ANYONE DOUBTING THE popularity of trolls should look at the Radio 3 website for children, Making Tracks, where kids are asked to play a wonderful game inspired by Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt — In the Hall of the Mountain King. Cunning or stupid, lumpen or limber, trolls are an essential part of childhood literature, and Katherine Langrish’s Troll Fell was one of the best books about them to appear last year.

Now she’s back with Troll Mill, and the same cast of characters grown a little older. The orphaned Peer is now a teenager yearning after his best friend Hilde, who seems more interested in a brawny fisherman than a gangling boy with a ruined mill as his inheritance. Yet on the same day that Peer gets a neighbour’s baby thrust into his arms — its mother, Kersten, promptly disappears into the sea — the mill awakes. Grief and fearfulness clash in his head as the trolls go about their mysterious business, grinding bones in preparation for a feast under the hill. Yet if Peer can make the mill work for him instead, he will have a living to bring him wealth and respectability — always providing his bullying uncles, turned into trolls, can be kept at bay.

All children between the ages of 7 and 9 have to study the Vikings in history lessons, and few fail to become fascinated by their melancholy mixture of violence and culture, which form part of our deepest literary roots. Too many children get a whiff of this world only through the secondary world created by Tolkien, who used many of its myths and customs to create the world of The Lord of the Rings. Yet until very recently, the beliefs and customs of this infinitely intriguing society were ignored by children’s writers. Of all of them, Langrish comes closest in describing what it must have been like to farm and fish and grow up in those times, and her work is rooted in a natural landscape no less convincing because it contains the supernatural.

One of the many things I love about this writer is the way that she allows for the possibility not only of magic but of reality, which is much harder for children to grasp. Suicidal Kersten could just as easily be suffering from post-natal depression as a seal-maiden returning to the sea; Granny Greenteeth could be an otter; and trolls simply tricks of the light. Any child who reads this book will have interesting questions raised in their mind about the nature of imagination. But then, quite suddenly, the weird and wonderful turn out to be true. Granny Greenteeth, the sinister water spirit living in the mill pool, really does want a baby of her own, and the Troll Princess, who wanted to kidnap Hilde’s twin brother and sister in the first book, is hot on the trail of her own stolen baby — a dreadfully precocious brat with 30 teeth and a purple tongue who turns out to enjoy terrifying the twins so much by telling them horror stories that the Princess embraces their mother as her new best friend. “He’s very advanced for his age,” the tactful Gudrun tells the Princess, turning her tail-lashing fury to tearful gratitude.

Despite the high drama of Troll Mill, it is moments of domestic comedy like these that make children rock with delight and long for the further adventures of Peer.

TROLL MILL (10+)
by Katherine Langrish
HarperCollins, £10.99; 320pp
£9.89 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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