Rolf Lidberg and his trolls

Two years ago Frog (with a little help from me) knocked down the wall between our bathroom and the smallest bedroom in our house. A year later the builders began work on our new, expanded bathroom. Now, two years later, the new bathroom is finished and I have begun sorting the debris that resulted from the building work and from emptying a bedroom.

Two years ago the bathroom and adjoining bedroom became one . . .

Because the bedroom was so small, it was used mostly by visiting children, with the pictures on the wall reflecting this. Among the debris I rediscovered these enchanting troll paintings, which last saw the light of day a year ago as illustrations for my series of blog posts on the visit Frog and I paid to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother. 

I have researched (and blogged here about) a Scandinavian print of my mother’s of which I have only a copy as all five of us children wanted to give it a home after my mother's death. I hoped to find an original print of my own but unfortunately I haven’t yet done so. 

'Happy families', a Scandinavian print of my mother's

The troll pictures are small posters which Frog and I found in an Exeter shop about thirty years ago. Now, after our visit to Norway and with my new-found enthusiasm for that part of the world – so beautiful, wild and uncommercialised - I wondered if we could do some research on these pictures too.
 

‘D’you think we could find original prints of these?’ I asked Frog last week, and the next day through the magic of the internet he came up with the name of the artist, Rolf Lidberg.

I then did some research of my own and discovered from Wikipedia that he was Swedish and lived from 1930 to 2005. He illustrated five children’s books, whose English titles are: Trolls (1984), A Troll Wedding (1992), The elf book (1995), The Troll Valley (2001) and The trolls go fishing (2001). We think our pictures probably come from the last one. Cards of the illustrations and secondhand copies of the books are available but again, as yet, we haven’t found any prints.

My mother did read Norwegian books to us when we were children, translating them as she went, including a mysterious one about a Mrs Green, a Mrs Brown and a Mrs White, but the Rolf Lidberg books are too recent seeing as I was born in the 1950s so I never came across them. I also have vague memories of carved wooden trolls appearing on the table at Christmas, as well as small gnomes which my mother called 'nisse’ (pronounced 'nisser'). (It’s only recently that I've discovered that 'nisse' is a Norwegian word and that ‘Nissen Huts’ are prefabricated barrack-type buildings designed by a Colonel Nissen, not log cabins at the bottom of the garden suitable for little people as I had always imagined.)

According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls are scary human-sized creatures who live in the woods, but what could be more adorable than Lidberg’s trolls, with their patched clothes and sweet smiles? Lidberg himself, according to Wikipedia, was hunchbacked and sported a bushy beard. Was he modelling the trolls on himself and if so isn’t that a wonderful example of celebrating ourselves as we are and not worrying about conforming to conventional ideas of beauty?

It’s a shame that the word ‘troll’ has now come to mean something quite different.

. . . and here as it looks today is the same part of the bathroom as that in the picture above