TROLLS ARE A UNIQUE life-form because their ‘flesh’ is composed of silicon in various complex combinations. At least, so it is said. They look rocky. Lichen grows on their heads. They have carbon as well as silicon in their make-up – in their teeth, which are of diamond – and from time to time, at intervals of many centuries, there appears a King of Trolls who is pure diamond. In one sense, therefore, trolls belong in the mineral kingdom, and exposure to strong sunlight often puts them into a fully stony state until nightfall – although in truth it is heat rather than light that slows down their brains.

At the same time, they do have most of the attributes of animal life: they eat and drink (mineral and chemical substances only), walk and talk, are male or female, make love and have children. Their given names are always related to geology – Mica, Bluejohn, Flint, Morraine (or Brick, for one born in the city). They can be killed by force, but do not (as far as is known) ever die a natural death. Instead, after several centuries of active life, a troll withdraws to some remote mountain area and settles down in one spot among the rocks to think long, slow thoughts about nothing in particular. Gradually he becomes more and more rock-like, till he is to all intents and purposes simply a landscape feature.

Many have come down from the Ramtop Mountains, which for most of them is their native region, and have come looking for work in towns and cities. Being immensely strong and intimidating, they are welcome wherever a hired fist is needed – as private bodyguards, barmen, bouncers or splatters (who carry out the same duties, but with messier results). One, who has adopted the human name of Big Jim Beef, is employed as a customs officer and frontier guard for the kingdom of Lancre; when not making checks on travellers, he lives under the Troll Bridge. It is not a good idea to mention billygoats in his hearing. Unfortunately, some of the young city-dwelling trolls give themselves unpleasantly thuggish airs; they go in for elaborate body-carving and real skull pendants, and become addicted to various brain-rotting substances (and practically anything can slow down a troll’s brain).

The best-known troll is Detritus, who was recruited into the Ankh-Morpork City Watch by Captain Vimes, and has proved a most keen and loyal Sergeant, if a little slow on the uptake. Trolls are not in fact stupid, despite what most people think, but their brains function properly only at low temperatures (because of the silicon), so the warm climate of the valleys and plains makes them very sluggish, especially in the daytime. Detritus now gets some help from a small fan attached to his helmet, but it was only when he was accidentally shut in the refrigerated Pork Futures Warehouse that his true intelligence was revealed – as he gradually froze, he scratched calculations worthy of Einstein all over the iced-up walls. There are hints that trolls have age-old cultural traditions which no outsider knows anything about; there is talk of their history chants and stone music, for instance, and of their Long Dance. They think of Time in a curious though logical way: the future, they say, must be behind you, since you can’t see it, but the past, which you can see in your memory, must be ahead.

There is an age-old feud between trolls and dwarfs, possibly arising from the fact that both races live in the same mountain regions, and that dwarfs spend their lives mining and tunnelling through rock – something which trolls find it upsetting to think about. It is even rumoured that dwarfs have occasionally tunnelled into the underside of a particularly stony and immobile troll. Be that as it may, the feud led to the disastrous battle of Koom Valley, said to be the only occasion in military history where each army ambushed the other. It was long ago and far away, but has never been forgotten. Koom Valley has become a myth, a state of mind.

Where any dwarf fought any troll, there was Koom Valley. Even if it was a punch-up in a pub, it was Koom Valley. It was part of the mythology of both races, a rallying cry, the ancestral reason why you couldn’t trust those short, bearded / big, rocky bastards. [Thud!]

And yet … and yet … if other myths can be trusted, the first man, the first dwarf and the first troll all originated in a single egg of stone, a geode, more than 500,000 years ago, and are therefore, in some sense, brothers. This myth was mentioned above, in the section on dwarfs. Its implications, together with the story of what really happened in Koom Valley, are explored in Thud!.

Trolls also have a dislike of druids, who can be found in the small, rainy, mountainous kingdom of Llamedos. There is no mystery about the reason, for the druids of the Disc went around erecting huge stone circles in much the same way as (some folk used to say) British druids did at Stonehenge. Regrettable errors occurred:

Any sapient species which spends a lot of time in a stationary, rock-like pose objects to any other species which drags it sixty miles on rollers and buries it up to its knees in a circle. It tends to feel it has cause for disgruntlement. [Soul Music]

Even the dragging on rollers is not the worst of it. It is said (as recorded in The Light Fantastic) that one particularly skilled group of druids found a way to quarry huge slabs of high-quality stone and fly them hundreds of miles along ley-lines to the snowy Vortex Plain, where they set them up as an immense construction of concentric circles, towering trilithons, and mystic avenues, to be a great computer of the skies. It proved hopelessly inaccurate. This act of wanton cruelty to minerals made trolls still more bitter towards druids.

On Earth, there are two quite different races claiming the name ‘troll’. One lot is to be found in Denmark: these are smallish mischievous goblins with red hair, living inside mounds and hillocks near farmland. They can be disregarded here since, apart from the name, they have nothing in common with Discworld trolls, and seem akin to Feegles.

The other ones, however – the huge mountain trolls who live in Iceland and Norway – are remarkably like those of the Discworld, but wilder and more hostile to human beings. They are thought to be the direct descendants of the dangerous Giants of Scandinavian myth, but differ from them in being generally solitary creatures. They are immensely old and strong, and probably not as stupid as humans say they are. They have had a considerable impact on the landscape – quite literally so, since they often quarrel and hurl huge boulders at one another, and never clear the pieces away afterwards. They also send avalanches and rock-falls crashing down on anybody who annoys them by shouting among the mountains. Many of them object to humans building churches in their district, partly because they dislike Christianity itself, and partly because they hate the noise of bells. The troll’s solution is always the same: heave a large rock at it. He always misses. At least, so the stories say, but can we be sure that there are no squashed churches under any of the rocks that litter the landscape? Has anyone checked?

There was once a Norwegian troll who tried a different plan. Hearing that St Olaf was trying to build himself a church at Trondheim, he volunteered his services as a stonemason. But this was in fact a plot to kill Olaf. ‘I’ll build your church for you,’ said the troll, ‘but I’ll take the sun and the moon and the heart out of your breast as my fee – unless you can guess my name before the last stone is in place.’ The troll turned out to be not only extremely strong but also a remarkably quick worker, and in no time the walls were done, and the tower was rising fast. But then one night as the saint wandered gloomily along the mountain paths, he heard the voice of a she-troll from inside the rocks, as she sang her little ones to sleep: ‘Hushabye, hushabye, your daddy Finn will soon be home, and he’ll bring you the sun and the moon to play with, and the priest’s heart too.’ Next morning St Olaf strolled up to the church, just as the troll was setting the last course of stones on the tower. ‘Splendid work, Finn,’ said Olaf. Now, it is one of the basic rules of folklore that to know a magical creature’s name gives you the power to destroy him – and another, that somehow or other the secret is sure to get out. So the troll crashed down dead, but Trondheim cathedral is still there.

The physiology of Earth’s mountain trolls must be based on silicon, like that of their Discworld counterparts, judging by the way they all too easily turn into large boulders, which in their case are permanent. One variety, the Icelandic Night-troll, hides in caves all day and only comes out at night, because any ray of direct sunlight petrifies it at once. There are several spectacularly tall rocks offshore which are said to be trolls caught unawares by the sunrise while wading out to sea.

Naturally, the best defence against a Night-troll is to keep it talking till the sun comes up. There was once an Icelandic girl who had been left at home on Christmas Eve, to look after her baby brother while everyone else went to church. In the middle of the night she heard a deep voice outside the window, serenading her.

Fair seems your hand to me,
Hard and rough mine must be,

Dilly-dilly-do.

But she did not look round. Instead, she sang to the baby in the cradle:

Dirt it did never sweep,
Sleep, little Kari, sleep,

Lully-lully-lo.

When the troll praised her eyes and her feet, she told the baby that she had never looked on anything evil, never trodden on dirt. And so it went on all night, till dawn broke and the girl sang in triumph:

Stand there and turn to stone,
So you’ll do harm to none,

Lully-lully-lo.

And when the family came home from church, they found a huge boulder on the path between the farm buildings, which had certainly not been there the night before.

As this tale shows, one difference between the way trolls evolved on Earth and in the Discworld is that the Earth ones can get amorous towards humans, an idea which would never enter the head of a troll on the Disc. Icelandic she-trolls sometimes kidnap a handsome young man to be their mate, or lure him up into their caves by magic chants. There, they do all they can to seduce him, and to persuade him to eat trolls’ food; they rub him with strange ointments, stretch his limbs, and bellow into his ear, to make a troll of him. It is said that men who do not manage to escape gradually do turn into trolls themselves. In the Norwegian legend of Peer Gynt, the King of the Mountain wanted Peer to marry his daughter, who was apparently quite good-looking, whereas it is unlikely that a female Discworld troll would ever appeal to a male human, no matter how cheap the beer and however bad the club lighting.

Earthly trolls can, in fact, look like humans and humans can become trolls, and it has been suggested that trolls have their origins in ‘folk memories’ of earlier races (even Neanderthals) who were pushed to the edges of the habitable world by the stumbling advance of civilization, and then into myth and story. This attractive and beguiling idea is very familiar to folklorists as an explanation for ‘fairy’ folk of any sort (who look outlandish and have strange powers), and so we will back tactfully away and leave it to the anthropologists.

It’s worth adding that Discworld trolls cannot digest human beings (though they have been known to try), whereas those of Earth find them both tasty and wholesome. In Norway, men have heard she-trolls bellowing to one another among the crags, discussing their cooking: ‘Sister, can I borrow your big pot?’ – ‘What for?’ – ‘Here’s Jon the woodcutter coming up this way, I want to make a stew of him.’ – ‘All right, Sister. When you skim the broth, save some of the fat for me.’ Somehow, bellowing across the landscape that you are waiting in ambush seems so very troll.

Trolls were still being talked about in Iceland as late as the nineteenth century. There were certain cliffs where seabirds nested, and it was said that when men went over the edge on ropes to gather eggs or to catch the birds themselves for food, great, grey, shaggy hands carrying very sharp knives would reach out from caves and cut the ropes, and so kill the men who hung there. So then some priest would be sent for to drive the trolls out by going down on a rope and blessing the cliff, while men on the cliff-top sang psalms as loud as they could. The really intelligent priests would bring a hammer, and chip away the sharp ridges on the cliff face as they blessed it – after which, the ropes hardly ever frayed and broke. But there remain a few cliffs which were never blessed, and where egg-gatherers never go, however many birds there may be. This is because once, when a bishop had gone down on a rope and was working his way along the cliff face, a voice from inside the rocks called out: ‘Don’t bless anything more! The wicked do have to have somewhere to live!’ And the bishop, being a fair-minded man, left this place unblessed.

GARGOYLES

Although gargoyles are very different from a standard troll in size, appearance, habitat and habits, they are in fact a subspecies which has evolved to fit an urban environment. They are, if anything, even more stony; they squat motionless on some rooftop, which they are very reluctant to leave. On the other hand, their digestive system is quite different from that of trolls; they are carnivores, preying on pigeons. Their main occupation is absorbing rainwater from the gutters and ejecting it vigorously, through their gaping jaws, on to the heads of pedestrians below. When they do move, it is in slow, grinding jerks; their mouths are permanently fixed open, making it hard to understand their speech. But their endless patience and keen eyesight make them valuable members of the Watch in Ankh-Morpork, somewhat like CCTV cameras in a modern city on Earth.

Gargoyles are also a familiar sight on the roofs of Earth’s medieval churches and castles, where they got their name. It suits them well, for they gurgle, gargle and glug in their gullets, and most of them goggle too. But there are few, if any, stories about them, probably because they are too high up for anyone to see them properly.

SEA-TROLLS

It should be mentioned that ‘trolls’ of one sort or another apparently exist elsewhere in the multiverse. The wizard Rincewind, in one of his early adventures described in The Colour of Magic, was almost swept over the Edge of the Disc, where an endless cascade of ocean pours away into space. Instead, he crashed into the Circumfence – a single rope, suspended a few feet above the water from occasional wooden posts, and extending for tens of thousands of miles round the rim of the Disc. This particular section was patrolled by a sea-troll, a creature of a pleasantly translucent blue colour, apparently composed of sea-water and very little else. As for size, he gradually swelled as the hours went by, then just as gradually shrank; owing to the strength of the Discworld moon, he was suffering from chronic tides.

The sea-troll was not native to the Discworld. He came from a different disc, quite a small one (mostly blue), where the seafolk lived in thriving civilized communities on its three oceans. Unfortunately, he had been blown over the edge in a great storm, fell through outer space (which froze him solid), and eventually landed on the Disc. Curiously, the name of his own world is Bathys, which on Earth is Greek for ‘ocean depths’, and the troll’s personal name is Tethis, remarkably close to that of the Ancient Greek sea-nymph Thetis.

Interestingly, the Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen, who painted a large number of what we now call fantasy paintings, did several based on trolls, including, in 1887, a fearsome sea-troll. Alas, it is not transparent.