The story of the Troll Museum began on Christmas Eve, 2015. I was sitting with my mother, showing her the Troms region on a map, when I suddenly saw something I'd never noticed before.
A troll in the water!
Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. I started asking everyone I knew: have you ever seen the troll on the map of Troms? Nobody had. That only made me more curious. I couldn't let it go.
That was the beginning of what would become the Troll Museum.
Together with a friend, I decided to try something nobody seemed to have done before: build a museum dedicated entirely to trolls. There was no single story waiting for us; trolls were scattered everywhere, in old tales, childhood memories, fragments passed down between generations. So we started piecing them together, like a puzzle.
We found a small location and told the story our own way: through folklore, imagination, and technology, letting visitors step through the facts and into the hidden world of magic.
But over time, I noticed something more was happening. People didn't just come to learn about trolls. They started to remember their own stories. They told us legends from their grandparents, fragments they'd almost forgotten. One memory awoke the next, and the museum became a place where stories weren't just displayed; they came back to life.
Maybe that's what has always fascinated me about folklore: a story can sleep inside you for years, until something wakes it up again.
The Troll Museum was never built by one person. It took the work of many people who believed in this strange idea and helped turn it into something real.
And to think it all started with one Christmas evening, one map of Northern Norway and a troll hiding there in plain sight.