Vikings Thought Trolls Were Real - And They Were Right.

Trolls. Not the kind in fairy tales—and definitely not the kind under bridges with riddles and bad hygiene.
These are the ancient creatures that haunted the Viking imagination—massive, magical, primal beings that stalked the forests, guarded the dead, and cracked mountains when disturbed.In this episode of Viking Legacy and Lore, we journey into the heart of Norse mythology to explore the terrifying, misunderstood world of trolls. Through epic saga storytelling, historical analysis, and modern-day folklore, we reveal:

• How Vikings actually viewed trolls—not just as monsters, but as spiritual guardians of wild spaces
• The saga of a warrior who awakens something ancient from a cursed burial mound
• The tale of a witch who summons an army of undead and trollish beasts to destroy a kingdom
• Why trolls were said to turn to stone in the sunlight—and how that myth still influences Icelandic road planning today
• What trolls meant in the Viking mind: fear, trauma, and the dangerous power of boundaries crossed
• How trolls still live on in our culture—through Tolkien, Netflix, Norwegian landscapes, and even your own psychology

This episode is a blend of epic Viking storytelling, deep historical insight, and mythological reflection. If you’ve ever wondered what frightened warriors who weren’t afraid of death… this is your answer.This isn’t just about trolls. It’s about the fears we bury—and what happens when they wake up.💥 You don’t have to slay the troll. You just have to face it.
 🛡 Bleed if you must. But never run.🎧 Subscribe for more Norse mythology, Viking saga deep-dives, and thrilling historical storytelling.🔥 Share this with a fellow warrior. And whatever you do…
 Don’t bleed on the stone.

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Transcript

  📍 You smell it before you see it. Rotting moss, damp hair and something like blood baked onto Old Stone, the kind of scent that sticks in your nose and tells your spine to go cold. The wind shifts the mountain creeks, and then out of the shadows a thing of bone hunger and ancient hate begins to rise, but this isn't a battlefield.

There's no shield wall here. No war cries. No battle horns. Just the silence of the forest and something watching from just beyond the tree line. Today, we're not talking about heroes. We're not talking about kings conquests or Viking raids up the Thames. No. Today we confront the monstrous, the thing that grabs goats in the night, the thing that rips trees from the ground like kindling, the thing that hungers for human flesh and has absolutely no regard for your travel itinerary.

We're talking about trolls, not the fuzzy harried kind that you find in the dollar store, not the bridge lurking kind from your third grade fairy tale, Definitely not the online variety that argues about horned helmets in YouTube comments. No, we mean the real kind. The kind vikings feared the kind they wrote into sagas, like whispered warnings, the kind that some people believe still live in the mountains, centuries after the Viking age has ended. In this episode, we travel into the deep wilds of the Viking imagination.

We'll explore the saga of a warrior prince who awakens something in a burial mound that should have never been disturbed. Ancient ruins they used to bind such creatures, not kill them, and what the word troll really meant to a viking and why it still echoes through the hills of Iceland and the dark forests of Norway to this day.

We will hear tales of monstrous armies summoned by witches and how even the strongest warriors could fall. Not because they weren't brave, but because they forgot that some boundaries are not meant to be crossed. We'll talk about ruins, rage, rocks that remember and fear that doesn't die with the dawn because trolls, trolls aren't just stories. They are the wild personified. They are boundaries, guardians, echoes of time before time. They're what rises when the land is angry and when we forget our place in it. So light your torch.

Stay near the fire because the question we're asking today isn't just did they believe in trolls? It's this, could something like them still be hidden in the forgotten wilds of the north?

They say there's a place in the far north where even the wind forgets how to breathe. A rise of land round as a shield older than the oldest village. The locals call it bone mound, but only when they have to. No birds perch there. No flowers grow. Even moss dies trying to cling to its stones. And the people in the valley below, they don't speak its name after sundown, but not every man listens to the warnings.

The warrior Prince, he had heard the stories, He'd seen the villager's eyes go glassy when he asked about the hill, but he was not from that valley, and he didn't fear the stone. He was tall, broad shoulder with a wolf skin cloak, slung over his back, and a sword at his side, a sword that had tasted blood on three continents. His people sang songs about his duels and his daring. They said his breath was like iron, and his shadow was like thunder clouds. And yet as he neared the top of the hill even, he began to feel it.

The air thinned, the trees leaned away. The sky cloudless moments ago lowered like a lid. behind him, trudged his companion, a scout from the region, a nervous man with a sharp eye and a sharper instinct for survival. We shouldn't be here. The scout said Voice low is pine needles.

This place is sealed, sealed for a reason. The prince kept walking at the summit, stood a Carin, a stack of black stones. Each one carved with ruins. Most were faded with age, but one stood out fresh, almost warm to the touch. Bound in blood, woken by pride, the prince tilted his head a warning or a dare. The scout didn't answer.

He had already taken a step backwards. That night, they made camp by the Carin, no fire. The stars, watched from above silent and cold. The wind dropped, the mist rolled in, not from the valley, but from the ground itself. It crept in slow, like fingers. Then came the sound, not loud, not sudden, just the slow grind of stone.

On stone. The Carin shifted. One stone slid aside by itself and from the dark beneath it. A hand emerged long, gray, thick with old scars. Its fingers ended in iron colored claws. its knuckles bent backwards, then came the arm, Then a shoulder, then a head, a head too large with eyes like embers burned in ash. It rose not like a man climbing out of a grave, but like a mountain. Remembering how to move. The creature was taller than a doorframe wider than a bull. Its back was hunched. Its skin looked like frozen bark. tusk curled from the corners of its mouth.

Its breath steamed in the cold air, and it smelled like soil that had been soaked in blood and forgotten. The prince stood. He didn't reach for a sword. Not yet. The creature looked at him and spoke. You have broken the seal. Its voice was like a glacier. Cracking in spring deep, slow, cold. Are you? Its keeper the prince asked.

The creature smiled. A horrible, cracked expression. I was a man then a giant then bound. It took a step forward. The ground shuttered. The scout Behind the prince panicked and then turned to run. The troll moved like lightning, snatched him by the leg and slammed him into the Carin with a crack that echoed down into the trees. He didn't get up. Now the prince drew his sword.

Steel met Starlight. He charged and the troll met him. Mid step, the two collided like wolves. The prince drove his blade into the creature's thigh. It sank in. Barely Black blood spilled thick and sticky as tar. The troll didn't flinch. It swung one massive arm, sending the prince tumbling  📍 through the frost coated grass. He rolled, stood and limped, and then he saw it. The ruin on the Carin, it was glowing  📍 the stone that said bound in blood.

The prince dropped his sword and he bit the palm of his hand deep. And he pressed it against thero and it flashed bright red, then gold. Then the troll roared, not in pain, but in recognition. It froze. One foot turned into stone, then the leg, then the chest, and with a final snarling, exhale, the creature's head turned into granite.

Solid, still silent. By dawn, the hill was empty. only the warrior remained. He stood beside the now quiet Carin, gripping the hilt of his sword, like it was the only warm thing in the world. His companion was gone, whether taken by wolves or gods, no one would say. The prince wiped his palm on his cloak and stared at the stone face of the creature. It's not dead. He said aloud, voice raw. It's waiting. And he walked away never to return. But in that valley, they still whisper about the hill. They say that when the mist rises without reason, when Gods vanish from their pens, when you hear the cracking sound that isn't ice, it's because the warrior prince wasn't the last to climb the hill, just the last to walk back down.

To understand how the Norse viewed trolls, we must first forget everything we think we know about monsters. In the Viking world, trolls were not fictional. They were not the bad guys in a two dimensional myth, they were deeply integrated into how the Norse explained the world around them from thunder and avalanche  📍 to grief and madness.

Trolls were the Norse language of fear, not abstract fear, but tangible topographical fear. The kind you can point to on a map and say, that ridge, that one with the weird stones that smells like copper when it rains. Yeah. That's where one of them sleeps. To the Norse trolls were not a species, they were a category of cosmic error.

The word itself in Old Norse troll was less specific. less a species name and more a label for something gone wrong. Some trolls were giants, some were shapeshifters, some were witches, or the undead.

Some were things that had once been human, now mutated by isolation, curses, or ancient power.

It was as if the word troll meant this thing doesn't obey the laws of men, god's, or nature. The word troll doesn't always mean a creature in early text. It has a variety of meanings describing a person experiencing psychosomatic conditions,

meaning physical reaction that originates from emotional or mental distress to be taken by a troll could mean to literally be bewitched, cursed, or mentally shattered. That's right. Before trolls were big and hairy, they were emotional and existential. So yes, your Viking ancestors might have been afraid of a 10 foot tall troll in the woods, but they were equally afraid of what a troll could do  📍 to your mind, to your honor, or to your soul.

In story after story, trolls don't just live anywhere. They live in between places, spots that are on the edge of the world. People know, and the world of the unknown. They were gateways doors to another world. In fact, one of the oldest descriptions of trolls comes from a ninth century skald, who describes a troll as being he who dwells in caves under stones, or in the dark corners of the earth.

Trolls were not just enemies, they were landmarks of forgotten truths. In culture,

It wasn't unusual for warriors to leave offerings at stones or hills. They thought might house trolls. Not to appease them, but to avoid waking them. Sometimes Vikings didn't want to fight the troll. They wanted to respect the boundary. It enforced. You don't fight a mountain, you bow to it and you avoid it entirely.

The Norse didn't have therapy. They had sagas, and trolls were often what you got when the story couldn't bear to name the trauma directly. A family that vanished into  📍 the snow.  📍 Well , A  troll took 'em. a child who lost their voice after seeing something in the woods, a troll touched them. A warrior who returned from the wild different. Angry, cruel, broken troll didn't kill him. It changed him. They weren't monsters in the sense of evil. They were embodiments of things impossible to cope with, and grief that hadn't healed in this way.

Trolls were more than beasts. Now, let's get academic for a moment or maybe a little bit philosophical in one of the most sacred poems in the poetic eda. The RIS describes a world before Odin, before Asgard, before creation itself, and who was already there. Giant troll women. That's right. Trolls predate the gods.

They are not just older, they are pre cosmic. Before the nine realms were made, trolls were already hiding in the corners of nothing. That changes the whole game. Could Ymir be a troll? That would mean that the remnants of the trolls would be evident throughout all of Norse's creation. A way to explain that everything is infected with corruption. Could it be Ymir's revenge? Now comes the most important part of the Norse Mythology. Trolls weren't just monsters to kill. They were tests in saga tradition. Every hero who meets a troll isn't just fighting a beast. They're confronting their own flaw.

arrogance, rage, curiosity gone too far. Pride that refuses to listen. If the hero fails the test, the troll destroys them. If they pass, it's never by slaying the troll. It's by binding it, by offering blood, by learning the lesson. Halfdon, in our story we just read moments ago, he doesn't kill the troll. He doesn't slay the creature.

He seals it with blood drawn from his own hand. Offered not in triumph, but in atonement. The ruin accepts the sacrifice. The earth falls silent

and when he walks away, it's not just as a victor, but as a man who knows, he came too close to something that remembers the world before men had names. That's Viking storytelling at its most profound In many versions of Norse folklore, the way to defeat a troll isn't to outfight it. It's to outwit it, outweigh it, or recognize it in yourself.

Some sagas even hint that the greatest warrior feared become trolls themselves, not by curse, but by losing their humanity to rage. So the next time someone tells you trolls are fairytale nonsense, remind them trolls were older than Odin, more clever than the legends admit, and far more frightening than fangs or claws because they didn't just stalk the forest, they hunted the corners of the mind.

You think the Viking age ended and the trolls just clocked out like, well, the Christians are here and it's time to clean out the cave, clock out and retire to some scenic fjord and journal our feelings and get into baking sourdough bread? No.

If anything, trolls got weirder, more stubborn and wildly more folkloric. After the Viking Age, trolls survived the fall of Asgard and the rise of Christianity, and somehow found their way into Netflix and Icelandic road planning committees. And of course, that one uncle who swears he saw something in the fog near  📍 Trondheim in 1983

when Christianity came knocking, showing up with scripture, sanctimony, and a holy urge to redecorate everything pagan, the old  📍 gods began to fade. But the trolls, they pivoted, they shapeshift from saga titans into rural weirdos of Scandinavian folk belief. You know the type, the type that live in a cave and guard bridges smell like wet pine  📍 and goat  📍 hair the kind that get angry if you build a church too close to their hill.

And were quite possibly allergic to church bells one of the biggest folklore shifts trolls began to fossilize. As in literally they turn to stone in sunlight.

This shift is usually chalked up to Christian influence and a Christian metaphor. Light equals God. Troll equals evil or ignorance and light prevails. But here's another theory, and it's one the sagas won't say out loud. What if the trolls of the post Viking age weren't monsters at all, but people, not just any people, pagans, those who refuse to convert. When Christianity swept across the land, waving incense and declaring the old ways dead, the unbaptized, the stubborn, the unwelcome, they were pushed to the margins out of the villages and into the hills. They lived in the forests under bridges, behind waterfalls. Not because they were mythical creatures, but because they had no place in the new world.

No homes, no clean clothes, no church bells, and slowly over generations, their stories twisted from men and rags to monsters and shadows. From outcasts to ogres, from human to troll. It makes a chilling kind of sense. Fast forward to the present day. Now trolls are actually sabotaging infrastructure. In 2012, Iceland's Road Agency actually halted a highway project because locals protested it would disturb a boulder known as a troll. Home Eyewitnesses claimed machinery kept mysteriously breaking down, and workers became injured unexpectedly. Strange lights were seen around the site. Now is that true? Did science explain it? Sure. But nevertheless, the trolls rerouted the road. In the 21st century, a major world government re-planned a highway because of alleged troll real estate

Ever hiked in Norway or Iceland? No, me either. But maybe someday. If and when you do, you'll come across a rock formation with a name, troll's Tongue, or the Troll Wall or the troll  📍 church . Are these just cute names slapped on rock formations by humorous cartographers, or are they simple biographies of the stones themselves. Local legends claim. Those formations were trolls. Trolls that had been stomping around at night, turned to stone at sunrise, Which means you can go hiking on the fossilized corpse of an ancient troll. Just don't forget to pack a sandwich for your snack at the top. These  📍 Nordic trolls continue to thrive beyond the Viking age.

This is another reason why the word Viking is way bigger than what the Norse used to do a few months out of the year. The whole entire age has so much influence in our modern world. We don't hardly comprehend the amount.

Not only that, but this influence didn't come from just one country. It came from Norway, from Iceland, from Greenland, from the Danes, from Normandy. And so the next time someone trolls you by saying Viking was just a verb, not a noun, just realize that they have a small view of the Viking age and fail to comprehend its grandeur and its influence and its significance in people's lives today.

I digress. Back to Trolls. Tolkien gave us trolls again influenced by Norse mythology. You can also listen to the episode on En VA's ring to hear more of Tolkien's influenced by Norse mythology. Tolkien's version of the troll was a British cave beast. dumb muscle for the forces of darkness, often paired with poor grammar and a club. In more modern times, we see movies made about trolls. In 2010, the Troll Hunter in 2022, Netflix came out with troll.

And yes, even Frozen gave us trolls.

But let's be honest, those were closer to sentimental moss balls in a musical therapy group. Still the roots are there. Even cute trolls remain avatars of ancient chaos. This isn't a departure from Norse's thinking because as we have seen, they recognize trolls as having power over the mind. So then what if trolls still exist, not in mountains or fairytales, but in us?

In Jungian psychology, monsters often  📍 symbolize the shadow self. The parts of us we bury, deny or refuse to name, and trolls they're perfect shadows, born from what we refuse to face, shaped by old trauma sleeping beneath the surface of our routines.

You want a modern troll? Try the voice in your head that says you're not good enough, or the resentment you feed in secret. Try that rage that flares up like a storm or the fear that keeps you from climbing your own mountain. That is a troll. But like the sagas teach us, you don't always kill a troll.

You bind it, you name it. You keep it from waking up in the dark. Here's the thing. Trolls were never just about claws or teeth. They were about boundaries. They guarded hills. We shouldn't climb mounds. We shouldn't open feelings we shouldn't ignore and powers we shouldn't crave.

They're the embodiment of don't go there. And when you do, they rise. So yes, trolls may turn into stone in sunlight, but the question is, who's still wandering in the dark? In the golden age of  📍 heroes, there lived a king whose name lit the sky like the northern star. He was called the Golden King. Wise in counsel, fearless in battle, beloved by the land he ruled. His hall rang with laughter. His warriors drank like thunder and peace settled over his kingdom like snow upon the mountaintops, but beneath every golden  📍 crown.

a shadow and her name. Well, it was his sister. She came from the same blood but not the same soul. She smiled with her lips, but never with her eyes and though she sat at his table and raised her cup in toast. She listened. She watched. She waited for the day she would take it all. They say that she studied the old ways, not the honored rights of the ancestors, but the forbidden ones. While the priest blessed with oil, she whispered to bones. While the Sears read ruins, she spoke to the dead.

She laid her hands on the skulls of wolves and dreamed in the tongues of spirits. She was a queen. Yes, but in secret, she was also a witch. And when she turned her heart to war, she didn't call  📍 for swords . She called for what? Slept beneath the earth. From the cold forest, from the caves hidden beyond the waterfalls from burial mounds.

Older than time they came, not men, not beasts, something in between. They were bent back, tus faced, mos skinned creatures. They smelled of the river mud. Some had teeth like carved bone. Others moved like smoke. A few still wore the scraps of what they once were. Warriors who died badly, called back with blood trolls, undead, beast carved from a nightmare and sealed with spells.

They did not march. They lumbered, they did not chant. They groaned. And where they passed the grass did not grow again at the center of them rode the witch. Her eyes full of stars. Her hands dripping with power. Word reached the Golden King. he gathered his champions, the finest warriors in the north. Men whose name sang like swords through the saga sky, and among them was the bear hearted one.

he was not loud. He did not boast. But in battle they said he changed that a great bear walked where he fought that his spirit became claw and rage and roar tearing through the enemy like a storm wrapped in fur.

The king and his warriors rode to meet the witch and her  📍 creatures on the field. That still stinks of ash to this day. At first it was quiet, then the wind changed and they arrived. The trolls. The risen cursed with no banners, no horns, only breath like smoke and eyes like ember stone. They fell upon the king's army, like a wave of bone and hunger, and for a while the heroes held.

They cut down monsters, they shattered skulls. They roared and cheered, but the enemy did not fall because they did not fear death. They'd already died once and then a moment of silence. The bear hearted one. He didn't  📍 rise from his tent that morning . He   📍 lay there , gripped by a spell, woven by the witch herself. His bare spirit was on the field, but not his body. A soul without a vessel, a claw without a hand. The king looked across  📍 the battlefield and didn't see his fiercest warrior .

He knew then he would not see the dawn. He fell with three spears in his chest and the bear vanished. The spell broke, the warrior awoke and he ran to the field heart full of fire. He saw his king, his brother, dead. Among the stones, he saw trolls feasting where songs should have been sung. He became the bear, the man and beast, bound by fury.

He ripped through the enemy like a flood through the frost, but even rage has its limits. And the witch, she did not. By sunset, the Golden King's Hall was dark. His throne empty, his people scattered, and the witch she ruled for a time. Some say the trolls turned on her. Others say she vanished into the hills with her creatures waiting to rise again.

Still, others say she was sealed beneath a mountain. Bones turned to stone, but eyes still watching. And to this day, the valleys of the north, they say if the mist comes early, if the wolves go silent, If the wind smells of wet ash, then she is near and her army sleeps beneath your feet.

because this was no ordinary war. This was not a story of conquest. This was the tale of a woman who summoned what should have stayed buried, who traded love for power, who fed the earth with the gods had sealed. She won the  📍 crown, but the cost was everything else. So what do we make of all this? The burial mound, the blood bound ruin the witch in her troll army. Rising like a nightmare. The world forgot to finish. It would be easy to call these just stories, just sagas carved from the old fears and colder winters.

But if you've made it this far, you know better. Because the Norse didn't invent trolls to entertain children. They didn't carve ruins in bined  blood just to pass the time they told these stories because they understood something. We are just beginning to remember. Trolls are not fantasy.

They are a language for pain, for fear, for the thing that hunts us from the inside out. And the greatest Viking wisdom is this. You don't have to slay the troll. You just have to face it. Maybe your troll isn't a beast in a burial mound. Maybe it's a secret you've never said out loud of fear. You've kept locked behind sarcasm and small talk.

A voice that says you're not ready, you'll fail. Stay small. That troll doesn't need to break through your walls. It already lives behind them. But here's the power of the saga. When the prince saw the creature rise, he didn't run. He didn't boast. He bled. He offered his own wound, his own courage, and that act, that self-sacrifice sealed the monster, not with violence, but with truth.

And when you face your troll, your past, your fear, your shadow, you will bleed. That's the price. But what you gain in return is your life back, not as a victim, not as a survivor, but as someone who walked into the dark, faced the beast, and came out with fire in their hands.

That's what these stories are about. Not magic, mastery, not monsters, meaning not death becoming. So walk with your head high. Speak truth. Climb the hill. No one else. Dares. Leave an offering. light a torch. And if you feel the ground tremble, don't run. You were born to stand at the edge to face what others fear, to bind what was meant to destroy you and to walk away, not hunted, but  📍 transformed.

In just a moment, it'll be time to go and there will be trolls to face and you will become a legend. And if this stirred something in you. The Carin cracked open inside of your imagination. If the witch's army made your skin crawl in the best way possible, if you felt your heartbeat sink with the rhythm of the ancient war drum, then this wasn't just a podcast, this was a summons, and now you carry the fire.

So here's what I ask. Don't let it stop with you. Send it to a friend. Send it to someone who walks the edge. Text the link to one who stares too long in to the forest,

post it to the Viking group that you are in. Drop it into the lore forms of Viking legacy . The sagas must continue



Because stories like this, they weren't made to live on playlists. They were made to move through the people like wind through the pines. They were meant to be shared like mead and memory around the hearth. And if this tale woke up, part of you.

The part that knows courage 📍  isn't always loud. The part that honors wounds is proof of survival, the part that stands even when it's terrified. Then leave us a review, not for vanity, but because it helps others find their way to the firelight. It helps the saga grow. It helps this, this living revival of Viking legacy and lore continue.

So if you haven't done so, follow, subscribe, come closer because the next story has already begun.

And lastly, be bold, be strong, and awaken the Viking in you.