Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/73

 Rh word "troll," but the author from whom so many of these references are obtained gives us an instance of its application, in the same locality, so recently as the middle of the fifteenth century. The Danish Governor of Iceland, at that period, was one Bjoern Thorleifsson, and he and his wife were on one occasion wrecked on the coast of Greenland, being the sole survivors of the ship's company. "Two old trolls, a man and a woman," then arrived on the scene and befriended the castaways. These trolls carried large hampers on their shoulders, and the male troll, placing Thorleifsson in his basket, while the female carried the governor's lady in hers, the party made their way to the residence of the Danish Bishop at Gardhs, where the two refugees passed the winter.

From these various references, therefore, we see that the Norsemen, during a period of several centuries, applied the three terms—"Lapp," "troll" and "pigmy" to one people on the western shores of the Atlantic, and it is the contention of Professor Nilsson and others that they applied the same three terms to one people on the eastern side of the Atlantic. It is obvious that they regard the three words as synonymous, when used in America; and this being so, one can hardly avoid the inference that they had previously regarded them as synonyms when used in Scandinavia.

Of several customs uniting the Scandinavian Lapps to the so-called Lapps of North America, perhaps the most striking is the use of semi-subterranean and wholly underground dwellings. Of this, there is ample evidence on both sides.

Yet, in spite of many strong reasons for regarding the Lapps and Eskimos as the representatives of the legendary dwarfs or trolls, there are other considerations which would lead one to believe that they are so only in a modified degree. Both races have traditions of underground folk of still smaller stature with whom, in the case of the Lapps, at any rate, their forefathers intermarried. This tradition quite accords with the statements referred to by Paulus Jovius, a writer of of the first half of the sixteenth century, who says that the territory lying between the Varanger Fiord, on the east, and Tromsö on the west (the territory known as Scrid-scrit, or