What Is the Troll Hole? — OK Whatever

Our first stop was Grumpy Troll Coffee, which is located near the entrance and essentially serves as the museum’s gift shop. In addition to handcrafted, fair-trade brews, you can find local artisan wares, like candles and yard art, as well as novelty candies such as troll poo (which Groom swears tastes like jelly beans not the other thing).

Next, I was taken up the stairs to the first display consisting of celebrity trolls and fan-art, including a photograph of a pregnant Demi Moore troll. There was also a provocatively dressed Bollywood troll, a tatted-up, naked LeBron James troll (that had no wiener), and a Trump troll (that had a tiny square covering his junk).

Artist David McDowell’s troll royalty display came next, featuring King Magnus and Queen Ingrid, two life-sized trolls with gray skin, bulging eyes, and phallic noses. At least, that’s what the King looked like; I couldn’t see the Queen’s face because she was missing her head. Apparently trolls do this sometimes. They like to remove their heads, but then inevitably end up losing them, as the Queen had just demonstrated.

There was an exhibit of human-like troll paintings, most of them of young maidens with tails (much like the one Queen Sigrid was sporting). This type of troll is called a huldra (or hulder), and she appears in Norwegian and Scandinavian folklore as a femme fatale that, Groom said, likes to “trick boys into marrying her.”  Legend goes that when a huldra marries, her tail is chopped off, but her inner troll remains. If her partner cheats or does wrong, she’s malicious and quick to seek revenge on him.

The scientific stuff was found in the Troll Hunter Room where everything from troll teeth to an enormous wad of troll snot was on display. There were skulls from “alien trolls,” because apparently the fabled cryptid also lives in outer space, as well as a photo of Bigfoot, because one school of thought believes the furry, bipedal creatures are merely a subspecies of troll.

The DreamWorks film Trolls had its own room, filled with movie memorabilia and designed to look like a child’s bedroom. And of course there was an exhibit dedicated to Thomas Dam troll dolls — the quintessential plastic figurines known for their stout figures, adorably ugly faces, and hair that stands up. From the ‘60s to the early ‘90s, Dam’s iconic troll dolls were replicated by tons of companies, due to a copyright glitch that entered the dolls into the public domain. Wish-Nik was one such copycat, known best for its Treasure Troll line of dolls with rhinestone belly buttons, and there’s a room filled with them and other Dam knock-offs at the Troll Hole Museum, too.