troll

I have just consumed, all at one gulp, Johanna Sinisalo's Troll: A love story. Who knows why the thing was re-published under this title. I blame the very marketing culture that comes in for criticism in this super little novel. The Brits got it as Not before sundown (in Sweden: Bara sedan solen sjunkit), which jibes better with the text as I read it. I confess my Finnish is not up to parsing the original title at a glance: Ennen Päivänlaskua Ei Voi.

I do know enough to smile at the fanciful philology in the book. It is all very well done. For example, in the course of some troll-related research the protagonist runs across information about the "rollikoira or troll hound," and I appreciate the cluster-busting, Fennic T-dropping coinage there. The doctored natural history and legend texts are also nicely executed.

I wonder what is being glossed with the word troll. Perhaps stallo? Part of the reason I dislike the American title is the glaring word troll there. It brings to mind kitchy Norwegian tourist goods, Kittelsen, and eventyr. And I am a Kittelsen fan. But the trolls in this book are less of that sort and more tröll in the old norrönt sense of supernaturals. They are more huldrer than troll, and uncanny huldrer, not the bunad-wearing sort. They are more stallo than anything else I can think of.

None of the English-language reviews I've read of the book so far have evidenced any grasp of the fact that this story and its apparatus of faux sources is in dialogue with a non-fictive literature of recorded folklore, Kalevala-meter verse, religious tracts, and geographical and topographical descriptions of the North. I like to think that Leea Virtanen might have appreciated being included in this work as the authority on Finnish folklore she truly is. It was published a couple of years before she died, so maybe she did get to see it. What the long-dead Mikael Agricola and Lars Levi Læstadius might have thought we can only guess. But these figures are not commonly known so far afield, and this can only have contributed to some reviews being negative and many others being off even when they are positive.

But in Finland it got the Finlandia Award. And for my part, I was charmed ... bergtatt.