Troll's Roles

Okay, trolls and ogres don't tend to be horribly scary nowadays, maybe they've never been horribly scary, but they had to have been at least menacing at some point. Now, they're generally more comic relief than true villain (see Harry Potter, Ella Enchanted, Lord of the Rings). We see them baffled at the simplest of tasks, warded off by any hero with a vocabulary above the third grade level, and driven entirely by basic needs. They blunder about and are most often laughably stupid, a punch line of an enemy. But perhaps while we're rolling on the floor laughing at them, we're missing some deeper meaning. Perhaps trolls, like onions and ogres, have layers. (Shrek, anyone?) In the past, we know that trolls represented a fear of the natural world or fear of the natural world’s revenge on mankind, but as they’ve developed over time, trolls have come to mean something else. If we stretch our meaning of trolls, we can include ogres, mutants, and creatures like The Hulk, because they all go back to the same basic meaning. Trolls are power and might without the intelligence to wield it properly.

Now that they have a broader meaning, we can find trolls in a wide variety of non-literal ways. Now our trolls don’t have to be covered in warts with giant dopey faces, they can be anything. We see trolls represented in characters like Joffrey Lannister from the Song of Ice and Fire books and the Game of Thrones television series. He is basically exploding with power, but is too stupid and sadistic to use it wisely, bringing about catastrophic consequences in the process. The concept of power and its proper use is a major theme throughout the series and several “trolls” pop up over the course of the story, but Joffrey is certainly one of the most prevalent when it comes to powerful idiots.

If we just talk about that very basic definition, without all of the stumbling comedy, I think a troll is something very real and very scary. Power without constraint or understanding is a reoccurring problem in our modern world. We see this threat in modern leaders and weaponry. As weapons worldwide are constantly ramped up to include more destructive and more volatile threats, the consequences of actually using them are growing too great for any cause to warrant their use. As we mix our chemicals and explosives, we have to realize that there is no purpose for a weapon too catastrophic to fire. It’s own destructiveness renders itself useless. It is raw power, but it isn’t accompanied by any concept of use or control. This is the dilemma trolls can be used to symbolize. As society continues to change and evolve, the meanings of our symbols evolve with us. Our monsters change as we do, as we find new things to be afraid of our monsters represent new things. Having seemingly conquered the natural world, we have found a new meaning for trolls, a new fear. And they are pretty scary.