Bridge Trolls are Ditch Angels, and Here’s Why
My family used to go on hikes with granola bars and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches down the railroad tracks. In winter, we had hot chocolate too. After around the mile mark, we reached the "troll bridge", which spanned over a small, swampy ditch. Sometimes it was more like a river, but usually the water was low and stagnant. The bridge was only three or so meters across, but that was plenty of room for trolls. We stopped there to eat our mid-hike lunch, crawling beneath the tracks and settling on the incline next to the water. We'd imagine we were eating with the trolls, and sometimes we left them offerings: a fairy house, a nice rock, a pile of flowers, or maybe just some kind words-- something like a prayer, but much more casual. "Hello! Thanks for letting us eat here today!"
The bridge trolls of Devil's Swamp, we were convinced, didn't mind us so much.
Name a city without a bridge! Any city! Go!
Pretty hard, right? Not even google gives good answers. Instead, upon googling, "city without bridge", one is met with countries and cities that have strict travel prohibitions or COVID-19 border procedures. Just about everywhere that's anywhere has a bridge, apparently.
Well, at least everywhere we've gotten to.
Bridges have always held a certain mystique. The Bifrost is perhaps the most famous mythical bridge which connects Midgard, the human world, to Asgard, the land of the Aesir gods. But there is also the Norse Gjallarbrú, a golden bridge nestled deep in the underworld, spanning the river Gjöll. There is the Islam As-Sirāt bridge, thin as a single hair and sharp as the sharpest knife. The Bridge of the Requiter, also known as the Chinvat Bridge, of Zoroastrianism is similar. The Bridge of Dread is found in Christian lore, stretching from the material world down to Purgatory. Evil souls fall off, straight into the fires of hell. These bridges hardly scratch the surface of bridges found in myths, cosmologies, and creation stories.
What I'm saying is that if you want to make a successful religion, you gotta put some bridges into it.
And that's not even including more recent bridge folklore! Take, for example, the London Bridge-- you know, the one that's falling down? Legend has it that the old children's game has its roots in a ritual practice that involved building children into the foundation of bridges in order to increase the longevity and sturdiness of the bridge. Slowly, the child's window to the world got smaller and smaller as bricks obscured their view until they were sealed away into the bowels of the city's very fancy-schmancy new infrastructure.
Bridges hold a lot of mystery and fear in the anthropocene. They connect foreign entities. They are often dangerous to cross. Once your foot slips, you're doomed, and the more a suspension bridge starts to break, the more breakable it becomes. Take this in addition to the ordinary horrors of travel like highwaymen, unpredictable weather, and like, nighttime existing, and it's no wonder that Bridge Trolls started crawling out of the deep to feed on our anxiety even more!
Many bridge troll legends mimic the very real scam of highwaymen, in which trolls take on the form of gnarled humanoids demanding a toll to cross a chasm, sometimes in the form of money, body parts, or a riddle. Other bridge trolls just don't want you to cross their damn bridges. They run at you with claws or clubs or snarls or grunts if you dare wake them . . . so you must be quiet, more quiet than the night, as you tiptoe across creaky, rotten wood.
Trolls come in various levels of relatability, but they are generally humanoid manifestations of their environment. The backs of river trolls are full of knots that rise above the surface, taking on the appearance of rocks or floating logs to the onlooker. The faces of mountain trolls emerge out of cliffs, shaking snow off their eyebrows like sleep-boogers. Cave trolls hide in the shadows, and they don't want to be disturbed. Bridge trolls are muddy, shifty, untrustworthy, and generally have a take-what-you-can-get attitude. They take on the liminality of bridges in their unpredictability. Sometimes they are friend, and sometimes they are foe. They don't belong to the peoples occupying either side of the bridge, nor do they really belong to the rapids, the cliffside, or whatever it is that the bridge spans. No, they belong to just the bridge, and the bridge belongs just to them. Sometimes they have clubs, and sometimes they have clipboards!
Some troll enthusiasts (myself included) adhere to the idea that every bridge has a troll. In ancient Sumer and Babylon, it was the mighty and ferocious Karibu (likely an ancestor to the Hebrew "Kerub" which eventually became Cherubim) who kept guard over cities, palaces, and temples. The Cherubim that guards the entrance to the Garden of Eden is a reflection of this idea. To this day, within many religious traditions, religious buildings are given special protectors such as guardian angels or patrons. Why, then, shouldn't every bridge have a protector? Of course, bridges need to be crossed, so it only makes sense that their guardians are stereotypically a bit more lenient than their cousins. But hey, it's a lifestyle choice! Why be a Sphinx with NO sense of humor when you could spend your days haggling with travelers, eating fat goats, and sniffing mud?
All this is to say that next time you cross a bridge, on foot or by car, try leaving something behind for whatever lurks beneath-- preferably, leave something either spiritual, biodegradable, or rocks are fine too. You most likely won't get a blessing or a curse, or any cosmic recognition for it. Nothing will happen at all for you, probably. But you might just make a troll's day, and what on Earth could be a better use of your time than that?
