Overview

Trolls have escaped from the black lava wastes of Iceland and the dense pine forests of Scandinavia to take on a new life in the collective global imagination. They may not steal goats and eat people quite as much, but they remain disruptive and dangerous, even if their limited imaginations sometimes make them comic and even quite likeable. Emerging from the earliest annals of Scandinavian mythology, trolls are contradictory creatures. They can be monstrous and large as mountains, or humble and humanoid in appearance. The accounts written in Scandinavia and Iceland in the 19th century paint trolls as creatures who kidnap, overrun farms, lurk in the dark corners of landscapes, demand human marriages, eat unsuspecting travellers, and occasionally help the people who encounter them. Carolyne Larrington collects these stories into a delightful directory of trolls, from the medieval to the modern, encountering kindly trolls, dangerous trolls, and stupid trolls along the way. Thoroughly researched and entertainingly written, The Little Book of Trolls is essential reading for the fantasy fan and a perfect introduction to the charmingly charmless world of trolls.

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9781487564988

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Carolyne Larrington is an emerita professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and an emerita research fellow at St John’s College, Oxford.

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