Shadow and Evil in Fairy tales

Marie-Louise Von Franz

Part two, Evil, 6 Primitive levels of evil – Trunt, trunt, and the trolls in the mountains, page 256

Two men once went to the mountains to collect herbs. One night they both lay in their tent, but one slept and the other lay awake. The one who was awake saw how the one who slept went out. He followed him but could hardly walk fast enough, and the distance between them grew ever greater. The man was going toward the glaciers. On the top of a glacier the other saw an enormous giantess. She gestured by holding out her hand and then drawing it back toward her breast, and like that she bewitched the man, drawing him to her. The man ran straight into her arms, and she ran away with him. [That is like “The Spear Legs,” in which one of the two brothers in the woods is bewitched.] A year later the people of that district went to collect herbs again at the same place, and the man who had been bewitched came to them, but he was so quiet and reserved and incommunicative that they could hardly get a word out of him. The people asked him whom he believed in, and he said that he believed in God. The second year he came again to the herb people, but this time he had become so hobgoblinish that they were afraid of him. And when they asked him whom he believed in, he did not answer. And this time he stayed with them a shorter time. The third year he came again, but had become a real troll and he looked awful. But one of the people ventured to ask him what he believed in and he said that he believed in Trunt, Trunt, and the Trolls in the Mountains, and he disappeared. Since then he has never been seen again and for many years nobody ventured to collect herbs at that place. 

This is an assimilation into an evil ghost similar to that in “The Spear Legs,” only the man does not become destructive, but just becomes a mountain troll. He does not harm the other villagers as the Spear Legs man did. If we ask ourselves to what type these powers of evil belong in these primitive stories, we see that some are definite, known spirits, like Kurupira, the spirit of the woods, who after the wholesale killing of the hunters eats them all, or like this giantess of the Icelandic mountains. These are known figures in folklore who are called evil spirits and live in that part of nature which is somehow uncanny or dangerous to that sociological group of people. For people who live near the sea they would be sea demons; for people who live near the primeval forests, they would be spirits of the forest; and for mountain people, they would be spirits of the mountains and the glaciers. This has caused people to believe that these spirits are simply personifications of evil in nature, which is what you will read in practically every philological and ethnological work. But we shall see that this is a superficial judgment. Certainly these powers of evil in this original form have to do with evil in nature and are closely connected with the destructive natural powers of devouring animals, the dangers of forests, snow, water, landslides, and so on, but they are not just that.