According to the legends Norway is the land were trolls are living. I’ve been living in Norway for almost ten years now but I still haven’t met a troll. It seems to be quite difficult to catch sight of those knobby creatures because I can’t find any information about their living habitats in my biology books either. However, there is a place north of Lakselv where you are supposed to find some rock trolls.
In order to get there, you have to drive from Lakselv to Indre Billefjord and take at Kolvik the road Rv185. You drive to Trollholmsund at the end of the road. There you will find a parking place but parking duration is limited to five hours. Nevertheless, this should be enough time because it is only a little bit over one kilometer to walk from the parking place to the rock trolls and it is easy to follow the signs.
An old sami legends says that some trolls came from the mountains to the sea a long time ago. They were carrying a crate full of gold. It was already very late in the night, almost morning and soon the sun would rise. The trolls were looking for some holes to hide from the sun but they couldn’t find any. Therefore, they turned into stone when the sun rose. Well, it seems that not only vampires have a problem with the sun! But the legend doesn’t tell us why the trolls left the mountains in the first place and why they were carrying so much gold with them. But I think that the finder of this treasure didn’t care about these facts either.
But we can suppose that this happened approximately 700 million years ago because the trolls are made of the same limestone that you can also find elsewhere in this landscape.
I go around the last bent on the way to the trolls and I am really looking forward to finally meet those mysterious creatures. But what is this?
A sign tells me that some filming is going on right now. I am disappointed! I am so close to the trolls but I can’t reach them. But I find some baby trolls a little bit further away from the rock trolls and an adorable troll dog seems to watch over them.
But the landscape is quite charming even without the trolls and I definitely have a reason to come back to this place one day.
