pronunciation:
Jøron: "YOU-roan"
Svånaug: "SVOH-nowg"

[continuing from the last chapter, "1756: Homme's Crest":  on the crest of a high knoll, Halvor launches into a local folktale ...]

" ...There was, one time, a great hairy troll living on the heights over there." Halvor pointed to the ridge on the left. "Just inland from the island and up above Utsund farm. Two trolls, in fact. Their names were Jøron and Svånaug. They had lived there in peace and quiet for several hundred years, but when our forefathers built the Kviteseid church—"

"Where you got married!" Margit said, proud to make the connection.

"Ja, that's the one. Trolls can't stand the sound of church bells ringing, you know. Weddings and christenings and funerals and all day long on Sundays. The old woman troll, Svånaug, just hated all that clanging. One day she'd had enough. She stamped and growled and grumped and howled, then hoisted a great huge stone and threw it at the church, but didn't throw far enough, and the stone splashed into Sundkilen down there."

Margit and Anne stared with mouths open in astonishment, but Sigrid smiled. She didn't much believe in trolls anymore, at least not the giant variety, and not under the blazing noontime sun. In the dark of night it was another matter.

"'You throw like a miserable wretch!' says her husband Jøron, and to show her up, he takes a tremendous slab of rock—" Halvor wrestled with an imaginary boulder—"and hurls it at the church. But that slab missed the mark, too, and landed plunk! in the waters of Sundkilen. And there it sits to this very day. Snipp, snapp, snoo, now my tale is through."

"What about the trolls?" Margit asked.

"Well, since they couldn't silence the bells, they packed their bags and moved to the high, high mountains where us puny little people don't bother them with steeples and bells."

Liv sighed with eyes closed and face turned to the warm rays of the sun. "I'm glad they're gone," she murmured. "I wouldn't want to share this peaceful mountainside with trolls. Just me and my dear family. Listen to the birds sing!"

"I hear a wagtail," said Sigrid.

"I hear a lark," Anne added.

"A woodpecker! Bonk, bonk, bonk!" cried Margit.

"I know where a waterfall-fellow lives," Halvor said. "Want to see?"

"A fossegrim?" Margit asked, eyes wide with fear.

"No, silly," Sigrid said. "Waterfall-fellows are birds that fly underwater! And you should be able to guess where it lives."

"Yes please, Pappa Halvor!" Fair Anne cried. "Let's go see!"

Liv groaned in mock dismay. "I was just getting comfortable."

"Come, Mor, come," Margit begged, pulling on Liv's arm. "I want to see a waterfall-fellow. Does he really fly underwater?"

"I guess we'll soon see. Lead the way, Pappa Halvor." Liv gave her husband a smile as radiant as the spring sun, and the little troupe scrambled down from Homme's Crest on a hunt for dippers flitting around woodland streams.

"Troll Wonders How Old He Is" by Theodor Severin Kittelsen

BEHIND THE SCENES

Trolls were supposed to come in all sizes, small as gnomes, big as giants.

This fairy tale – or troll tale! – is found in the local folklore about Kviteseid church.

Norwegian fairy tales almost always begin, Der var en gang... "There was one time..." And they  almost always end with this phrase: "Snipp, snapp, snute, nå er eventyret ute."

Both snipp and snute mean the end of something. Snapp means brisk and lively. The rest means "now is the fairytale finished."