The Friendly Troll of Oslo
By Cole Herrold
I had purchased the book Trolls: An
Unnatural History some time ago when I was really starting to expand my
collection of Fortean books, and upon the initial read of it, I discovered that
it was more focused on the folklore and cultural importance of trolls and less
on ostensibly real accounts. However, when looking at the introduction, there
is one alleged encounter that the friend of the author had sometime either
before or in the 1970s. This encounter is unique for several reasons for one,
it is not typically what one thinks of when describing a troll in terms of
behavior, and two, because of the general size of the creature, which is
outstanding.
John’s friend and the witness of this
encounter was waiting for the last tram in Oslo on a rainy September night. The
wind was howling ferociously, and the rain beat down on her soaking her to the
bones. She was a foreign exchange student attempting to gain citizenship and had
just come back from an exceptionally fun and enjoyable evening in town as she
had dinner with some of her newfound friends. How distant the warmth of that
dinner was as she waited for the glowing light of the scheduled tram. She began
out of boredom to look out into the surrounding Norwegian forests, which loomed
around her like great pillars of green. As she looked at the bucolic beauty that
encompassed her, she noticed that there was something looming above some of the
trees, and it seemed to be moving. As she peered into the darkness, she saw
what she could only describe as a Troll. It was covered in shaggy hair and
seemed to not be wearing clothes, but it was too dark for her to be certain.
The creature had very little neck and seemed to rely on the weight of its
massive head on its shoulders. She could not take her eyes off the colossal
creature and certainly was terrified by the prospects of what this creature
could do. Trolls typically from legends she knew were not something to
encounter on a dark and stormy night. The creature was a few hundred meters
away, and it seemed to notice her. She, however, was unable to move and felt
compelled to watch this bulging behemoth, but as she watched, she noticed that
it seemed to do something that some could only call out of character as the
creature began to bow its head almost in recognition and proceeded to lift its
massive left hand out of the thick canopy and wave slowly at the petrified
girl.
As the creature began to do this,
something incredibly bizarre began to happen; the wind seemed to die down to
nothing as though the creature's hand controlled the wind in some unknown way.
She continued to watch the creature as the creature seemingly continued its
waving, and the pair continued this bizarre yet slightly pleasant interaction
for three minutes. At the end of the three minutes, she could see that the tram
was starting to come to the stop, and almost as if the Troll wished to not be
seen by others, it vanished. As soon as the Troll was gone from her sight, the
winds returned, and the rain continued to pelt down. The rest of her trip after
she boarded the tram was uneventful, but she could not get the hairy giant out
of her head, and as soon as she got home, she opened her diary and wrote in
Norwegian, "experienced a troll while I was waiting for the tram."
The following day she ran into her friends
and, knowing they were natives, began to tell them of the experience that she
had. Her friends listened to her story and did not try to dissuade her story
but seemed to believe her story outright. John Lidow, when he asked her about
it, did report that she said that if it wasn't a troll, it could have been a
tree.
John would later offer up a hypothesis as
to why she saw what she saw. This hypothesis originates from folklorist Lauri
Honko and is a lump explanation as to why supernatural encounters occur in some
locations. Her outlying theory details with cognition "a person who is
under some kind of stress or in a state of conflict or a conductive
psychophysical condition (induced, for example, by fatigue or consumption of
alcohol) and operating within a certain frame of reference, is confronted with
an incomplete 'releasing' stimulus, usually involving only one sense. Using
traditional means of cognition, the person complements the stimulus- creates,
as it were, complementing stimuli – and experiences a vision". In layman's
terms, basically, people can experience phenomena when they are under extreme
exhaustion, stress, psychological problems, alcohol, or other stimuli, and that
this in certain locations known or associated with some phenomenon such as
graveyards could make people see a ghost or in this case a Norwegian forest a
troll. He points out because of his friend's stressful transition to Norwegian
citizenship, a few beers she had at dinner added to the dark rainy night caused
her to visualize a troll. Lidow points that this encounter was primarily a
visual phantasm and that the lack of wind can be attributed to her seeing
something unknown and that the wind actually had not increased or decreased.
The illusion thereafter was broken was by the light of the tram, revealing that
it was a trick of the mind.
I have so much beef with this explanation,
even though I'm certain this does occur on occasion. As someone who has
partaken far beyond my limit on many a night, I can say that the hallucination
aspect does not happen as often as researchers would have it. Most of these
banters are usually spawned by some stress-oriented reason, and I've never
encountered Trolls in the kitchen or gremlins on the lawn or some other
paranormal entity in connection to it. So, bah humbug to the hypothesis on
those grounds, I also think the fact that she had a fairly decent length of
time with her sighting that she could clearly point that this was something
physical and not just a trick of the light or a phantasm of the mind. As even
she said, it could have been a tree, and the theory he suggests is something
more mental than tangible, so even just based on her account, I sincerely don't
believe this to be the case. Now with that said, there is always the tree
angle, but something about this does not seem to be a tree.
The biggest element that the tree
hypothesis seems to be missing is the fact that the branch would have had to of
been raised to give the appearance of a hand coming up and waving. Even if it
was some deciduous tree, it would have had to of lost its leaves to give the
appearance of a hand or had enough foliage on it to give it some sense of mass
that it wasn't just the skeletal hand like branches that would ultimately be
the only thing the tree would appear like. On top of that, the witness noticed
that the hand seemed to appear after the creature began to bob its head, so if
it was a tree, it would have had to have its branches hidden behind another one
and was only noticed later for some reason. Then there's the fact that the
creature seemed to disappear once the tram approached; if it was a tree, it
should have remained in the same spot giving her a point of reference for her
encounter. When you really look at it, this hypothesis does not exactly work
either for all of those reasons, especially since I am assuming she would have
taken the tram in the area many times before and therefore should be familiar
with the area that the landscape should be normally discernible.
So with that said and all the skeptical
answers, while not impossible but unlikely, where does that leave us. Well, I
think it's best to ascertain some direction of possible hypotheses its best to
take some notes of what occurred In the encounter. The first thing I think we
should take note on this if this is a creature, its approximate size based on
the types of trees around it. Now the most interesting aspect of this is the
colossal appearance of this creature; the largest tree recorded in Norway in
2020 was The Grand Fir Tree at about 167 feet tall, and the country is known
for its silver birch, Scots pine, downy birch, Norway spruce. Scots Pines can
reach heights of about 40-60 ft, Silver Birch can reach about 49-82 ft, Norway
Spruce can reach 40-60 ft, and Downy Birch can reach 33-66ft tall, so even
assuming that the creature was slightly taller than the smallest mature height
of these common tree species it still would be a staggering 40-55 ft tall at
least. From a cryptozoological standpoint, there's almost no way that this
could be a biological creature; it would have been discovered already. A
land-dwelling creature assumedly a mammal since it has hair about, let's say,
45-50ft tall is almost impossible to of existed this long without documentation
or capture. This is not a Bigfoot where the largest is like 12 ft tall; even
though there are occasionally tales of 20fters, this creature is 5 times the
size of the typical Bigfoot (about 8ft) it should have been found. This is
highly as likely if you look at the biological necessities of animals, such as
the 50-500 rule where a species needs a population of 50 to stop inbreeding and
500 to reduce genetic drift, and if you had 500 of these creatures near Oslo,
we should have reports almost daily, or some impact in the local fauna since
these creatures clearly need a large caloric intake.
Now there's another element of the
encounter aside from the size, which, as stated clearly, cannot be from a
biological land animal. When you look at this case, it seems to be clear when
the creature seemingly has the ability to control the forces of nature. When
the Troll waved, and the winds and rain seemed to slow and almost subside, this
seems to be more indicative of what traditionally these creatures are
associated with. Trolls in folklore are often associated with the environment,
and tales of more civilized trolls did not start occurring until the
1500-1600s; before that, they were forces of nature creatures that seemingly
were carved from the woods, oceans, and mountains. Now with that said, there
are very few paranormal entities with these kinds of abilities. We can
eliminate extraterrestrials as there's no UFO, nor has there ever been, at
least to my knowledge, a 40-50ft tall Alien. Cryptids, as stated, are unlikely since,
unlike lake monsters, sea serpents which could reach that length, or hairy
hominids, the Troll of this size is biologically almost impossible, whereas
other cases such as the Staffordshire Trolls of Slitting Mill could be a
cryptid. This leads in reality only a few answers, the first being an
interdimensional being that these creatures pop in and out of our dimension and
could have some abilities that could explain its anomalous abilities, which may
be perfectly natural in its world. In some ways, this could explain most faerie
lore as faerie land is a place that does not exist on our plane it seems and
seems to only be accessible at certain times or by these entities; this could
be that these entities are aware of doors or portals to other dimensions and
happen to just come over to our dimension for some reason or another.
The end possibility is that this creature
is a faerie. I had already briefly discussed the idea that faeries are
interdimensional beings entities that pop in and out of their dimension to ours
but canonically, that is not what faeries are supposed to be, and faerie land
is a side piece of lore to a much larger mystery. Faeries are ofttimes
especially in Scandinavian folklore linked to the environment we see something
similar in Ireland, and the United Kingdom as faeries are connected to specific
mountains, moors, bodies of waters, there are noticeably different kinds of
faeries like with water sources there’s the Kelpie of Ireland, or the Nokken or
Fossegrimen of Scandinavia, but Trolls at their core have always been connected
with deep woodlands and mountains so following this logic the sighting is
almost perfect. From this, we can see faeries as almost elementals, and some of
the early Christian lore is that they are the Sons of Earth, the idea that they
were created from nature and not God or in some version entities formed by God
but not blessed in the same way humans were now I must stress this is from
folklore and no indication of true accounts, but perhaps nature has spirits or an
avatar form. They don't need to be like Swamp Thing, where he is the avatar of
the green (plant life), but perhaps these entities are specifically the
guardians or spirits of specific trees or waters or something similar. Many
cultures had similar ideas, such as the Shinto religion in Japan and the Greeks
as well with the idea of Naiads, Dryads, Nereids, and satyrs perhaps there's
some regionality to it, and these entities appear in specific forms depending
on the region. Hence why, as opposed to a beautiful Dryad maiden, the witness
saw a 40ft troll, but this is just speculation and a phenomenon that needs to
be more thoroughly studied.
With that said, there are countless
reasons this case could have been misidentified, even though I seriously doubt
for the reasons Lidow claims. Yet, I am fascinated by this case. I wish the
witness would have sketched what she saw, and I would love to pick her brain
about it, but I'm sure there would not be a follow-up. Even without her follow
up however it's a compelling and interesting case for a phenomenon that rarely
is ever broached by true Fortean researchers and usually scoffed or thrown into
another category without truly looking at the case. I cannot say for certain
what she saw, but I am firm in my thought that she saw something more than a
specter of the mind or the shambling branch of a tree.
Quick Facts:
Species/Potential Species: Mammal/Unknown
Location: Oslo, Norway
Sighted: September, Sometime Before or in
the 1970s
Works Cited:
Trolls and Unnatural History By John Lidow
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