For several years, Internet users have been subject to the statement that the Finns call Mozarella the meat of the muri-trolls. We decided to check if this is so.
In social networks, a collage of two pictures is popular: a photo of Mozarella’s ball and images of a troll mumm with a frightened expression on his face. “I just found out that in Finland, Mozarella is called the meat of the mummy-trolls. My life will never be the same, ”users of social networks sign this collage. Such posts can be found, for example, in Telegram, X, Facebook And "VKontakte ".
Moomy-Trolli - The characters of the books of the Finnish writer Tove Jansson. An illustrations for her works, first published in the middle of the 20th century, she painted herself. Thanks to these drawings, readers learned that the Moomi Trolls are a rounded creatures with white skin remotely similar to hippos.
The posts mentioned above go back to one English -language source: post User Twitter (now X) Tom Walton (@edgeblend) of September 13, 2020. Russian -speaking bloggers use the same pictures, and also almost literally translate the signature.
Nevertheless, the publication of Walton is not the primary source of history about sarcastic Finnish slang. In numerous discussions of this topic on Reddit (for example, here or here) Users from Finland and Sweden (Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish, and books about mummies are written in Swedish) converge that in everyday speech Mozarella does not compare mummar meat, this is simply a “bearded” and not a very funny joke. Moreover, in this way they joke not only about Mozarella, but also about any white cheese - for example, Halumi, Lapland Leipayuusto And even Grain cottage cheese (He, accordingly, becomes a minced meat from the muri-trolls).
Swedish journalist Sydsvenskan Patrick Lundberg in 2011 suggestedthat the beginning of the jokes about the meat of the muri-trolls was laid by the Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Peter Miklitz. In your essay "A holiday with mummy trolls”, Published in 2008,, ridicurating the stereotypical Finnish patriotism, wrote:“ Which of us does not have happy children's memories associated with mummies-all these feasts, when the whole family, relatives and friends gathered around the muri-troll to celebrate the birthday of a grandmother or grandmother, graduation from an older brother or sister or some other important event? A pause in stressed everyday life and get together for a delicious moom-troll is a family tradition that my wife Gittan-Lollan-Gullan-Millan-Kikkan considers it important to convey to our children. Joint eating the troll gives an unsurpassed feeling of unity. ” Further, Makvitz talks in detail about how to cook mumm-trolls. True, he recommended frying them on a spit, like a ham or a Christmas goose, but the snow-white mummi-trolls are still poorly associated with real meat (which you can’t say about white cheese).
In favor of the version expressed by Lundberg, the fact that “verified” was not able to find any earlier mention of mummi-trolls on the Internet-neither in the Swedish nor in the Finnish language (which, of course, does not exclude the fact that earlier the joke could only appear in oral speech). Its oldest mention in open sources, which we were able to find, dates back to 2010. The editors of the Finnish site for parents Kaksplus asked its readers the question: ""What can I say to children if they eat too much mozzarella?"One of the answers read:" What is the meat of mummies-trolls. I was advised by this acquaintance. The terrible thought, in fact, is good that my children are already big. ” Later, jokes about the meat and minced meat of the Moomin trolls began to appear in Finnish and Swedish social networks more or less regularly. Sometimes they fell into English -speaking publications. In 2018, one such fast On Twitter, he scored almost 9,000 reposts (more than Walton's tweet), but outside the social network he remained almost unnoticed. But Walton paid attention to the popular (more than 500,000 subscribers) satirical community Very Finnish Problems on Facebook and Placed His screenshot on his page. Since then, the administrators of the group have repeatedly repeated this publication, and each time it called a new wave of reposts.
Thus, in Finland (and Sweden), Mozarella (and not only this type of cheese) is really called the meat of mumm-trolls, but quite rarely and only as a joke.
Photo on the cover: Collage of Tom Walton
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