Come visit the scenic Nordic countries, famous for their seemingly endless woods, snow-clad mountains, cozy inland lakes, and... monsters?
When the Nordic countries appear in fiction, they are often depicted as somewhat otherworldly. When talking through the woods, you might encounter The Fair Folk or monsters right out of Norse Mythology, the mountains are home to giants and trolls, and the lakes, rivers, and fjords are inhabited by monsters seeking to drown innocent swimmers. Foreigners especially may not come away from their visits unchanged.
A setting that follows this trope does not have to be literally the Nordic countries but should be a very close analogue or Fantasy Counterpart Culture of them. The reason the Nordics in particular are considered so strange and otherworldly stems from a mixture of the local cultures and scenery: most of Scandinavia is covered by deep forests, and what isn't consists of mountains. Their long history of Christianity and Norse and Finnish myth intermingling has resulted in a vast cultural heritage of monsters and mystique, which has the added bonus of not being quite as well-known as, say, Classical Mythology, so authors who want to break out of the norm can draw on it for inspiration that audiences won't immediately find familiar. Some daring writers might even draw on the folklore of the region's other native culture, the Sámi, who have lived in the northern parts of Scandinavia (and parts of Russia) for as long as the Norse cultures have.
These stories may include creatures and characters out of Nordic folklore, like the Hulder or Skogrå who seduces men but is identifiable by her cow's tail and hollow back, the Nøkk, Neck, or Fossegrim, a malicious shapeshifter who lures people into the water to drown them, the largely friendly but elusive Nisser or Tomter who live on farms and in the woods, and, of course, the classic trolls. In other cases, the stories might draw on the older Norse Mythology, and include such figures as the Norse gods, giants, jotuns, and monstrous wolves. Note however that this trope does not cover stories that are merely set in or feature Norse mythology.
Note that the title is just there for alliteration, and this trope covers all the Nordic countries. In addition to Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which make up Scandinavia, the Nordics include Iceland and Finland, and the semi-independent Faroe Islands and Åland. Greenland, despite being a Danish territory, is typically not considered Nordic because its population is predominantly Inuit.
Nordic Noir is this trope's more mundane counterpart. See also Grim Up North, which is when the northern parts of the world are depicted as cold, inhospitable, inhabited by monsters, and populated by Fantasy Counterpart Culture vikings.
Examples:
- In Hetalia: Axis Powers, out of all the Nordic nations, Norway is depicted to have the ability to do Black Magic and speak to fairies, trolls, nisse
, and other creatures of Scandinavian folklore, and can command them to do his bidding.
- Norwegian Romantic Nationalist painter and illustrator Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1916) made his name painting scenes and images based on Norwegian folklore, creating some of the most famous depictions of trolls, nøkken, draugen, and huldra, as well as scenes from the fairytales of Asbjørnsen and Moe. He is the man behind the trope image, which depicts a troll walking down Oslo's main street.
- Swedish Romantic artist and illustrator John Bauer (1882-1918) based many of his paintings on folklore topics such as trolls, gnomes, giants, changelings, and humans interacting with them, regularly set in the deep primaeval forest of Scandinavia. After travelling in northern Sweden, he regularly included details from Sámi culture, for example in the outfits of his trolls and giants. His work has played an important role in shaping the visual imagination of Nordic folklore. Among other things, he is well known for illustrating the first issues of the fairy tale anthology Bland tomtar och troll (see below).
- The Senja Troll, located on the island of Senja in northern Norway, was the largest troll statue in the world before its unfortunate destruction in a fire in 2019.
- Hilda: The comic and its animated adaptation follows a young girl from Trolberg, a small town clearly based on the various towns dotting the Scandinavian coastline, where she runs into all sorts of creatures from Nordic folklore like trolls, nisser, draug, and many others.
- Asbjørnsen and Moe are in many ways the trope codifiers, having collected fairytales from all around Norway which forms the basis for this trope.
- Downplayed with Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish writer whose fairy tales, inspired by older Danish and European folklore, are generally thought to be set in his native Denmark (with a few exceptions where the setting is explicitly in another country, such as "The Bronze Pig").
- Frozen, whose first film is an adaptation of the Danish fairy tale The Snow Queen, is explicitly set in a fictional kingdom in 19th-century Norway and draws a lot from Scandinavian culture and folklore, including trolls and elemental spirits such as the Nøkk and the Earth Giants, and the second movie brings in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Sámi. Queen Elsa herself is born with ice powers and is revealed in Frozen II to be the bridge between humanity and nature.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Thor: The battle between the Aesir and the Jötunn at the beginning of the film is stated to have taken place in Tønsberg, Norway in 965 AD/CE.
- Captain America: The First Avenger: During World War II, the Tesseract later revealed to be one of the Infinity Stones is uncovered in Tønsberg, and taken by Johann Schmidt/Red Skull, using it to power Hydra's weapons.
- Avengers: Endgame: The remaining Asgardians establish New Asgard in Tønsberg.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In "The Well", it's revealed that a warrior from the Asgardian Berserker Army decided to stay behind on Earth rather than return, becoming "The Warrior Who Stayed" and hiding one piece of the super-empowering Berserker staff within the forest of what would become Trillemarka National Park note in Norway. In the present day of the episode, a Norse Paganist hate group travels to Trillemarka to retrieve the piece, believing they could use it to become gods on Earth. Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D. team travels to stop them by finding the remaining pieces before they do.
- Midsommar: The movie takes place in Sweden and follows a woman getting indoctrinated into a cult whose ethos is based on Scandinavian traditionalism.
- The Ritual: The movie follows a group of friends who go hiking through the Swedish forests, where they encounter a creature identified as a Jottun, a creature of Norse myth, as well as the cult that worships it.
- The Troll Hunter is a found footage film in which a documentary team follows the Norwegian government's troll hunter, a secret animal control agent for a beast that the public thinks only exists in storybooks. Because this is a found footage film, you can guess what happens when the government finally catches wind of the documentary team…
- Bland Tomtar Och Troll (roughly "Among Gnomes and Trolls") is a Swedish fairy tale anthology for children, started in 1907 under the editor Erik Åkerlund and with new issues published annually since then, boasting several big-name authors and illustrators. While the fairy tales in it are usually original work, they regularly use common tropes of Scandinavian fairy tales: trolls, giants, princesses, Talking Animal helpers, clever farmboys, supernatural spirits rewarding endurance and hard work, etc.
- Gnomes: A series of "field guides" about the lives of gnomes who live in the general Germanic, Nordic, and Baltic regions of Europe. Many creatures of Scandinavian folklore are presented, although the main conflicts are between the gnomes and the trolls. The books would prove popular enough to later be adapted into The World of David the Gnome.
- The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: The book has an overarching plot of the namesake Farmboy Nils being turned into a Tomte and traveling through early 1900s Sweden with some wild geese. Alongside the Tomte, he also encounters ghosts and it is implied that giants as well as the skogsrå and bergsrå are real.
- The song "Månemannen" by Norwegian band Vamp describes various creatures of Norwegian folklore, including witches, trolls, and huldra, interacting with more modern elements like a parked care, and fleeing as the sun rises.
- Disney Theme Parks:
- In Walt Disney World, the defunct Maelstrom ride, which was in the Norway pavilion at Epcot, featured a number of figures from Norse Mythology, including Odin, a Nokken, and a three-headed troll, alongside more realistic depictions of modern-day Norway such as polar bears and oil rigs, tied together by the narrator's final line, "Norway's spirit has always been, and will always be adventure". Replaced by Frozen Ever After in 2016.
- Frozen Ever After is a ride retelling of Frozen (2013), set in a fantasy kingdom in Norway. While it also exists in Hong Kong Disneyland and is planned for Disneyland Paris as of 2023, it most explicitly embraces this trope in its original location of Walt Disney World, where it stands in the Norway pavilion of Epcot's World Showcase as of 2024.
- Scion ditches the Masquerade-intensive setting of 1e for a "it's out there if you know where to look"-style setting in 2e. One of the elements used to highlight this is that Norway has nature preserves for trolls.
- Vaesen Nordic Horror Roleplaying, as the title implies, is set in Sweden and the players take on the role of investigators looking into encounters with supernatural creatures from the local folklore.
- Bramble: The Mountain King dives fully into Nordic folklore. As Olle travels into the enchanted forest to save his sister, he runs into many creatures from Swedish fairytales, such as Trolls, pointy-hatted gnomes riding hedgehogs, Näcken, draugr, and the Skogsrå, among others.
- Fate/Grand Order: The Scandinavian Lostbelt: Götterdämmerung is the Lostbelt that diverged from Proper Human History during the events of Ragnarok. In this Singularity, Scandinavia is frozen, and Giants litter the land. Humans live in villages under Scáthach-Skadi with support from the Valkyries, where they are required to reproduce at age fifteen or sacrificed to the Giants. However, at twenty-five, they are forced to be sacrificed.
- Through the Woods: The game opens near a cabin by a lake in the Norwegian woods, but quickly transitioned into an otherworld populated by beings out of Norse myth and folklore, including Huldra, Nøkken, trolls, and vikings.
- Fox Fires takes place in the forests of Finland and features encounters between the animal protagonists and various forest elves, house elves, sauna elves, and other spirits. One of the main characters is a runaway witch's cat.
- Scandinavia and the World: Being based on Nordic stereotypes of each other and made by a Danish artist, the comic often incorporates folklore and mysticism of the region. Trolls make frequent appearances, and the differences in how they are viewed between countries is examined (for instance, Norwegian trolls are savage beasts while Danish trolls are shown more as designer pets). It's Iceland who has the lion's share of the strangeness, however. He's often seen accompanied by little imps, once walked on molten lava, and has a museum full of mummified penises.
- Stand Still, Stay Silent is a post-apocalyptic take on this trope, where the majority of the world has been destroyed by a virus that mutates its victims into horrific abominations. These monsters are called trolls, with more specific subtypes and individuals named after other creatures from Nordic folklore and myth. Aside from Iceland, which survives largely untouched and is the cultural, political, and economic center of the known world, people have largely returned to the ways of life of their ancestors, with Norway, Iceland, and Finland even turning to their old gods. Norwegians in particular are for all intents and purposes just vikings with guns.
- Metalocalypse: In "Dethtroll," the band apologizes for previous incidents while touring Finland by playing an ancient song from Finnish folklore about the lake troll Mustakrakish (which they apparently believe would make a good new national anthem if set to heavy metal music). The Finns immediately panic because they know this will, in fact, summon Mustakrakish, who proceeds to lay waste to the country.