The medieval Icelandic sagas depict a range of standard avenues by which adolescent males can show their development towards adulthood, including autonomous sea journeys and displays of legislative or martial attainment. Another activity that seems to bear initiatory significance is that of premarital and strictly temporary sexual intercourse with trolls. This chapter analyses four iterations of this motif, specifically as it appears in Örvar-Odds saga, Kjalnesinga saga, Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra, and Ketils saga hængs. In each of these texts, the juvenile hero leaves his human community, goes off into the wilderness and has a tryst with a troll-woman, before returning and, usually immediately, marrying a human bride. Though he develops a dominant sexual role during the act of intercourse itself, the hero fails to show initiative at several crucial points. Fascinatingly, it is members of the troll household, including the ‘temporary troll lover’ herself, who compensate for this deficiency in motivation. In three of these sagas, the trolls actively encourage the protagonist's use and abandonment of his supernatural mistress, arguably exonerating him from the potentially negative social and emotional consequences of his actions. By thus pardoning him, these texts present such affairs as acceptable and innocuous forms of sexual initiation, which facilitate the heroes’ development of dominant masculinity. These episodes might reveal medieval considerations of adolescent and/or premarital sexual experimentation in a purely abstract or imaginative sense, including as a male sexual fantasy. However, considering the sexual practices that seem to have existed around the time of these sagas’ composition and consumption, I will further argue that these episodes might expose perspectives on the contemporaneous or remembered custom of premarital concubinage. However, Ketils saga hængs paints a significantly different picture. In its portrayal of the emotional impact of premarital affairs on both partners, as well as its refusal to exonerate Ketill for his profligate behaviour, this saga questions the efficacy and equitability of this model as an avenue toward male sexual maturation.

The broader motif of sex with troll-women has been studied most influentially by John McKinnell.