NOTE: If you're having trouble getting this to work, try renaming the mesh from troll.nif to blacktroll.nif. Some people seem to be experiencing errors with the mesh from the original mod, and this will fix it.


So, as a Norwegian person playing an American game based on Nordic culture, what bothers me the most about this game? The horned helmets? The phony accents? The Nordic NPCs that have names of the wrong gender?
Nope, it's the trolls. The damned weird-looking Hollywood style trolls that have virtually nothing in common with their folklore origins. If you showed Skyrim's three-eyed gorillas to any person from a Nordic country, they would not recognise them as trolls, and that has annoyed me for a while.

So, Norway is known as "the land of trolls", trolls are very important in our culture, and tacky-looking troll figurines are our number one most common souvenir, so I feel it's my duty to shape up these trolls into something more worthy of the name.


Quite understandably, people who aren't from Scandinavia tend to get the wrong idea when they hear that trolls are an incredibly varied creature in terms of appearance. While it's true that trolls can be big or small, ugly or pretty, stupid or wise, have five heads or only one, there are still some very strict rules on what a troll is and isn't. All trolls in Scandinavian folklore are depicted as being covered in plants, and they always have big noses and big ears. Now, these noses can be pointy or wide, and their ears can stand up like bunny ears or hang down like, well, different bunny ears, but all trolls have these two features.



Swedish and Danish trolls are often depicted with tails and long hair, while Norwegian trolls usually don't have tails and are classically shown as being so big that trees grow on them.


Trolls of Scandinavian folklore are not just big ugly monsters. They are not ogres, and they are not simply man-eating giants. They are the embodiment of nature, and symbolise everything that makes nature dangerous and scary. This is why they're always covered in vegetation, so they blend in and can't be seen until they're right on top of you. Trolls also usually turn to stone in daylight, but not all of them do.
Trolls live for a very long time, thousands of years in many stories. Therefore they're usually depicted as wrinkly and bearded, unless they're female, in which case they have saggy breasts that are so long they can toss them over their shoulders.



I based this texture mostly on Norwegian trolls because they're a lot more primitive and violent than the Swedish and Danish ones, which seemed fitting since the trolls of Skyrim are very hostile and animal-like.
Like I said, trolls are supposed to have large noses, but since I had to rely on a pre-existing mesh, these won't have that, but at least it's more than just the nostrils of the vanilla trolls.
Trolls in general are usually much bigger than the ones seen in Skyrim, so I highly recommend using a mod like Bigger Trolls alongside this for the full effect.

This is only a retexture of the dds file, so you have to download Classic Arena Trolls first: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49473
Install that one first, and then overwrite with my file.