I have heard it suggested that the name of a “toll bridge” refers to the idea of a “troll” lying in wait under a bridge, demanding “protection money”, as in fairy stories.
I understand that the English word “toll” is ultimately derived from the greek, telos, but one stubborn person just counters that by saying that troll comes from the same source.
“Troll” is of Scandinavian origin. It makes sense to me that Scandinavian languages are Germanic and should therefore have some commonality with English, but I don’t know anything 'bout Nordic languages, and they sound much more foreign than southern Germanic languages. Can some kind Viking give me some insight into the etymology of “Troll,” so I can sleep at night?
The Trolls of ancient Scandinavia were the original race of Giants (similar to the Greek Titans). Later, the word took on the meaning of spiritually evil creatures and was applied to diminutive folk (such as ogres and critters under bridges). The OED provides no earlier version of the word in that sense that could be linked to the Greek télos and the transliteration from the ancient Scandinavian equates pretty regularly to troll or trold with no real variants. Its derivants include variations on trylla, but nothing that looks like the Greek word.
The word for fees, as noted, came from the Greek télos that picked up an omicron in place of the epsilon fairly early. On the other hand, I have never seen a construction in which tel- or tol- transformed into trol-.
Your friend may associate taxes and gods, but there does not seem to be any reason to associate them, here, on the basis of etymology.
Even though the word origins are unrelated is the association of trolls with bridges due to the similarity of the phrases ‘toll bridge’ and ‘troll bridge’, or did these phrases have separate etymologies?
That seems unlikely to me. The association of trolls with bridges apparently dates to the fairy tale Three Billy Goats Gruff, collected in Norway and first published (in Norwegian) in 1841. I don’t speak Norwegian, but unless the words in that language for “toll” and “troll” are as similar as they are in English, “toll bridge” couldn’t have influenced the fairy tale. (FWIW Google Translate says Norwegian for “toll bridge” is “bombo” while Norwegian for “troll” is “troll”.)
In Norwegian, a trollmann is what you would call a wizard. The word clearly has to do with magic, and fuck-all to do with “bridge”, which is bru. [bro would be a more Danish style of Norwegian.]
That’s what a translator app said was the Old Norse word for ‘bridge’. If it’s pronounced like ‘bro’ or ‘bru’ there’s a lot of wasted letters there. Do you know how to pronounce it?
In that case the “translator” app is having you on, and there is no way to pronounce it. It seems someone took the English word BRIDGE and simply swapped each letter with its common transliteration into Elder Futhark (a runic-style Germanic alphabet). Nothing to do with Old Norse (bridge = brú in Old Norse):
ETA cf what a Saga written in Old Norse actually looks like:
This is the first I’ve ever heard “ogres” referred to as “diminutive folk”. And while “troll” can refer to creatures both large or small (with wild pink hair), the ones under bridges are always the large ones.
Well that’s disappointing. Imagine! A random web site providing useless results. So any connection between Toll Bridges and Troll Bridges is accidental.
