.
- ✦ Hates church bells and Christianity; legends tell of trolls hurling boulders at the offending churches.
- ✦ Trollveggen, Trolltunga, Trollstigen and Trollheimen all carry the creature's name on the Norwegian map.
- ✦ Oldest written appearance: a troll-woman trading verses with the skald Bragi Boddason in the Prose Edda.
- ✦ Old Norse troll meant fiend, demon, werewolf or giant — scholars still debate where jötunn ends and troll begins.
Case File
- Classification
- Giant / wildman being
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- First Sighted
- Old Norse and later Scandinavian folklore
- Habitat
- Mountains, forests, caves and under bridges
- Reported Size
- From dwarfish to towering many-headed giants
- Also Known As
- Troll · Jötunn-kin