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

The Friendly Troll of Oslo

 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