The Genre of Trolls: The Case of a Finland-Swedish Folk Belief Tradition

The Genre of Trolls: the Case of a Finland-Swedish Folk Belief Tradition. By Camilla Asplund Ingemark. (Abo, Finland: Abo Akademi University Press, 2004. Pp.xiv + 328, preface, introduction, bibliography, appendices, photograph, illustrations. N.P. paper) "Little Matt," a tale that Camilla Asplund Ingemark examines in The Genre of Trolls, is an aberrant version of a story about a human / troll hybrid. It's aberrant in that its hybrid protagonist enjoys a long and successful life, in contrast to the typical hybrid fate of a swift, untimely death. As an application of postmodern theory to barely modern texts, The Genre of Trolls is a bit of a hybrid itself, and we should hope that it and its author enjoy the former fate. Specifically, Ingemark studies troll narratives collected between 1850 and 1920 in Swedish-speaking Finland. Her stated goal was to utilize theories of intertextuality, particularly those of Lotte Tarkka (1993) and Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman (1992), to examine the relationship between the aforementioned troll narratives and Christian texts such as biblical stories and hymns sung in the regions from which the troll narratives came. Before applying these theories to her data, she first provides a thorough review of various theories of intertextuality and the theorists who advanced them. She then continues with an overview of troll discourse which is nothing short of meticulous, and comprises the longest section of her work. Happily, her troll section's meticulousness is matched by its accessibility, so those unfamiliar with troll tradition will find themselves comfortably oriented by the end of her third chapter. The downside to Ingemark's thorough introductory chapters is that one must wait until almost halfway through The Genre of Trolls to reach her original arguments. These arguments are not limited to her stated intentions. She also uses a chapter to consider the aberrant wonder tales of Johan Alen, from which the aforementioned "Little Matt" comes. She incorporates the ideas of several theorists into these considerations, in particular those of Mikhail Bakhtin and his idea of chronotopes (1981). She uses a final chapter to consider more of Bakhtin's ideas, namely unfinalizability and dialogism (1981, 1984) in relation to troll tradition in general. I must admit that I was predisposed to like The Genre of Trolls, due to the dialogue it employs between modern and postmodern interests. I find tedious the often artificial division of our discipline into two camps, those interested only in pre-modern and modern data combined with modern theory, and those interested only in postmodern data combined with postmodern theory. That written, it should be observed that this particular hybrid can be ungainly (as Ingemark herself observes); it is difficult to apply theories so concerned with context to century-old texts, although Ingemark contextualizes as best she can. …