The Skessa — Female Troll of Eastfjords

Eastfjords, Iceland

The Skessa is a female troll — enormous, carnivorous, and unpredictably intelligent — whose territory in the Eastfjords traditions extended from the mountain ridges to the shore, and who was the primary supernatural danger to isolated farms.

The Skessa — the female troll — is a distinct figure in Icelandic tradition from her male counterpart. The male troll is typically strong but not clever; the Skessa is both. She is described as larger than a house, with a carrying bag in which she keeps people she has taken, and with an intelligence that allows her to mimic human voices and behaviour. The Eastfjords traditions are the most detailed in Iceland for Skessa encounters. The remoteness of the region — narrow fjords separated by high ridges, farms isolated from each other in ways that southern Iceland is not — gave the tradition more territory and more darkness to work with. The specific Eastfjords tradition: the Skessa would sometimes take a shape closer to human, wearing stolen clothes, and approach farms in the guise of a traveller seeking shelter. The diagnostic: her feet were too large for any normal shoe, and she could not fully disguise the bass register of her voice. Those who turned her away survived. Those who invited her in did not. She was stopped by the same mechanism as all Icelandic trolls — sunrise. The eastern fjord valleys, with their high ridges blocking the morning sun, gave her more time than she would have had in the open highlands. The tradition accounts for this: the Skessa of the Eastfjords could operate longer into the morning than her counterparts elsewhere. Multiple Icelandic sagas of the Eastfjords include Skessa encounters as documented fact.