In a conventional fairy tale, a troll might lurk at the edge of a village, waiting to be outwitted by a brave human. In Rasmus Daugbjerg’s Troll, the danger runs in the opposite direction. People cut down the forest and kill its animals on a king’s orders; a female troll, bound to the land, must retaliate. The question is not simply whether the monster will be defeated. It is whether anyone can escape a system in which both obedience and resistance lead to destruction.
The novel is about to reach a wider English-language readership. Penguin lists an English edition for 25 February 2027, translated by Hazel Evans (ISBN 9781837310463). That is a scheduled UK publication, not a newly written Danish novel: the original, Trold, appeared with Gutkind on 16 August 2022. Before the translation arrives, its premise offers an unusually sharp way to think about the return of folklore in contemporary Danish fiction.
What happens when nature is no longer the scenery?
In much familiar storytelling, a forest is a place the protagonist enters. It offers obstacles, refuge, temptations or discoveries; the human journey remains the centre of attention. Daugbjerg’s premise refuses that comfortable arrangement. His troll belongs to the earth, and the earth’s injury becomes her obligation. She is neither a cheerful guardian nor a simple metaphor for a benevolent natural world.
That distinction matters. A fable is a story whose invented situation makes an ethical or social conflict unusually visible. The kingdom, the destructive orders and the troll’s punishment are not a policy programme with characters attached. Instead, they isolate a disturbing pattern: actions that look necessary for survival or safety from one position can be catastrophic when seen from another.
The Danish publisher’s account describes a town whose inhabitants fear the king and the troll alike. They must obey commands to destroy, then face the consequences of doing so. For readers accustomed to an environmental story about individual bad choices, this is a more uncomfortable problem. It asks what responsibility means when fear, dependence and coercion shape the available choices.
The king, the townspeople and the impossible task
There are three different forms of power in this outline. The king has political authority: he can order work and destruction. The townspeople have the capacity to act, but under threat. The troll has a terrible duty tied to the land, a duty that can make her violent even towards people who are not free to choose otherwise. The result is not an easy contest between good nature and evil humanity.
This is one reason the novel is better approached as a moral predicament than as a straightforward warning about climate change. Its central conflict draws attention to who issues orders, who performs them and who suffers the consequences. It also troubles the expectation that punishment must restore balance. If a creature is compelled to avenge ecological harm by inflicting further harm, what would repair actually look like?
That question remains open rather than requiring a neat answer. The Danish critic Mikkel Thulstrup, reviewing Trold in Atlas on 17 October 2022, reads the creature as an expression of climate crisis but also notes a tension between the book’s legible allegory and its darker, more mysterious language. His reservation is useful. A literary fable can illuminate an ethical problem and still risk becoming too easy to decode. The strongest reading holds on to both its argument and its strangeness.
A modern story in an older Nordic visual world
Trolls have never had a single stable meaning across Nordic tales. Depending on the tradition, they may be immense or small, hostile or vulnerable, linked to mountains, forests or the world beyond ordinary human settlement. They are not interchangeable with one definitive folkloric character. That flexibility gives a contemporary writer room to move beyond the idea of a monster whose only function is to be conquered.
The drawing accompanying this article is Skogtroll (Forest Troll), made around 1906 by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen. It is historical Nordic folklore imagery, not an illustration commissioned for Daugbjerg’s novel. Kittelsen’s creature seems to grow out of the landscape itself, making it difficult to decide where body ends and forest begins. It offers a visual point of comparison, not evidence that Daugbjerg borrowed the image.
Danish writing has long shifted between realist explanations and unsettling forms that resist ordinary logic. Litteraturnet’s guide to Danish experimental writing in the 1960s introduces one historical part of that story. Daugbjerg’s combination of apparently simple tale and unnerving implications belongs to a broader continuing question: when everyday language cannot make a crisis felt, what can a strange story reveal?
Three books for English-language readers
1. Troll — Rasmus Daugbjerg. The English-language entry point is Penguin’s forthcoming 2027 paperback, translated by Hazel Evans (ISBN 9781837310463; scheduled UK publication 25 February 2027). Readers interested in folklore, environmental ethics and short, forceful fiction may want to start here when it is published. The Danish Trold was published in 2022. This is a preview and thematic introduction based on the publishers’ accounts and available criticism, not a claim to have reviewed the complete forthcoming English text.
2. The Wax Child — Olga Ravn. For a different kind of Danish supernatural fiction, consider Ravn’s historical novel about accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Denmark. Its unusual witness is a wax figure; its concerns include rumour, gender and the violence of collective suspicion. Martin Aitken translated it into English. The Penguin paperback appeared on 24 September 2026 (ISBN 9781405976824). It is not the same kind of ecological fable, but both premises ask how communities turn fear into a moral certainty that damages people.
3. The Employees — Olga Ravn. This brief work of speculative fiction is set aboard a spacecraft, where human and humanoid workers respond to mysterious objects and begin to question what they owe their employers and themselves. It provides an unexpected comparison: a non-human viewpoint can make the supposedly natural rules of human society look strange. The English translation is again by Martin Aitken; a Penguin paperback was published on 6 November 2025 (ISBN 9781405976787).
If you enjoy speculative writing that makes a familiar world unfamiliar without supplying tidy explanations, Litteraturnet’s English guide to Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume offers another route into contemporary Danish literature. Its repeated day is very different from Daugbjerg’s forest, but both premises force readers to reconsider responsibility over time.
Why the approaching translation matters
An English translation can give a Danish book a second beginning without changing its original date or making its story suddenly contemporary. What matters here is the possibility of an international conversation about a recognisable dilemma: the people who inflict harm may themselves be frightened, the creature defending the world may be frightening, and the ruler who commands destruction may never face its immediate cost.
That is the promise of Troll as a reading prospect. It does not ask us to believe in a forest monster. It asks whether an old kind of monster story might help us see a modern system more clearly—and whether seeing clearly is enough.
Sources and further reading
Penguin: Troll, English edition and scheduled 25 February 2027 release; Gutkind: Trold, original Danish edition (16 August 2022); Mikkel Thulstrup, “Klimaet som trold,” Atlas (17 October 2022); Penguin: Olga Ravn, The Wax Child (2026 paperback); Penguin: Olga Ravn, The Employees (2025 paperback).
Image: Theodor Kittelsen, Skogtroll (c. 1906), via Wikimedia Commons; Public Domain Mark 1.0. Historical artwork, not an illustration from Troll; no cropping or generative alteration.
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