TROLLS

Carrying on from my Norwegian giant/troll story yesterday, the term troll is very imprecise and has been used for a wide number of creatures, ranging from the gigantic to the diminutive.  However, I would hold that it was sometimes used to designate groups of wildmen which, I suspect, persisted in Europe into historical times and may be found even today in remote locations.

In the 19th Century there were so many reports in Sweden, a highly forested country, that mythologist Benjamin Thorpe postulated that there were populations of uncivilized human still living in the woods.  There have been other reports of wildmen from a number of European countries, some even being quite recent.  Whether these are permanent residents, interdimensional beings or mere figments of the imagination is, of course, another matter.