The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North

the troll inside you Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press @ https://punctumbooks.com/support If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) the troll inside you: paranormal activity in the medieval north. Copy- right © 2017 by Ármann Jakobsson. This work carries a Creative Commons BY- NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redis- tribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form what- soever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2017 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-00-4 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-01-1 (ePDF) lccn: 2017945423 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover image: Lína Thoroddson Ármann Jakobsson the troll inside you Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North To Davíð Erlingsson, unorthodox mentor Table of Contents Preface: Jitterbug - xi Acknowledgments - xv b Troll - 17 The Truth Is Out There - 21 Categories - 25 Unreal Fauna - 31 Cave - 37 Petrified - 43 Troll Space - 49 Trollspeak - 55 Witchcraft Epistemology - 61 Causality - 69 Rationalism in the Lava Field - 71 Zombies in the Crack - 77 Goði as Exorcist - 81 Troll on Your Doorstep - 85 Never Forget - 91 The Confidence of Youth- 95 Popular - 101 Cultural Hegemony - 105 Immigrant Song - 109 Oedipal Conflict- 113 The Witchfather - 117 Don’t Feed the Trolls - 123 Coprophagy in the Fields - 127 Please! Let Me In! - 133 The Fragile State of Humanity - 139 Time the Devourer - 143 My Parent, Myself - 147 Ties Unravelled - 153 Gravity - 157 Troll and Control - 161 y Textual Hauntings (Endnotes) - 165 Index - 229 Preface: Jitterbug The present book may well spring from seeds planted in a postgraduate course offered at the University of Iceland on the subject of folktales, instructed by Davíð Erlingsson, some twenty years ago. The class consisted of the standard five or six students attending any postgraduate course at the university, all eager to learn more about trolls and other paranormal beings. There was though a collective tinge of disappointment building as the teacher seemed unable to get around to covering the advertised subject, rather re- lentlessly providing us with photocopies of various tables of contents and indices from nineteenth-century folktale collections and sometimes even of articles from the domi- nant Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, or foreign press- es like The Guardian Weekly. When the week in which trolls were supposed to be discussed was upon us Davíð arrived with a photocopy from one of his favourite journals of a Nazi propaganda poster from World War II in which Amer- ican culture was personified as a composite monster called “Jitterbug” that was set to destroy European culture.1 As the reader may well imagine, the students found Davíð’s method of teaching them to think about Icelandic folktales baffling at first but the results have proven to be lasting: from that day onwards it was harder to take for granted the matter of classifying and categorising folktales, and at least one of this unorthodox instructor’s students never forgot the lesson provided by the image of the xi “Jitterbug” in lieu of more traditional imaginings of trolls. Thus it is that these now primitive photocopies have ex- cercised a profound effect on the present project: both in drawing attention to the actions through which categories and definitions arise, and in providing liberation from the preconceived notion that a troll is, like a dog or a cat, a well-defined and discrete zoological category. This study is concerned with medieval Iceland, tradi- tionally believed to have been settled during the ninth century and formally Christianised around the year 1000.2 The texts under analysis, the sagas, are late medieval sources, mostly from the fourteenth century although many of them contain storylines and themes that rely upon older narrative traditions.3 The culture of medieval Iceland, dominantly Norwegian but also influenced by Celtic traditions, was indeed Christian at this point but much involved with a pagan past and the transition from one belief sys- tem to another.4 Although this study is primarily concerned with writ- ten sources produced within one society during a couple of centuries, its focus is general rather than specific and is thus possibly of some interest to any scholar seeking an engagement with paranormal encounters from any time and place. While Iceland has never been a great power, culturally, politically or otherwise, it had during the Mid- dle Ages a literary culture which is remarkable in its scope for having developed within such a small society, the pres- ervation of which is no less astounding. Thus documents from Iceland form a significant, and perhaps to some ex- tent disproportionate, share of the preserved European documents from the Middle Ages.5 Furthermore, they are of a varied nature, many of them dramatical histori- cal narratives which illuminate the human condition in xii general. Sagas are frequently compared to modern novels and their art is parallel to that of later fiction, and yet they were probably conceptualised as history, a narrative form that was flexible in medieval Iceland.6 It is also the case that all study of a single individual, group, or culture may have implications for humanity in general, and this study is fashioned as a case study of general interest. I have thus tried to make it accessible not only to experts in Old Norse but also to whomever is interested in how paranormal encounters can be framed and indeed were framed in the culture of fourteenth-century Iceland. It is a strange endeavour to attempt to write something intelligent in a language one does not possess. For practi- cal reasons I tried to suppress my feelings of inadequacy while writing and even became accustomed to regard this book as a long poem, by which I mean that this is a book of ideas rather than an exhaustive catalogue of examples and matching interpretations. Instead of delineating every single paranormal encounter found in medieval Icelandic saga writing, the aim is to offer a path that might eventu- ally lead to a better understanding of the subject, so it is to be hoped that readers will not miss their favourite scenes or characters too much but feel fortified enough to contin- ue on their own neverending quest of textual interpreta- tion. Readers who feel certain scholarly issues are ignored or not discussed thoroughly enough may also be advised to turn to the endnotes (“Textual Hauntings”) for further enlightenment. This is a study of a particular culture and particular late medieval narratives. Nevertheless the focus will not be on particularities but the general, in the belief that it is through the general application that the particular be- comes interesting, even though the general is never inter- xiii esting enough to particular humans unless it manifests itself in the particular. Acknowledgments I wrote this book in 2015 and 2016, after an involvement of almost eight years with the topic. My research was made possible through the generosity of two benefactors. One is The Icelandic Centre for Research’s (Rannís) Icelandic Research fund, which generously funded the research project Encounters with the Paranormal in Medieval Iceland for three years (2012–14), and the other is the University of Iceland’s research fund (Rannsóknasjóður), which sup- plemented the funding from Rannís with a smaller and yet substantial grant over five years. This book and much else would not have been possible without the assistance of these two bodies. The book is the product of the aforementioned research project Encounters with the Paranormal, in which I collabo- rated with my colleagues and friends Ásdís Egilsdóttir, Torfi H. Tulinius, and Terry Gunnell at the University of Iceland, and Stephen Mitchell at Harvard University. Eight doctoral students participated in the project at some point or another: Andrew McGillivray, Christopher Crocker, Gunnvör Karlsdóttir, Miriam Mayburd, Kolfinna Jónatans- dóttir, Arngrímur Vídalín, Anna Katharina Heiniger, and Marion Poilvez. Six MA-students wrote their theses within the parametres of the project: Timothy Bourns, Hildur Ýr Ísberg, Védís Ragnheiðardóttir, Ingibjörg Eyþórsdóttir, Steven Shema, and Zuzana Stankovitsová. Several other scholars and students were also involved at some stage. I xv also owe particular thanks to Daniel Sävborg and Karen Bek-Pedersen for prompting me to take a closer look at Bergbúa þáttr. Thanks are due to all those mentioned above who have in some way or other provided much aid to this book although I alone am responsible for its conception and eventual appearance. My foremost co-worker in producing the actual tome was Christopher W.E.

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