Bone And Sickle

Trolls in Scandinavian folklore can be a little different from what’s imagined in the rest of the world.  We begin our show with a montage of clips from recent movies, Trollhunter (2010), Troll (2022), and Troll 2 (2025) — the latter two being Netflix productions that have rekindled interest in the subject while reimagining trollsin a way that does not always conform to the folklore. While all Scandinavian countries have their share of troll lore, this episode focuses specifically on Norway, the country with the most compelling collection of troll folklore. The first portion of our show looks at the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s play along with  incidental music composed for the play by his associate Edvard Grieg. Introducing this topic is a clip from the 1970 musical Song of Norway, a fanciful Edvard Grieg biopic that garnered particularly bad reviews.  We learn a bit about why Grieg hated his well-known “Hall of the Mountain King,” a composition which accompanies Peer Gynt’s