Trow (folklore)

A trow (/traʊ/, also trowe, drow, or dtrow) is a malignant or mischievous fairy or spirit in the folkloric traditions of the Orkney and Shetland islands. Trows may be regarded as monstrous giants at times, or quite the opposite, short-statured fairies dressed in grey.

Trows are nocturnal creatures, like the troll of Scandinavian legend with which the trow shares many similarities. They venture out of their 'trowie knowes' (earthen mound dwellings) solely in the evening, and often enter households as the inhabitants sleep. Trows traditionally have a fondness for music, and folktales tell of their habit of kidnapping musicians or luring them to their dens.

Insular Scots trow and drow are inherited words from Norn, the Old Norse dialect spoken in the Northern Isles before being driven out by Scots.

Draugr and troll have historically been used synonymously to some degree, along with related terms, like "mound dweller" (Old Norse: haugbúi), "the dead living within its mound (tomb)", which subsequently became a word for wight, nisse, brownie, and thereof, in descendant forms: Norwegian: haugbonde; Shetlandic: hjogfinni ("mound-found"); Orcadian: hogboon, hogboy; Lincolnshire: shag-boy.

The trow [trʌu], in the Scots language, is defined as a "sprite or fairy" of mischievous nature in dictionaries of Scots, particularly Orcadian and Shetland dialects.

The trow is also called drow under its variant spelling in the Insular dialects of Scots; the "drow" being mentioned by Walter Scott. However, the term "drow" could also be used in the sense of "the devil" in Orkney, a motif also found in Scanian descendants of draugr, and thereof.

The word drow also occurs in the Shetland Norn language, where it means "hidden people" (troll-folk), a loose race or conglomeration of elfs, wights, gnomes (nisses, brownies), or trolls, etc, in Nordic folklore, or "ghost".

As drow is not a Norse language spelling, linguist Jakob Jakobsen proposed it was taken from the common (Scots) term "trow" altered to drow by assimilation with a Norn descendant of Old Norse draugr (cf. Norwegian: drau, 1729). The reconstructed Shetland word would be *drog if it did descend from Old Norse draugr, but this is unattested, nor was it adopted into the Nynorn vocabulary to supersede the known form.