Troll — the monsters hiding in the mountains
The largest and most dangerous thing that could be living in a Norwegian mountain — a man-eater and a child-stealer, not a cartoon. Caught above ground at sunrise it turns to stone, which is why so many Norwegian peaks are said to be giants frozen mid-step.
A troll was the largest thing that could be living in a Norwegian mountain, and the worst — bigger than a bear, strong enough to carry off a grown cow, and hungry for human flesh when it could get it. People near the high forests and the summer pastures guarded against them the way they guarded against weather.
Trolls lived inside the mountains and in caves the daylight never reached, and came out at night. When they could not get human flesh, they took human company by force. A child who did not come down from the pasture, a bride who walked too far into the spruce at dusk, a herder who never came back from the high meadow — these had been taken into the mountain. The word for it was bergtatt, mountain-taken, and someone eventually found again could not speak right afterwards. In the best-known telling, Margit Hjuksebø of Telemark is carried into the rock and brought back only when the church bells are rung for her. The bells were the thing trolls could not stand, which is why so many tales have them hurling boulders at country churches and missing — the erratic stones left in the fields were the missed throws.
Daylight was the other defence: a troll caught above ground at sunrise turned to stone, and the Norwegian map is full of them. The Seven Sisters on the Helgeland coast are seven troll-daughters frozen mid-flight. They were fleeing the same chase in which the troll Hestmannen loosed an arrow at the maiden Lekamøya — and the king of Sømna flung his hat into the arrow’s path, where it struck and turned to stone: Torghatten, the hatted mountain with the hole punched clean through it. The Trollveggen wall above Romsdalen is a wedding party caught by dawn; a spire on it is still called Trollkjerringa, the troll hag.
What turned to stone was the troll the sun had caught. The one a herder still feared at dusk was the one the sun had not — the thing that emptied a summer pasture and left no one behind to say why.