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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesTrolls inhabit Scandinavian mountains, woods and stories, confronting people with formidable strength, dangerous appetites and sometimes an unexpected willingness to help.
Also recorded as Scandinavian Troll
Boots squeezes a piece of cheese until whey runs out. He calls it a stone and threatens to squeeze the troll in the same way. His opponent offers to help with the woodcutting. [2]
Read the manuscriptTroll is a Scandinavian name with a long and unsettled history. Store norske leksikon traces its use for different supernatural beings, the dead and demons, while leaving its earliest meaning uncertain. Norwegian folktales often make trolls enormous and grotesque; other accounts give them smaller bodies or more neighbourly conduct. A familiar name does not guarantee a familiar temper. [1]
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe collected the Norwegian stories translated into English by George Webbe Dasent as Popular Tales from the Norse. Dasent calls the resourceful younger son Boots. In his prefaces he defends keeping the tales’ rougher features against requests to soften them for English readers. Their humour can end in a death as readily as a marriage or a recovered home. [2]
In “Boots Who Ate a Match with the Troll,” an elderly farmer needs his sons to cut timber so he can pay his debts. The two eldest try in turn. Each flees when a troll claims the wood and threatens to kill him. Boots asks for provisions and takes the fresh cheese his mother makes. When the same threat comes, he squeezes the cheese, passing it off as a white stone. The frightened troll bargains for its life by offering its labour. Together they cut a great quantity of timber before evening. [2]
The troll invites Boots home, where they divide the work of preparing porridge. Sent to fetch water, the boy finds two iron pails too heavy to lift. He dismisses them as small basins and proposes carrying back the spring itself. The troll cannot afford to lose its water supply and fetches the water instead. Boots has made his weakness sound like impatience with a task beneath him. The host performs the work while the guest tends the fire. [2]
Over the porridge, Boots proposes an eating match. He secretly hangs his food bag in front of him and spoons more into it than into his mouth. When it fills, he cuts a slit and continues. Eventually the troll can eat no more. Boots advises it to cut an opening in its belly as he apparently has, assuring it that the pain is slight. The troll follows the advice and dies. Boots takes the silver and gold from its hillside home; the money goes towards his father’s debt. The contest’s final trick enriches the family through a killing. [2]
“The Three Billy-Goats Gruff” begins with another claim to territory. Three goats must cross a bridge to reach the hillside grazing. The troll underneath hears each crossing and threatens to eat the traveller. The smallest goat persuades it to wait for his larger companion; the second makes the same argument. By the third crossing the bridge creaks under the biggest goat. He accepts the challenge, drives his horns into the troll’s eyes, crushes its body and throws it into the stream. The goats grow so fat on the hillside that they can scarcely walk home. The appetite that made the troll wait has brought it an opponent it cannot defeat.
The household in Grettir’s Saga has suffered two disappearances before its visitor arrives. In successive winters, a husband and then a servant vanish while the mistress, Steinvor, attends Yule worship. Blood beside the outer door follows the second disappearance. Grettir comes on another Yule eve, calling himself Guest. He carries Steinvor and her daughter together through the flooded, ice-filled river, then returns to wait at the house. His strength unsettles the people he helps: at church, Steinvor says she cannot tell whether a man or a troll carried her across. [3]
Towards midnight a huge troll-wife enters with a trough and a chopper. Grettir rises to meet her. She is stronger, dragging him through the house while their struggle breaks the panelling and tears away the door fittings. Outside, she hauls him towards the river’s deep gorge. At the edge he manages to free his right hand, draw his short sword and cut off her arm. She falls into the water. Exhausted, swollen and bruised, he returns to bed; Steinvor comes home to the wrecked house and learns who her guest really is. [3]
The saga then preserves a competing ending. Grettir says the wounded troll-wife threw herself into the gorge. The people of Bard-dale say daylight caught her during the struggle and that she burst when her arm was cut off: a woman-shaped rock still stands on the cliff. Even within the narrative, survival does not settle the account. The priest also wants visible evidence for Grettir’s belief that the missing men went into the gorge. Their disagreement sends the two back to investigate beneath the waterfall. [3]
The investigation leads Grettir beneath the waterfall into a cave, where a giant attacks him. He cuts through its weapon’s shaft and kills it with his short sword. Seeing bloodied remains in the current, the priest assumes Grettir has died and abandons the rope. Grettir finds the bones of two men, carries them out and climbs unaided. He leaves the bones and a carved account at the church. The priest buries the bones in the churchyard, and the saga says the hauntings cease. The missing men’s story has reached a burial, even while the troll-wife’s fate remains disputed.
Dasent’s bridge troll has eyes likened to saucers and a nose likened to a poker. At Halvor’s feast, large and small trolls mingle; some have long tails, others none, and some have exceptionally long noses. These differences occur within one gathering. In the saga, the troll-wife’s strength is measured through damaged architecture: fittings that should hold the house together give way around the bodies locked in combat. Her trough and chopping tool bring the equipment of a household into the attack. [2][3]
Boots never acquires the strength he claims. His success depends on keeping the troll from testing the right thing: the material in his hand, the weight he cannot lift, the bag receiving his supper. The creature can cut timber and carry water with ease, yet it accepts a threat against its spring without asking how the boy would move it. By contrast, the largest goat actually has the power its challenge promises. Wit saves Boots; the largest goat meets a threat of being eaten with force. [2]
Trollveggen, Trolltunga and Trollfjorden preserve troll names in the Norwegian landscape. Store norske leksikon also recounts a giant’s explanation for Jutulhogget: a jutul in Rendalen cuts a gorge with a sword, intending to divert the Glomma into his own valley. Here the story gives a spectacular formation the scale of a single creature’s work. [1]
Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt makes admission to troll society a disturbing bargain. In Act II, Peer wants the mountain ruler’s daughter and her kingdom. The ruler first demands that he disregard everything beyond the mountains. He then distinguishes the human command to be oneself from the troll command to be sufficient to oneself. Peer accepts, although he barely understands. Marriage and sovereignty make the conditions tolerable to him. [4]
Other concessions follow. Peer drinks what the court serves and allows a tail to be tied onto him. But when the king’s daughters perform, he sees a cow playing a harp and a pig dancing. His blunt description offends the court. The king proposes altering his eyes so that everything ugly will look splendid. Peer asks when his human sight will return. Told that the change is permanent, he refuses. Clothing and a tied-on tail could be removed; a promise could be broken. He will not accept a transformation that leaves no retreat. [4]
The quarrel becomes a trap. The king accuses Peer of desiring his daughter, who declares that she will bear his child. Peer finally admits that he is neither a prince nor rich. Ordered to kill him, the younger trolls pursue him around the hall, blocking each escape. He falls under their attack and calls for his mother. Distant church bells sound; the trolls flee and the palace disappears. Ibsen gives the would-be king a humiliating rescue. He has been willing to adopt the court’s comforts and customs until the bargain threatens his ability to withdraw. [4]
Theodor Kittelsen’s 1882 drawing fixes the moment when Boots threatens the troll with his supposed stone. Nasjonalmuseet identifies its medium as pen over pencil on paper and connects it with an 1883 edition of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s tales. The museum’s Eventyrskatten exhibition placed such drawings beside storytelling, music and moving images, asking how illustration enlarges a scene and shapes a familiar character. The collected story acquired another storyteller in the artist. [5][6]
A different afterlife appears in Trolljegeren, the 2010 fictional documentary discussed by film scholar Ellen Rees. Its hunter works for a secret state service, concealing escaped trolls and the damage they cause. Three goats on a bridge become bait in a trap, while the creatures’ forms recall Kittelsen. Rees connects the film’s bureaucracy and power lines with contemporary Norwegian disputes over government and landscape. A monster hunt becomes a job with paperwork, and the country’s apparently untouched wilderness becomes managed territory. [7]
The English versions leave a question of naming open. Dasent’s Troll, the saga’s troll-wife and the creatures of Ibsen’s court reach us through different translators and literary forms. Their wording does not establish that every original term had the same reach. The saga makes the uncertainty especially personal when Steinvor tries to name her rescuer. The same strength that saves a mother and child makes the man carrying them difficult to distinguish from what she fears. [2][3][4]
Dasent supplies the complete woodcutting contest, bridge crossing and Christmas feast. The Morris–Magnússon saga translation preserves Grettir’s battle and the rival account of its ending; the Archer translation supplies Ibsen’s court scene. Store norske leksikon gives regional and linguistic context. Nasjonalmuseet documents Kittelsen and illustration; Ellen Rees interprets Trolljegeren. These are distinct witnesses to the troll’s changing place in stories and images.
Anne-Sofie Schjøtner Skaar, Rune Blix Hagen · Store norske leksikon · Norwegian
Checked 2026-10-09
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Jørgen Moe · Project Gutenberg · Translated by George Webbe Dasent
Tales V, Boots Who Ate a Match with the Troll; XII, The Cat on the Dovrefell; XXXVII, The Three Billy-Goats Gruff; notices to the first and second editions
These retellings follow Dasent’s English translation of Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collection.
Checked 2026-10-11
Icelandic Saga Database · Translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon
Chapters 64–66 and chapter 67 opening through the burial of the recovered bones
The account follows the Morris–Magnússon English translation; its two explanations of the troll-wife’s fate remain distinct.
Checked 2026-10-09
Henrik Ibsen · Project Gutenberg · 1867 · Collected works volume IV, 1912 impression of 1907 edition · Translated by William and Charles Archer
Act II, scenes V–VI, especially the complete troll court, printed pp. 69–83
Checked 2026-10-09
Theodor Kittelsen (artwork) · Nasjonalmuseet
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The invaders in “The Cat on the Dovrefell” arrive for Christmas dinner. A traveller taking a captured white bear from Finnmark to the king of Denmark asks Halvor for lodging. Halvor explains that trolls force his family out every Christmas Eve, but the traveller insists on staying. The household prepares porridge, fish and sausages before leaving. At the feast, a little troll approaches the bear beneath the stove and offers the supposed cat a sausage on a fork. The bear rises, growls and chases the entire company out. [2]
The following Christmas Eve, Halvor is cutting wood when a voice asks whether he still has his big cat. He answers that it now has seven kittens, each larger and fiercer than its mother. The voice promises that the trolls will never return, and the tale says they keep their word. The bear has done the necessary frightening; Halvor’s description gives it a growing family powerful enough to keep his unwelcome guests away. [2]
NG.K&H.B.05246
Checked 2026-10-09
Nasjonalmuseet · Norwegian
Checked 2026-10-09
Ellen Rees · Scandinavica · 2011
50(2), pp. 52–62; scoped passages pp. 52–54, 58–61
The film discussion follows Rees’s analysis; the film itself was not separately viewed.
Checked 2026-10-09