Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/77

Rh evident that they did not understand the word "troll" to imply a person of even so great stature as their own. Mr. Benjamin Thorpe has also recognized this apparently contradictory state of things when he identifies the jotuns with the fates, who, he says, were not Danes, but seem to have been "a still earlier (Finnish) race, out of whom the Gothic conquerors made their trolls and giants."

With this last reference I must bring these remarks to a conclusion. I have purposely ignored many considerations which naturally present themselves to one; but my object has been, not to deal with the magical and unreal qualities often attributed to the trolls, but to demonstrate that the people so designated by the Norsemen were actual flesh-and-blood. Nobody who reads the references to the "trolls" on the western side of the Atlantic can assert that those were anything but real people, and it can hardly be assumed that the word "troll," when used by the same Norsemen on the eastern side of the Atlantic, a month sooner or a month later, bore a perfectly different meaning.