The History of Troll Dolls

Thomas Dam was living in Gjøl, Denmark during the postwar economic downturn. After suddenly losing his job as a baker, he struggled to support his family by shoveling snow, but made funny wooden carvings at night to entertain his children. His wife convinced him to try selling the figures in the nearby city of Aalborg and it turned out that people loved them. He soon became a working sculptor and in 1956 he was commissioned by a Swedish department store to create a large Santa Claus figure. He also created an accompanying window display featuring tiny sculpted Christmas elves fitted with mattress springs inside their small bodies so that they would bounce. Customers were so enthralled that they asked to purchase the little dolls and Dam sold out his entire stock. The demand for his dolls didn’t slow down, so he began altering the materials he used to facilitate faster production and the figures themselves morphed from elves to little trolls. In 1961, Dam began using PVC to make his troll dolls, and the following year, they became an international sensation. By the mid-1960s, the Sears catalog was not only advertising the troll dolls, but also exclusive playsets and other accessories. Dam’s toys encouraged kids to rub their trolls’ brightly colored hair for good luck and were originally called Good Luck Trolls (though they were marketed as Wishniks in the United States). Coinciding with hippie aesthetics, troll dolls became massively popular, so much so that unbranded copycats began to pop up. (A loophole was closed and Dam’s full copyright on troll dolls was restored in 1996; many retailers were subsequently sued for infringement.) Eventually, the craze faded, but when the original fans of troll dolls began having children of their own, the toys became popular once more. In fact, a couple named Steven and Eva Stark debuted their own Norfin line of officially licensed Dam troll dolls at the 1983 New York Toy Fair and collecting the figures became popular once again throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ace’s Treasure Trolls, one of the many versions of the toys that became popular at the time, even added a now-iconic rhinestone belly button to each one. Troll dolls faded from the zeitgeist again until DreamWorks acquired licensing rights from Dam’s company and released the movie Trolls in 2013, followed by Trolls World Tour in 2020. Today, troll dolls continue to be popular with kids and adults alike and are also avidly collected by many enthusiasts.