“When you're walking around in Norway you’re walking on a dead troll,” says Lise Lunge-Larsen who lived in Norway until she moved to the United States for college. As the stories go, trolls that came into contact with sunlight turned to stone, thus forming the mountains. The folklore surrounding trolls is an indelible part of the culture that children learn about at an early age. “If you grew up in Norway... that's just something that you learn about right away.”
With as interwoven as the idea of trolls are in Norwegian culture, is anyone seeking them out as some might quest for Bigfoot? “No… nobody would do that. They’re firmly anchored in the mythology,” says Lunge-Larsen. But trolls do exist - metaphorically - and there might be a bit of troll in all of us. "My parents would call me a troll when I was behaving badly."
Trolls are uniquely Norwegian and the people of Norway have not shied away from the topic. Trolls became a strong symbol of Norwegian culture that ran through the likes of politics, literature and music. Referring to Edvard Grieg's composition In the Hall of the Mountain King, Lunge-Larsen says, "Who do you think the mountain king is? It's a troll!"
Original Broadcast: 10/4/2022
Rebroadcast Date(s): 10/20/2022
