A heritage of belief

“Trolls are real,” stated the old sailor. “One almost kidnapped me when I was a kid.”

He had a shaved head, skin weathered by the sea and wind, and clear blue eyes. He did not appear to be joking. 

“That’s when my journalism background kicked in, and I had to set aside my bias and hear him out,” recalls Britte Rasmussen Marsh. “He told me that he was walking home along a fjord, when a beautiful woman beckoned to him. It was clear he had something she wanted. But then he realized she was a Huldra [a secretive forest spirit].” 

That conversation, which took place in Norway, not far from the Arctic Circle, several years ago, birthed an ongoing project that includes a book, a podcast, and a group translation of an obscure text. 

“Have you encountered a troll, in one way or another?”

Marsh has been asking the question of people ever since that day. She’s posed it to sea captains, school children, and anyone else who might add to her understanding of what she calls a “heritage of belief.” 

Surprisingly often, the answer is “yes.”

The stories she has collected span from the coast of central Africa to Mexico.

Marsh is a youthful but worldly 33-year-old second generation Dane. In her hands is a binder brimming with tabs and sticky notes for the book she is writing about trolls and what she terms “the troll diaspora.” Sitting nearby is a book, written by an old Norwegian trapper, that she is working to translate, for the first time, into English. Its title is “I have seen Huldra,” a nonfiction account of an encounter with a beautiful siren creature. 

She does admit to grappling with another question: “How do you talk about this in a way that doesn’t make people think you are completely bonkers?”

But, it’s really no more far-fetched than most of the things people believe, and Marsh is not particularly interested in establishing a rigid true/untrue dichotomy. Whether or not they exist, trolls are clearly real, from the cold forests of Norway to the comment sections on social media. They are out there, in one way or another, and Marsh wants to learn more about them and the role they play in people’s lives. 

“It’s my job as a journalist to collect these stories, with authenticity, and let the readers decide,” she explains. “It does not matter what I believe.”

“It’s not easy to sit next to a man who says sincerely that he saw a troll and [dismiss him],” she continues. “I’m an agnostic, through and through.”

It was while visiting her extended family in the far north of Norway that she first heard an adult speak of trolls not as characters in fables for children, but as living, breathing forces; as being with agency and desires and impacts in the natural world. Much of her prior experience in Scandinavia had been in the relatively southern regions of the geographical area. As she headed to Norway’s extreme northernmost regions, she began noticing differences in morphology and phenotypic expression. She observed a difference in the way people thought and spoke, too. 

“It’s kind of understood that the further north you go, the more people believe in trolls,” Marsh says. 

“As you go further north in Norway, people are bigger,” she continues. “They still eat whale blubber. There is a noticeable change.”

It was there that her real interest in trolls began. 

“[Trolls] tend to lure people and marry them, in a Christian church, interestingly, which is an intersection of different cultures,” she says. 

“I was just floored the first time I heard one of these stories,” she says. “I kept waiting for him to laugh. But he didn’t. Then another person spoke up and said they had seen a nisse [a gnome-like creature often associated with Christmas or the Winter Solstice] when they were a teenager.” 

Today, Marsh has amassed a mountain of research on these Scandinavian creatures who roam people’s imaginations, and possibly the real world as well. Her investigation has taken her gaze far from the geographical borders of Scandinavia, from lands of snow and ice to modern day Portland, Oregon, where she has worked as a school teacher. There, in her classrooms, she heard accounts of small creatures meddling in human affairs. The stories she has recorded often sound like fairy tales, but they are also intensely personal. Some appear figurative or metaphorical, while others were told literally and earnestly. 

A writer, educator and journalist by trade, Marsh says the idea of trolls simply “didn’t leave” her once she began searching. While she still substitutes teaches, the project actually prompted her to leave her fulltime job and turn her attention elsewhere.  

“There is something very insidious about a writer who isn’t writing for themselves,” she says. “In the classroom, I felt fraudulent when I would tell these kids to believe in their voices, because that’s not something I was doing at the time. That’s why, for the past three years, I’ve been intensively studying trolls.”

The project, like a trickster troll, has taken several forms. It’s called WeTroll, and it currently includes a book she is working on, as well as a podcast that she will unveil when it’s ready. She now plans to write a series of books chronicling people’s encounters with trolls, and the first manuscript is nearing completion now.  

“It’s a nonfiction book and a podcast that explores the troll diaspora,” she explains. “It’s true life encounters, it’s the way our perceptions change, and it’s what I like to call ‘The Applied Troll.’”

“I’m wanting to be inclusive of all of us,” she says. “That’s why it’s called WeTroll.”

Her investigation has led her to many unexpected creatures, including the draugen, which are believed to be the ghosts of drowned sailors. “I talk to people who have had experiences at sea,” she says. 

It has also revealed to her duendes, unmistakably troll-like creatures that allegedly live in the walls of homes in Latin America; as well as chaneque, the gnomic beings that populated stories there long before the first Spanish ships arrived. “They are essentially just two words for the same thing,” Marsh explains. “I had three different students tell me about duendes. They are like these Rumpelstiltskin riddle-makers; these creatures who can’t really be trusted.”

“Obviously what happened with Spanish colonization [in present-day Latin America] was bloody and awful, obviously, but one very interesting thing that also happened is that there was room in Catholicism for ghosts and demons and trolls, as long as there was a specific saint assigned to defeat whatever that magical entity was,” she continues. “In that way, Catholicism was very different from the Protestant ideas that came to Scandinavia.”

The more diverse stories she records, the more commonalities Marsh finds among trolls and other magical entities. 

“There is this connective thread to the archetype of a troll,” she says. “There are connections.”

“My research is rooted in Scandinavian traditions because that’s what I know most, but I’m going beyond that,” she continues. “I would like to look at how people’s ideas change based on distance, on colonization, on assimilation.”

In addition to literal and figurative trolls, she also looks at the very word, “troll”: at its etymology and evolution. “Troll” is a term that means many things today, and it is attached to everything from beer and musical festivals to online antagonists. 

“It’s actually hard to nail down what an actual definition is, in 2020,” Marsh says. “Why do we call online haters ‘trolls’? Why aren’t they demons or dragons? In some ways, language finds us. I think that’s interesting.”

So, does she really take these stories seriously? 

She is a believer in the scientific method, a fan of Carl Sagan and of rational discourse. But while those things provide vital ways of seeing the world, they might stop short of fully expressing the experience of being human. For that, people for thousands of years have turned to stories. They have told and listened to tales of monsters, spirits, wraiths, stone giants, gods, witches, little people and more. 

“Personally, I’m not going to debate whether or not trolls are real,” Marsh says. “I’m more interested in talking to other people and finding out what they believe.”

“We are suffering so much right now because of this need to make everything good or evil, this or that, my way or the highway,” she says. “That’s destroying families.”

“We need to accept non-closure,” later adds. “We need to suspend our disbelief just long enough to listen.”