Overview
About Trolls
What did tröll mean?
The Icelandic word tröll has a longer and less orderly history than the familiar image of a huge creature living in a mountain. Medieval writers could apply it to beings whose appearance and origins differed considerably. In his study of troll language in Njáls saga, Ármann Jakobsson identifies examples elsewhere in medieval literature involving sorcerers, restless dead, possessed animals and dangerous human outsiders. Size alone cannot explain that range. Magic and threatening power matter more than a single bodily form.
This changes how a saga passage should be read. Calling someone a troll may describe a dangerous relationship with the supernatural rather than identify a separate race. Even a curse invoking trolls belongs to this wider vocabulary of menace. Later Icelandic tradition made the large, strong mountain dweller especially recognizable, while modern fantasy, including Tolkien's influential fiction, helped standardize a powerful but unintelligent opponent. Those later images should not be projected backwards onto every medieval occurrence: the surrounding episode, speaker and period determine what the word is doing.
Giants, giantesses and difficult neighbours
Jón Árnason’s nineteenth-century introduction to troll legends describes a contradictory population. Trolls are generally larger and stronger than people, and tales can present them as violent, greedy or foolish. Yet the same introduction credits them with knowledge unavailable to humans, loyalty, gratitude and unprompted help. Their behaviour follows relationships as well as appetite: an injury can provoke revenge, while a kindness can earn lasting assistance. A helpful troll is therefore part of the recorded tradition, not necessarily a modern softening of it.
Female figures are prominent in the vocabulary: tröllkona means a troll woman, while skessa and gýgur also name giantesses. These are overlapping terms rather than a reliable catalogue of separate species. Jón describes trolls as human-shaped despite their extraordinary bodies, living among cliffs, mountains and caves. They hunt and fish, and some stories give them livestock. Encounters include abduction and the pursuit of human partners as well as cannibalistic threats. Familiar household needs coexist with frightening strength, making the boundary between human neighbour and dangerous outsider unstable.
Daylight and the shape of the land
Turning to stone at dawn is a recurring explanation for striking features of the Icelandic landscape. A pillar becomes a stranded figure; another rock resembles a boat or an animal caught beside its owner. In The Folk-Stories of Iceland, Einar Ólafur Sveinsson connects such narratives with cliffs, ravines, mountains and unexpectedly placed boulders. The landscape supplies recognizable shapes, while the tale supplies an interrupted action and a reason that it never resumed.
Petrification is a motif, not a rule that every source applies to every troll. Einar writes of many trolls becoming stone, sometimes with their boats or livestock. He also discusses encounters built around voices, fear and dangerous solitude rather than sunrise. Similar dawn motifs occur in Norwegian tradition, so their presence does not prove that a particular Icelandic story began independently at its named rock. Einar also allows for entertainment alongside belief. A vivid local legend can give meaning to a place without demonstrating either its geological origin or the convictions of everyone who tells it.
Traditional accounts
The Night Troll
NátttrölliðAt an unnamed farm, Christmas worship left a frightening problem behind. Whoever stayed to watch the house while the others attended the Christmas evening service was found dead or distraught in the morning. One year a girl volunteered.
She sat in the baðstofa holding a child and singing. During the night, a voice came at the window. The visitor praised her hand, then her eye, then her foot. Each time she answered with a verse of her own. Her replies claimed that her hand had never swept filth, her eye never witnessed evil and her foot never trodden dirt. The exchange continued until the visitor announced daylight in the east.
The girl answered that it should become stone and harm no one. The presence vanished. When the household returned, a great stone stood in the passage between the farm buildings. She told them what had happened: the visitor had been a night troll. The tale ends with the girl safe and the threatening voice replaced by a silent stone beside the house.
The Troll Woman in the Stone Boat
Skessan á steinnökkvanumWhen Sigurd sailed home to inherit his father's kingdom, his wife and young son travelled with him. The ship was becalmed. While the others slept, a stranger arrived in a stone boat, took the queen's clothes and sent her away to the stranger's brother in the underworld. Wearing the royal clothes, the troll woman took her place.
At court, the child cried until entrusted to a nurse. Two young men saw the false queen reveal her troll form and receive a meal from her three-headed brother. The two onlookers kept silent, afraid of her power. But the child's nurse witnessed something else: a woman in white emerged through the floor, an iron chain fastened around her waist, and held the child.
After her second visit, the nurse alerted the king. On the third, he recognised his wife and cut the chain. The palace shook. The queen had bargained with her captor for three visits to her son, hoping for rescue. Reunited with her family, she recovered her place; the impostor was put to death and the nurse rewarded.
Versions, places and names
These versions leave their settings unnamed. Other Icelandic troll legends attach transformations to particular rocks and sea stacks, giving shared story patterns a local setting. A named landmark needs its own local account. Translation also changes emphasis: the stone-boat visitor is a skessa or tröllkona in Icelandic, although Lang's collection calls her a witch.
Places & legends
Reynisdrangar
A ship, a refusal, and a curse
In one version preserved by the regional folklore collection Sagnir af Suðurlandi, a ship belonging to a king’s son arrives at Þórshöfn. A troll-woman asks for a passage, but the request is refused. When the ship leaves, she appears again and calls for the crew to wait. They will not. She pronounces a curse that will turn the vessel into stone, and the king’s son answers by directing the same fate at her. The shapes offshore become the ending of their quarrel: a rock that once resembled a ship with three masts, and a tall figure with something like a head and neck. Another detail in the recorded tradition gives her a giant companion, identified with Landdrangur, the rock closest to shore.
Hvítserkur
The troll who never reached the bells
In the version told by Visit North Iceland, a troll from Strandir sets out to break the bells of Þingeyrarkirkja. His journey depends on darkness: he has to reach his target before morning. But the night ends while he is still on his way. Sunlight strikes him, and his body becomes the rock now called Hvítserkur. The bells escape his attack; the would-be destroyer is left standing at the edge of the sea. Seen through this story, the rock’s outline becomes a halted traveller, caught forever between departure and arrival. The local legend gives a character and an unfinished purpose to a formation whose physical shape was made by natural processes.
Dimmuborgir
A home for the troll family’s sons
In a local telling shared by Visit Mývatn, Grýla and Leppalúði live at Lúdentsborgir with their thirteen sons, the Yule Lads. As the boys grow, their parents’ home becomes crowded, and the sons want a place of their own. The search carries them far afield, to Finland, Greenland and beyond. Eventually they decide that staying near their mother and father is better, and choose Dimmuborgir. Its strange stone chambers become their home overlooking the Mývatn district. The story then brings these former troublemakers closer to children: in the Christmas season they visit settlements one by one, leaving presents in shoes for good behaviour and potatoes for mischief. This is a local Christmas telling attached to a real lava landscape.
Trolls, hidden people and the returning dead
Trolls should not be treated as another name for every supernatural inhabitant of Iceland. Later tales about huldufólk, the hidden people, often imagine a parallel society with homes, celebrations and institutions resembling those of human communities. Ghost narratives concern the dead and their continued presence among the living. Mythological jötnar belong to the language of medieval accounts of gods and other powers. These distinctions help readers, but they are not watertight boundaries imposed consistently by storytellers.
Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir’s research on dancing legends shows how roles move between traditions: Christmas visitors who appear as trolls or ghosts in related narratives can become elves in later Icelandic versions, with dancing added to their festivities. Medieval usage is broader still. Ármann Jakobsson discusses both a dead man and a supernatural calf being called trolls, and points out the overlapping language applied to giantesses in Snorri’s Edda. The safest distinction therefore starts with the individual narrative: who appears, what they do, and which recorded version is being read.
From spoken accounts to printed collections
The collection published under Jón Árnason’s name in 1862–1864 emerged from collaboration. Magnús Grímsson helped initiate the collecting work and shaped the written style of stories contributed before his death in 1860. Jón received accounts from correspondents around Iceland; Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Konrad Maurer also took part in preparing material for publication. Surviving working manuscripts show that editors debated suitability and wording rather than simply transferring an untouched oral tradition into print.
Several versions of the same tale might reach the collector. Jón sometimes recorded alternatives under missagnir, allowing readers to see differences behind the chosen text. An older surviving manuscript is evidence for an earlier written version, but it does not automatically reveal the story’s first form. Árnastofnun’s discussion of this problem emphasizes that tales continue changing after collection, through literature, film and other media. Troll narratives should likewise be read as recorded versions with histories of telling and retelling. Naming the collection and variant makes those histories visible without pretending that one published account settles every detail.
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