His trolls “interact” with tourists and the world in whimsical ways, like the waterside “Hector Protector” on Culebra, which grasps a lantern and becomes a kind of lighthouse. At Lillehammer’s Hunderfossen Family Park, kid-friendly attractions inspired by the stories include a 45-foot-tall troll holding the Trollsalan restaurant (the trollsuppe, thankfully, is just beef stew) and a diorama of Billy Goats Gruff.īut Dambo’s art takes a different tack, using mythology playfully to draw humans back to nature.
#Other fantastical touches plus
The fairy tales’ popularity paved the way for the jolly troll statues now planted outside what seems like every hotel and café in rural Norway, plus the hordes of gap-toothed, grinning plastic figurines at gift shops. You can spot his paintings and drawings of trolls, gnomes, and other fantastical beings at the Kittelsen Museum at the Cobalt Works, an indoor-outdoor culture and history complex an hour’s drive east of Oslo. His wild-haired, droopy-nosed ogres were far goofier and more approachable than the mysterious outsiders of yore. Perhaps most significantly, Norse Folktales gave trolls a new look thanks to artist Theodor Kittelsen, the most prominent of several illustrators for the popular collections. (Related: Love a good fairy tale? Learn about their ancient origins.) Hanshaugen Park a few miles away, Moe’s grave at the Vestre Aker cemetery is capped by a bust of him.) The books, inspired by the Brothers Grimm, were soon translated into nearly every language on the planet. (Asbjørnsen, mutton-chopped and stern, is commemorated with a statue in Oslo’s St. In it, easy-to-fool trolls headline in stories like Boots and the Troll and Three Billy Goats Gruff. Trolls might have stayed in Scandinavia permanently if it weren’t for two 19th-century Oslo folklorists, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, who gathered and published many traditional fairy tales in the 1840s Norske Folkeeventyr ( Norse Folktales). With ‘Billy Goats Gruff,’ trolls go global The former, played by actresses in red gowns, cheesily perform for tourists during one stop on Norway’s historic Flåm Railway. Think huldras, long-tailed Norwegian enchantresses who lure men to be their boy toys, or Grendel, the “horrible demon” and “dire-mooded creature” from the old English Beowulf (set in Scandinavia and based on Norse myth). In early literature and storytelling, trolls were often violent monsters or fearsome, intelligent guardians dwelling in mountains, rocks, or deep in the forest.
“Trolls pose a threat, but you can get something out of them if you are brave.” “If you venture out into their wilderness, you most likely return with something valuable-gold, experience,” says Wellendorf. Trolls had dual lessons to teach humankind: first, that the unknown world beyond the village or castle walls could be uncertain and potentially threatening and second, that the risk of such exploration might yield knowledge and riches. “They could be big and ugly or fair and beautiful, but they were the ultimate others, somewhat like us, but different and more dangerous,” says Jonas Wellendorf, associate professor of Old Norse at the University of California, Berkeley.
Long before trolls got turned into eco warriors by Dambo (or candy-colored cartoons in Trolls World Tour), they showed up in old Norse mythology and poetry as far back as 12th-century Iceland. “And the trolls do that, and also help me tell stories, like the legends I grew up with.” Trolls, the origin storyįor anyone who lives in, or visits, Scandinavia, trolls are everywhere and nowhere, hidden in the woods and writ large in the region’s literature and tourism. “I want people to know that trash has value,” says Dambo. All utilize scrap materials from wherever they’re built: plywood that protected buildings from a hurricane becomes an “island guardian” in Culebra, Puerto Rico fallen branches and twigs morph into spikey troll hairdos in Denmark.
#Other fantastical touches series
Since 2014, Dambo has erected dozens of the wooden, folklore-inspired creatures in greenspaces and parks around the world: a seated, bearded dude in Copenhagen’s hippie enclave of Christiana sister and brother trolls “lost” in Florida’s Pinecrest Gardens a series of wooden giants (one playing a flute) outside of Seoul, South Korea.
0 kommentar(er)
