Hey Freckle! Might I offer you some emojis as digital tokens of love in exchange for whatever knowledge of troll-under-the-bridge folklore you might have? 💐💝🌸💘🌺💕🌷💖
Why of course, Ren! ^^
The “troll hiding under a bridge” is actually a very interesting phenomenon, because I’ve only ever encountered a troll under a bridge in one story: The Three Billy Goats Gruff. This story about a troll under a bridge being outsmarted by three goats that he wants to eat, was included in the first collection of Norwegian folktales published by Asbjørnsen and Moe in 1841 (Norske Folkeeventyr). In 1859 Dasent published an English translation of the tale. According to folklorist R.M. James this both introduced the word “troll” to English speakers and cemented this type of troll (huge, ugly, violent and – incidentally – hiding under a bridge) as what a troll ought to be.
What exactly a troll is differs from country to country though. And sometimes very specific creatures (like the Slattenpatte from Denmark and the Huldra from Norway and Sweden) are called “troll” in the same way so many creatures in English are called “fairy”.
The various trolls populating the Nordic countries do share one characteristic however: they live out in nature. This is why the “troll under the bridge” thing is so strange. Trolls have their own society, separate from humans. They dwell in the mountains, hills and forests and usually only mix with humans when they meet a lonely traveller, sneak into a village out of curiosity, or steal the occasional princess or baby.
The Danish and Swedish types even leave changelings sometimes! Probably because they tend to take babies to raise them as their own, which fits with how human they are compared to the trolls you might find in Norway, Iceland and the Faroes. Even these more monstrous ogre-like trolls tend not to lurk under bridges to though, at least not as far as I know.
Even more curious, while the story of three goats being stopped by a predator on the road also shows up elsewhere in Europe, the predator is usually a wolf, not a troll, and the bridge does not feature at all. So both the troll and the bridge in this story might just have been a one-off kind of folktale, that accidentally became a troll-prototype in the English language.
