The Forest Troll

I was born and raised in a small hut in the middle of a forest with high trees. Leafy birch trees, deep green elms, giant oaks, poplars and hazel trees left their mark on me. Small gashes or deep wounds every time I climbed their trunks to see the world from above. I love the forest, for its melancholy power, for the respect it demands without ever having asked for it.

This is how my brothers and I spent our days—climbing the trees and looking for a passing traveller who would take pity on us and give us some money or a piece of bread. We knew all the paths and all the passages through the forest up to miles away from our home. After all, that was our job.

Every morning, our mother would tell us to go out and not to come back unless we brought something to help at home. That’s why we chased the travellers. We had the rest of the day to play if we could find one and get something. Otherwise, we’d have to find and carry enough wood for the fire all night.

Father, on the other hand, was not interested in the day-to-day. He urged us to look for the one-eyed troll and, if we stole his eye, to make our fortune and escape from the forest. How scary that sounded to our childhood ears. How could we three little children take the eye – the one and only eye – from the monstrous Troll? At the very idea, terror ran through our spine.

So that’s how we spent our days. Leaving the house, we would go straight to the travellers’ paths and wait for someone to pass by. We would sit at the roots of a tree and look longingly at the strong trunks around us, which seemed even bigger when we looked at them from below. And from there, from very low, we plotted the course with our eyes. We made the calculations, where to hold on and where to step, and then climbed the strong, tangled branches until we were high up in the treetops, to the swaying peaks that rustled up there, in the blue sky.

When the sunset, a deafening silence suddenly haunted the forest. A strange mixture of isolation, peace and solitude spread like a fog. At first, over the trees, they slowly sank down to their roots. It was the time when we moved deep into the forest. Since we wanted to find the giant Troll, we had to move away from the safe areas of the trails marked on the maps.

There, in the heart of the forest, where even the trees dared not even breathe lest they disturb the stillness of the forest, where even silence lay in wait, our hearts began to beat like crazy. We waited, wanted, begged and pleaded for trouble, for wild adventures and exciting experiences.

Until one night, a night that was more silent than ever, a lifeless night, the forest gave us the adventure we were looking for.

A movement we understood at first as a faint movement in a dead landscape. A vast shadow that we thought was a huge rock, a towering, dark mass, began to come toward us. And then we understood. We were in front of the Troll of the forest. The only eye on his forehead was bright and shiny. Who would have ever thought the ugly Forest Troll would have such a beautiful eye? And while we watched, our greatest fear reflected at it, and while our feet wanted to run away from him quickly, an otherworldly attraction held us spellbound. We stood mesmerised before him with eyes and mouths wide open – everything our childhood fantasies ever demanded was right in front of us, waiting for our reaction.

The forest had suddenly transformed into a scene of terror. But, instead of being terrified and lounging in a corner lest the Troll passes by without noticing us, we decided to step forward and confront it. How small and foolish we were to think we could take on the giant Troll and steal what was most precious to us.  

Then we saw another Troll behind the giant Troll with the glowing eye. And behind it, another. A row of three giant Trolls whose heads reached very high, higher than the tops of the trees. But only the first Troll had an eye. The other two each had an empty hole in their forehead. One by one, in turn, they would take the eye and place it in the hole, look around, and then give it to the next one. The one in front at a time would put the eye in his forehead, and the other two in the back would follow faithfully. Three ugly, huge Trolls shared one gorgeous, lightning-fast, precious eye.

Then, our big brother suddenly shouted, “Run! But don’t go far. They won’t see us down here since they have their eye on the front.” I grabbed our little brother by the arm, and we started running. The low ferns shook, and the first Troll, wearing the eye, looked down and spotted us among the bushes. It began to chase us with slow, heavy movements while the other two Trolls blindly followed.

Then, our older and brave brother went after them and stuck a sharp stick into the ankle of the last Troll. He winced in pain and cried out loudly. The first Troll was startled by the loud cry, and as he jumped up in fright, his eye went out of his forehead, rolled over his hairy body, and fell right beside us.

What a tremendous stroke of luck that was! But it was too big to carry alone, and my brother’s little hands could not help me. Without much thought, we quickly rolled it away from the Trolls. We barely had time to get away when he bent down and fumbled with his hand to find his eye. I was terrified because the eye was shining, and wherever we took it in the dark night lit up the place as if it were day. It was lucky that the Trolls were all blind because there was nowhere to hide that squinting eye.

When the Trolls realised that we had lost the eye and one of them had been injured, they threatened that great harm would come to us if we did not return it to them immediately. But our brave big brother told them, “I am not afraid of you, Trolls. I have three eyes while you three have none.” They then screamed angrily and said, “If we don’t get our eye back right now, I’m gonna turn you to stone.!”

Our brother insisted he was not afraid of their threats and that if they did not leave immediately, he would nail wood to all their feet and leave them crawling on the ground like reptiles. When the Trolls heard this, they had the heebie-jeebies and began to cajole him. They pledge to him valuable things and great honours. They promised that if he gave them back their eye, they would give him gold and silver and whatever else he asked for.

Then our brother agreed to give them the eye if they first gave him a bucket of gold, a bucket of silver and three steel bows. The Trolls protested and said that none of them could find their way home without the eye and that he would have to give them the eye first and then wait for the rewards. Our brother did not accept and pretended to leave with the eye.

Then one of the Trolls began to shout. He was calling for their wife, a monstrous Trollkona —we understood that all three of them had a wife who had an eye of her own that she didn’t share with anyone. After a while, a woman’s voice from a distant hill to the north asked what they wanted, and they called her. One of the Trolls asked her to bring three steel bows and two buckets of gold and silver.

Indeed, it was not long before the Trollkona came. But she threatened us with spells and incantations when she heard what had happened. But the Trolls were so terrified that they told her not to raise any more objections and to be very careful, for if the fearless boy attacked her, he would take her own eye. Trollkona did not want to risk it, so she left the buckets of gold and silver and the three steel bows and went down the same path. Then I gave a hard kick in the eye, and it rolled towards the wounded Troll. By the time he bent down, fumbled to find the eye and placed it on his forehead, we – the three poor brothers – had taken our buckets and bows and ran away.

Since then, no one has ever seen Troll in our forest again.

Picture of Sofia Motsia

Sofia Motsia

MA Creative Writing, BA Theatre studies

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