The Toven Troll

 The Toven Troll

By Cole Herrold

It should be no surprise by now that I'm a huge film buff, and one of my favorite films ever made was a Norwegian film about the existence of Trolls. The film called Troll Hunter mixed both Cryptozoology and Faerie folklore in a perfect creature feature film that hypothesizes on how these creatures could exist in a particular environment system and, more importantly, how they've "evaded" detection by the majority of the public. Ever since I watched the movie sometime in the early 2010s, I began to study potentially real encounters with trolls. Trolls are from a folkloric standpoint, a muddied term the word Troll initially in the original term of the word simply meant any kind of malevolent magical being, and in classic old Norse, there are two variations of the spelling, each meaning widely different terms; however, there was always one connection, and that was whatever was described with the term was defined as being malevolent. It wasn't until 1852 that folklorist Jon Arnason would go and taxonomically sort out all of the different creatures in Scandinavian folklore and determine what creatures typically would fit that category. This is where we get the concept that Trolls are hairy humanoids, often with hunched backs and long protruding noses. These creatures also sometimes were described as bearing long ox or cow-like tails and had a great repulsion to sunlight and churches. This category then was broken down into several different species of trolls such as Forest Trolls, River Trolls, Mountain Trolls, etc., with each one slightly different in description, behavior, and size.

Now with all that said, finding authentic Troll sightings is rather difficult as many tales involving the creatures revolve around parables or mythology and are heavily associated with bardic tales. I've managed over time to come across several, however ostensibly real Troll encounters, three of which I've already covered: The Staffordshire Trolls of Slitting Mill, The Friendly Troll of Oslo, and The Trolls of Sorenson's Wood and while doing research for another project I came across another account. This account originally appeared in the November 12, 1937, issue of the Norwegian newspaper the Nordlands Avis and describes an encounter that occurred in Toven in Nordland County, Norway.

The encounter began when two boys from Leira were searching for stray sheep for sheep breeding on the high hills and steep cliffs of a Norwegian mountain. The two boys were exceptionally tired, for they were walking all day and had managed to get all the way over to the other side of the mountain and were now returning home since it was getting dark. The pair was approaching Toven when they suddenly noticed a large creature down in a scree (a mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain) not too far from them. At first, the boys were unsure of what the creature was, but as they came closer and closer to where the figure was, they could tell that it was not an animal that they were familiar with but instead something that seemed to of stepped out of folklore. The two boys saw a creature that to them resembled both a troll and man, and they noticed that the peculiar beast was staring at them from its rocky stoop. The pair, while fairly certain that this was not a human, felt that they had to be 100% certain, and so the pair began to shout at the creature to see whether the creature was human or not. The creature seemingly did not understand or was unable to answer the inquiries; the boys hollered down to it and gave no reply. One of the boys had a shotgun with him assumedly for protection in the frigid and potentially hazardous environment, which was the mountain they were on, and they shouted once again at the creature and threatened to shoot the being, but again the boys received no answer. The boy then fired a warning shot over the head of the creature, and the creature seeing the potential danger it was in, started to sprint down through the boulders. As the creature continued to clamor down the rocky outcroppings, the entity made loud noises as it ran out of sight down the mountains. The boys terrified by the creature they had just witnessed ran home as fast as they could and would never see anything similar to the creature for the rest of their days.

While this encounter is exceptionally brief and less extravagant than the other Troll cases I covered, it is very interesting. For one thing, this encounter is the first time I've come across a creature described as a cross between a troll and a human outside of folklore. Troll human hybrids have been written about for some time, but oftentimes they are seemingly at least from the stories that are written about them indistinguishable from either Trolls or humans depending on appearance, but most tend to be more troll-like. It's also particularly interesting because Trolls typically are described as overly large or small humanoids, just extraordinarily hairy ones, so it's a rather odd description when one tries to decipher what was more human or more troll-like about it or even what the boys meant by including the term troll to describe the creature. As stated previously, trolls were placed in an accepted taxonomy in 1852, and this encounter took place some 85 years later, so the idea of what a troll essentially is should be ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Some for me, this is both particularly interesting and particularly confusing.

While I mention that this is a Troll encounter, there is also another possibility as this creature could be something other than a fae. This creature, based on its description and the added human element to it, could be a child’s way of describing a Bigfoot-like creature. A similar creature from Denmark, another country in Scandinavia that some scholars feel to be such a creature, has been cataloged by Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe in their book The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates. This book's first European reference is of the fictional monster Grendel from the epic poem Beowulf which Coleman and Huyghe, and other researchers see as a potentially undiscovered hairy hominid and that the tale of Beowulf. These researchers feel that the story of Beowulf could be based on several actual events that were dramatized and that the encounter with Grendel, in particular, was a potentially real interaction with an unknown species. In the epic poem, Grendel is described as a descendent of Cain, the first murderer according to the Bible. While an official description of what Grendel looks like in the poem is not stated, the poem does state that Grendel was "a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our humankind." And while I would love to delve more into the Anglo-Saxon epic and the various in-depth alternative interpretations of the tale from Tolkien to Zemeckis, it is important to note for simplistic sake that many folklorists and scholars, as well as artists, tend to draw and depict Grendel as a large-eared hairy humanoid typically of gigantic stature. Now, if this is to be the case, could it be that the creature seen in Toven could be the Norwegian Sasquatch.

Now the Troll/sasquatch hypothesis I've never been a huge fan of for most Troll encounters typically have some sort of supernatural element to them such as incredible growth like in the Sorenson's Wood Trolls case or Weather control in the Friendly Troll of Oslo case or weird time loss like in the Staffordshire Trolls of Slitting Mill case. This tends to be the majority of reports, unlike the Sasquatch, where the supernatural element is in the minority. This case, however, does seem to smack of something more biological as the way the creature behaved one could associate its reaction with an animal or something that knew it was reasonably in danger. Something that seemingly supernatural would not care about.

While I can only speculate as to whether this creature could be a cryptid or fae, a lot of the issues with this account is that there was no follow-up. The account was so short, and that there were no quotes from the witnesses makes any sort of truly in-depth analysis of the encounter incredibly difficult. For someone who is deeply interested in the fae and cryptid encounters, it is extremely frustrating as upon reading this encounter, I'm left with hundreds of questions with no real hope of a follow up as the case which now is almost 84 years old, and the chances that the witnesses are still alive are unlikely, and of course, the language barrier would be an additional problem. I managed to find the initial article, and I had attempted to translate it, but even then, I only managed to loosely translate it, and there was barely any additional information from the article. So this case, it would appear, is simply going to have to remain a brief mystery which is unfortunate, to say the least, but as with most cases, that is the nature of the beast.

The original text of the article from the November 12, 1937, Nordlands Avis.

Quick Facts:

Species/Potential Species: Hominid/Faerie

Location: Toven, Nordland County, Norway

Sighted: November 1937

Works Cited:

“Troll på Toven!” Nordlands Avis November 12, 1937

Humanoid Encounters: The Others Amongst Us: 1930-1949 By Albert S. Rosales

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates By Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe

Beowulf By Anonymous