Yrsa Fjellheim

Yrsa Fjellheim is a young Norwegian troll from a small mountain community in western Norway, where trolls are neither mysterious monsters nor particularly interested in being mysterious monsters. Her family is quiet, practical, and deeply attached to the landscape around them, and Yrsa grew up surrounded by people who could identify local plants, rocks, streams, and weather patterns with considerably greater enthusiasm than most families devote to professional sports.

That upbringing developed into an academic interest in the natural world. Now in her early twenties, Yrsa is pursuing graduate work in environmental science, specializing in forest ecology and watershed conservation. She's patient, observant, and genuinely loves research, including the parts other people consider tedious. Yrsa doesn't mind spending hours measuring, cataloguing, comparing, or reading papers to answer a question that occurred to her three weeks earlier. She finds knowing things enormously satisfying.

She met Ingrid Stormdottir while participating in a university field project in Iceland. Ingrid was assisting with local field access and transportation, and the two initially bonded over the landscape, plant identification, and Ingrid's ability to turn a straightforward survey day into something considerably more energetic than the itinerary suggested. Yrsa discovered that Ingrid was exhausting in a way she rather liked.

Through Ingrid she soon met Sigrun Skadi, and the three became an unlikely but remarkably stable friend group. Yrsa sits comfortably between her friends' extremes. She shares Sigrun's preference for preparation and careful thought, but she's much more willing to be talked into Ingrid's spontaneous adventures once she's established that nobody is likely to die. Ingrid provides momentum, Sigrun provides practical common sense, and Yrsa provides the increasingly detailed information everyone realizes they should probably have requested before leaving home.

Yrsa's academic nature doesn't make her stuffy. She's quietly funny, enjoys hiking and traveling, and can become surprisingly animated when somebody asks about a subject she loves. She also wears an iron troll cross, an old symbol once supposedly used to protect humans from trolls. Yrsa wears hers because she thinks this is hilarious.

Her friends have learned that when Yrsa says, “I looked into it,” what follows may be anything from three sentences to a forty-page PDF.