My name is Rebecca Merkelbach, and I’m a post-doc at the University of Tübingen in southern Germany, where I research and teach Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. A few years ago, I completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge where I worked on the representation and use of social monsters (a subgroup of characters called trolls) in the Sagas of Icelanders. So I’m basically a Doctor of Trollology! If you want to read more, an expanded version of my thesis was published in 2019 as Monsters in Society: Alterity, Transgression, and the Use of the Past in Medieval Iceland

This blog used to be me rambling on about monsters and other ‘Others’, past and present, political, social and cultural. Not only because monsters are awesome, but also because they do important cultural work. I rarely find the time to update it anymore, but I’ll keep the blog online as an occasional platform for ramblings, translations, calls for papers and the like.

For someone else’s take on the subject, and an excellent overview of what monsters do and mean, see this article from the NY Times:

From Daleks to Zombies: What Monsters Mean to Us