According to the Scandinavian notions above, therefore, trolls were created by God and were indeed members of the divine creation—not supernatural beings—but humans who, in one way or another, had acted against God’s will. The priests tried to dismiss the pagan imagery associated with these creatures, but certain of the original beliefs survived even into the period when the trolls had been verified as an animal species like any other. An interesting feature of the topic is that, owing to the effect of Christian belief, many troll-narratives based on folk tradition have been transformed into tales about demons. In Finland, for instance, hundreds of narratives are recorded that show how cunning individuals discomfit and dupe simple-minded fiends—which, in the more venerable versions, are almost exclusively trolls. Thus, on the evidence of these narratives, our ancestors had a particular need to emphasize their own superiority and pre-eminence in comparison with this somewhat anthropomorphic animal.
The typical attributes of the mythical trolls were ugliness, hirsuteness, and habitation inside mountains and rocks. They were agents of the dark powers, and they turned into stone in the light of day. Often the trolls were held to be servants of Satan, lying in wait for people at night and snatching them off to their caves. The phrase for these abductions was: “They were carried off to the mountain.” The trolls either killed their victims or held them as prisoners until insanity ensued.
Malign trolls of this sort also appear in the Scandinavian Viking tradition. Odin and his brothers killed the giant Ymir, after which the giant’s rotting body began to be infested with maggots, some black and some white. The gods called the maggots forth and gave them form and intelligence, and from the black maggots, which were by nature cunning and treacherous, the gods created the trolls; and since the trolls were in this manner born from the flesh of Ymir, out of which the earth was also created, the gods decided that the trolls should continue their existence as part of the earth and rock. In consequence, the trolls came to live beneath the earth, and if they erred by penetrating up into the daylight they were punished for their crime with petrifaction, becoming rocks themselves. On the other hand, the poem “The Seeress’s Prophecy” in the poetic Edda states the lineage of the trolls to be that of the tribe of the wolf Fenrir. The trinity of the wolf, the troll, and man is indeed a fascinating and illuminating aspect of the werewolf myth.
Finnish tradition also hands down stories of benign and harmless trolls who have lived with human beings on such good terms of mutual understanding that they have even married into named families. There are also numerous stories of girls having given birth to children sired by trolls and of youths seeking troll brides; and these are altogether in the class of the ancient myths about animal consorts.
Tales of trolls adopting human babies as their own cubs have been recorded everywhere from China to North America and its Indian tribes. Though, as a species, the troll never spread beyond the Bering Strait, it is conceivable that ancestors of the Indians migrating to Alaska via the Chukotskiy peninsula may have transported this narrative tradition with them (cf. e.g. the Alaskan monster, the alascattalo, a hybrid of the moose and the walrus, whose name is etymologically reminiscent of the Lapland creature, the staalo, whose legend is clearly a variation of the troll legend). It can in fact be asserted that the troll has played a very special symbolic role among the northern peoples for thousands of years.
ANGEL
It looks at me like a puppy-dog, but there are live coals in its orange eyes.
It’s lying curled up into a ball. I go to the bedside gingerly and hold my breath as I sit down on the edge of the bed beside it and observe its slender, heaving black sides, its helpless but sinewy being. Suddenly its paw straightens out. Its long supple fingers and fierce nails come toward me, and I almost snatch my hand away but don’t, I don’t, and its fingers wrap around my wrist for a moment; its hot slender paw touches me for a fleeting moment, and my eyes fill with tears.
Three days have gone by, and it simply isn’t eating.
ANCIENT POEMS OF THE FINNISH PEOPLE
II. 3. 3410, 1933 Village of Kitee: “Repo-Matti Väkeväinen’s Powerful Spell”
If the Lord willn’t grant my will,
And lets me be alone,
Then grant me thou my will,
Old man behind the hill,
Old man beneath the stone!
ANGEL
Dr. Spiderman had mentioned birds’ nests. I tried a raw egg first, cracked into a bowl, then an unshelled one, but it wouldn’t have either of them. I went to the supermarket for some quails’ eggs, and it did show a little interest in these, but perhaps it was just their color, spottedness, and small size reminding it of something. Anyway it didn’t eat those either.
I look at the black figure on the bed, at once restless, exhausted, and—it’s obvious—painfully hungry. I can’t let it outside. Out there are the thugs in their steel-toe-capped boots, getting their thrills by drenching drunks with gasoline, throwing cats from the roofs of multi-story blocks, and mugging gays. And if I tell anyone I’ll just as certainly lose the creature.
Its juniper-berry smell plays in my nostrils. Its own species didn’t want it. It was too much—ballast, a burden. They abandoned this light, slender, supple being, worthy of being immortalized in black marble.
Back to the cursed highway of knowledge, to the electronic asphalt, stretching in all directions, with no path leading where it should: to the forest.
For the hell of it, I put the cursor on to the Kalevala link of netzoo and click there. The net Kalevala has its own index. I wait briefly while the machine scrolls up references to trolls and demons. There’s no end of them. The biggest group is in the poem called “The Demon Skis,” where Lemminkäinen, skiing along, is chasing a demon that’s scampering away from him, and the demon, as it dashes off, sends the stewpots flying in a Lapland village. I log on to the bride’s guide poem, “Instructions and a Warning.” Here the bride complains about her bridegroom, and this makes me think of the Filipino girl downstairs:
I’d be better off
in better places,
with larger lands,
and roomier rooms,
a fuller-blooded man,
better built;
I’m given to this no-good,
left with this loafer:
took his carcass from a crow,
robbed his nose from a raven,
mouthed like a famished wolf,
haired like hell’s troll,
bellied like a bear.
That’s the complete demon reference. I wasn’t expecting to find instructions for feeding trolls in the Kalevala, but, surprisingly, the falling meter sweeps you along. The following troll fragment is, very aptly, Väinämöinen’s, which he sings to the accompaniment of a kantele.
None in the forest
that loped on four legs,
that bounded and bobbed,
but lingered to listen,
suck in some ecstasy:
squirrels came switching
from leaf-spray to leaf-spray,
stoats came and stopped there,
settled on fences.
Elks hopped on the heath,
lynxes leaped about laughing.
A wolf woke in the swamp,
a troll rose on the rocks,
a bear reared on the heath
from its pen in the pines,
its den in the spruce thicket.
I’ve had my fill of the Kalevala. The SEARCH function locates links here and there—to biology, mythology, various fairy tales, and old stories in their hundreds if not thousands. But nothing concrete. I’ll have to look elsewhere.
I’ve already been out of the apartment several times, and every time I come back to find my troll in the same place on the bed, heart-rendingly in almost the same position, scarcely able to raise its head.
YRJÖ KOKKO, PESSI AND ILLUSIA, 1944
“What . . . ?” exclaimed the woodpecker, gazing down inquisitively. It saw something th
at looked like a span-sized human being, though the creature had thick brown fur and a squirrel’s tufty ears, as well as a hare’s funny little stumpy tail. It peeped up at the woodpecker with happy and friendly eyes. Actually, perhaps the eyes seemed too small, but that may have been because of the rather large nose, with an equally large mouth beneath it, broadening into a happy smile and revealing beautiful pearl-white rows of teeth. Also, the creature’s hands and feet were perhaps on the large side, and its fur seemed matted, with longish hair dangling from the top of its head to its neck. Obviously, this was a small forest troll, waking up from its winter sleep—not a relative of those large black predatory animals that prowled the Lapland boulders in the summers, looking for prey. It was at most a second cousin twice removed—a gnome, the little friendly creature found in fairy stories.
ANGEL
I lower the children’s book I’ve been reading here in the library reading-room. From his description it’s clear that Yrjö Kokko had never seen a photograph of a real troll. But the pile of books on my library table, which I’ve been scouring under the heading TROLL, show that it’s no wonder: sightings of trolls were extremely rare, and photographs rarer still, until the 1970s, when automatic cameras, hides, and weeks-long watches over carcasses became the fashion. Before that, trolls were rarely hunted: the flesh was uneatable, the carcass nauseatingly smelly. There was known to be some small market for trolls’ winter coats: in a small way the Russians went in for trapping trolls in the autumn, but it was a rather unprofitable business. The trolls very rarely fell into traps, and it was almost impossible to hunt them down with guns, for they were silent and swift night-creatures. Hunting dogs were tried but with hopeless results: either the trolls put the dogs totally off the scent, or, if they were cornered, mauled the dogs with murderous fury. A dog with a bull-terrier type temperament, the rollikoira or troll hound, much prized in Russia, does still exist. It’s a variant of the Karelian bearhunter and is said to have more than a little strain of the wolf and the husky in it. But the troll hound (its real name, I hear, is the Ladoga bloodhound) has not been used for hunting for a long time.
Also, it was no use looking for trolls, like bears, in their winter dens, for the cavities the troll seeks out for hibernation are so inaccessible that there was almost no point in looking for their breathing holes. And there was no reason to cull them for competing with human hunters on game preserves, for in winter they were completely out of the running and in summertime they were more interested in lemmings than elks. For a few years a bounty was offered for killing them because the Lapps wailed that the wolverines and staalos were rampaging among the reindeer herds, costing more than tax inspectors. But then the environmentalists and animal-rights people put an end to the hunting.
I dive even deeper into the lore. Certain Hanseatic traders were familiar with the term Spukenfell—literally “spookskin”—which referred to a rare and expensive item, as mythical as mummified mermaids and unicorns. In Russia in the early twentieth century a few trolls were successfully caught in traps, and the thick silky-black spookskin flayed from a full-sized male in its winter coat was apparently an imposing sight. One Politburo official had a spookskin hanging over the fireplace in the guest room of his dacha, with the head still attached. I’m revolted.
I again read Kokko’s description of a troll. Leaving out the size, it’s not so wide of the mark. The brown coat of fur, though, is actually pitch-black, the ears are not tufty at all, and the “funny little stumpy tail”—oh, so cute—is a lashing, tuft-ended snake, a trembling mood-antenna. A rather large nose—hmmm—perhaps it will be later when the face elongates into more of a muzzle. The mouth is not particularly big either. When it “draws back into a happy smile,” pearly-white rows of teeth are, indeed, revealed, but, however beautiful, they’re saw-edged and sharp, the canines like Turkish daggers. Its hands—the forepaws—and feet are large; in fact, considering the size of the body, rather like a lynx’s paws. And, while its fur coat has from time to time looked tangled, its head is not crowned with dangling hair. It has a huge black brush, just as if the hair-stylist who created Tina Turner’s image had a salon in the forest.
I leaf through more of Pessi and Illusia. The animals and the plants chat away like anything, and then a cutesy little girl appears, whose eyes are big and blue and amazingly bright and who has white curly hair like a cloudlet on a sunny day. A fairy.
The troll and the fairy introduce themselves to each other: they are Pessi and Illusia—not difficult to work out, considering the title of the book. One is a pessimist, and the other lives in the land of illusion—clever old Kokko! And because both their names are diminutives, because of their small size, Illusia establishes that they’re fated to be companions in destiny . . .
I shut the book. Thoughts go whizzing through my head.
So what does the troll mean to me?
A protégé, somewhat like a pigeon with a broken wing? Or an exotic pet? Or maybe a stranger on a short visit, rather oddly behaved but altogether captivating, who’ll be leaving one day when the time’s right?
Or what?
I ask myself and give no reply.
I reach out and grasp the next book.
A.W. CHALMERS, THE HIDDEN TRAILS OF MANKIND, 1985
For the most part, the ancestors of man may well have adapted flexibly without the constant need for major mutations; but more drastic environmental changes called for more pronounced mutations. Since the close of the Miocene period there have been two such major evolutionary leaps.
The first occurred when Australopithecus experienced a restructuring of the pelvis and the foot, which allowed a brachiating forest ape to become a more or less upright walker. This four-limbed “southern ape” thus became two-legged, with hands free for manipulation, as did, convergently, Felipithecus, the so-called “cat-ape.” Both Australopithecus and Felipithecus probably carried loads. Upright walking and the development of the deltoid muscle would allow the bearing of weights, such as tools, food, and children, from one place to another.
Approximately four million years later the second important hominid mutation occurred. This was the rapid expansion of the brain, leading to the emergence of Cro-Magnon man, classified as the species Homo sapiens, the species we ourselves belong to.
ANGEL
It stands in a museum display-cabinet on the ground floor of the library, looking like a streamlined thundercloud. Its coat has lost much of its shiny black during the years spent in the glass case. To suggest the beast’s environment, it’s been surrounded by a miscellany of foliage, lichen, and musty-looking plastic stones. The taxidermist has stuffed it in a slightly crouching position, and the long and supple fingers on the forelimbs stretch towards the glass, so that as you approach the cabinet you’re startled and take an instinctive step backward. Its muzzle is creased into a sneer, and the strikingly large teeth are dark yellow—perhaps from being conserved so long. I observe that the taxidermist was incorrectly informed about trolls’ eyes. To catch the fury and danger of the animal it has been given brown glass-button eyes, which give it a sad, lost look. These might be suitable for a bear, say, but are totally unlike the troll’s actual eyes, which are large, fiery slants with pupils that are vertical stripes. I press my hands and nose and lips to the glass. It mists over by my mouth as I whisper, “Help me.”
A.W. CHALMERS, THE HIDDEN TRAILS OF MANKIND, 1985
At the close of the Miocene period salt began to be concentrated in salt basins, and there was a global decrease in oceanic salinity. In consequence, the Antarctic seas began to ice over, doubling the size of the ice cap, and lowering sea levels worldwide. The trees began to diminish in size and the African rain forest shrank in extent, leaving only smaller areas where the arboreal apes are still to be found. The eastern side of the continent became a savannah of grass country, dotted with woodland. This savannah experienced alternating wet and dry seasons, times of abundance and times of dearth, seasons of flood and seasons of cracked mud. The
upright two-limb carriage of the hominid Australopithecus allowed its adaptation to this new environment. No longer confined to trees, the hominid was no longer dependent on them.
A similar convergent-evolutionary adaptation occurred in another mammal, the “cat-ape” Felipithecus, bred in the Southeast Asian jungle. The broad shoulders, long arms and partly prehensile toes of both Australopithecus and Felipithecus suggest that both animals still resorted on occasion, perhaps for refuge, to trees. But with the declining availability of trees Felipithecus had to adapt to a new and variable terrain. In search of food, it sought a new home in the East Asian plains and finally the Siberian forests.
PALOMITA
The stairwell’s a big, listening ear, with the bell echoing ring-ring-ring, fainter and fainter, until it disappears. I’m at Mikael’s door, but Mikael’s not at home. I’ve checked the time: it’s the same as when I last met him, but anyway he’s not here. I couldn’t check through the peephole in the door to see if he was coming, as I’d had to clean the flat and do a lot of washing, and the noise of the washing machine drowns the footsteps from the stairwell.