The word ‘troll’ first appeared in 1276, when Norway’s King Magnus Haakonsson created a set of laws that made it illegal to wake the trollish ‘mound dwellers’, which were actually the graves of early pagan ancestors buried in mounds of earth. Worshipping these ancestors was a practice that the Christian elite of Norway were keen to stamp out. King Magnus’s creation of these laws included the first written record of the word ‘troll’, and so trolls became associated with the Scandinavian pagans of the thirteenth century.

But the word has an even longer history. In early Norse folklore, ‘trolleri’ referred to a particular type of magic that was designed to do harm, and it can also be traced back to early German words meaning giant, monster or fiend.