Trolls and Trollstigen
Norway’s Mythic Monsters
At last it was our time to descend Trollstigen, “The Troll Stairs,” one of Norway’s most tortuous mountain passes in a country famous for its dizzying drives (see last week’s post, High Way to Hjelle). Trollstigen drops 858 meters in 11 hairpin turns down a steep stone slope on the side of a mountain, bracketed by torrential waterfalls on either side. The overall effect is of giant steps carved in the rock. Hence the evocative name.
Trolls hold a special place in Norway’s culture and mythology. While some are small (troll dolls), and some are human sized, the real trolls, the ones of old Norse legends, are massive creatures who dwell in the most remote and desolate landscapes: Forest Trolls, Mountain Trolls, Ice Trolls. They are so large, they are often mistaken for mountains themselves as they slumber, and woe to the hapless human who awakens one!
Twelve years ago, a Norwegian Movie called Troll Hunter appeared, and this is how it depicted trolls:
This year Netflix is releasing a new Norwegian horror film called simply, Troll, about a mountain troll awakening and wreaking havoc. Coming soon! Here’s a screenshot from the trailer:
Teresa (my beloved wife) and I thought we saw a troll just a few days ago while we were boating in Geirangerfjord. We passed a cliff that held a massive chiseled face in the rock, with a green goatee on its chin. In these vast landscapes, if you go looking for trolls, you’ll find them everywhere!
As Teresa and I drove towards Trollstigen, we mused about what might have impelled early Norwegians to have imagined trolls. Since arriving the fjords, we both sensed this land is different from anything else we have experienced. Yes, the Alps have vast grandeur, the Dolomites have awe-inspiring pinnacles. But there’s something about the fjords and mountains of Norway that makes us feel both awed and little bit scared as we flamotor through them.
“It feels something akin to vertigo,” I said while driving, “where my eyes can’t process the size of what I’m looking at. I can’t fit the fjords, the cliffs, the peaks together into a single perceptual framework. It’s dizzying, like a fear of falling, but falling up, falling out: out into something so big it threatens to dissolve us.”
The road rose as we were having this conversation. We drove through a wild and vast plateau with snow-streaked mountain tops that appeared and disappeared in the misty rain, as if to demonstrate once more the point we were discussing:
Teresa responded that she thought this peculiar sensation has something to do with Norway’s waterfalls:
“We’re used to mountains that are still, like in a painting,” she said, “maybe with one waterfall added in. But in Norway there’s falling water everywhere. It makes it seem as if the mountains are moving, too. Alive, in a way that feels ominous. A presence. The noise of the water is everywhere, it speaks, it growls. So it’s easy to imagine why people believed that trolls lived here.”
Abruptly a sign appeared on the side of the road, marking the path to the lookout above Trollstegin. We parked. The mists moved in an out, causing the mountains above to loom into existence and then vanish again as we walked along the wet trail. We followed the path of the river to where it plunged over the abyss, and then on to the lookout point, which hung over the edge between the two falls:
From there, looking straight down, Trollstigen faded into cloud and then reemerged. It was disorienting…you can see the waterfall, the road below, and yet, where exactly is up and down? My photos (below), are taken from the same spot. Which orientation is correct:
Even more discombobulating, on our way back to the car, we stepped into this tourist gift shop, which sported rows and rows of kitschy, souvenir trolls!
Come on! These are not the fearsome beings that slumber in these hills beyond the mists! I felt appalled and disenchanted. I guess it is a natural human impulse, to turn something fearful into something cute and harmless…like a teddy bear. Are we doing it just for the children — or to convince ourselves that we’re safe?
Luckily, before shaking off the rain and getting back in the car, I found something that restored my sense of awe: One of the informational plaques by the visitors’ center described a stone-age archeological find near Trollstigen. It was a U-shaped rock wall. Prehistoric hunters built it to hide behind when stalking reindeer. What was unusual is that this wall was built high up on the mountainside, not in the valley, where, logically, they could more easily hunt. According to archeologists, this indicates the wall might well have been erected when glaciers still filled the surrounding valleys — meaning people were living here, on the edge of Trollstigen, during the last Ice Age, more that 13,000 years ago, and quite possibly much earlier.
I wonder, did these stone-age reindeer hunters, the first who made this wild, vast space their home, sense the presence of trolls? Are they the ones who created the first legends, and passed them down to Norway’s neolithic farmers, the vikings, medieval Christians, the modern makers of horror movies and kitchy tourist troll dolls?
To our surprise, driving down Trollstigen in mist and rain, was actually not so scary compared to other mountain switchbacks we have driven in Norway. Teresa and I wondered if driving through clouds actually made it less nerve-wracking. Because cloaked in fog, we could not see the trolls.
