Plot
The troll is trying to convince Sir Mannelig (Swedish: Herr Mannelig) to marry her. She showers him with gifts but he refuses her, because he realizes that she is not a Christian woman but a troll (a Satanic creature). She is desperate about her failure, because winning Sir Mannelig would have "freed her of her torment" (presumably of the curse of living as a troll).
Read more about this topic: Herr Mannelig
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)