April book-blog: Twelve things the villagers mean when they tell you there's a troll in the hills, or: In which Ármann Jakobsson resolves an old TTRPG community argument
Here's the big deal of Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North - the thing that distinguishes (or at least elevates) it from any academic, critical work on myth and folklore: 'The first thing readers of this book must do is refrain from imagining that they know precisely what a troll is. While in the nineteenth century Icelandic trolls were taxonomised ... in a thirteenth-century narrative a troll has no such clear identity, not even within the human psyche. Trolls do not constitute a race or a species. The first step when considering the troll sighted on the ridge is to avoid the idea of a clearly demarcated group. ... Thinking like a nineteenth-century scientist will not further one’s understanding of the medieval troll. Furthermore, it might be useful to resist the glossarial impulse to treat medieval Icelandic words as concepts that are carefully defined as they are used. ... How could these men understand a troll? They accept ...