TOVE JANSSON · ASTRID LINDGREN
The Moomins and the Great Flood; Comet in
Moominland; Finn Family Moomintroll; Pippi
Longstocking; Karlsson on the Roof; Karlsson
Flies Again; The World’s Best Karlsson; The
Bullerby Children; The Children on Troublemaker Street;
Lotta’s Bike; Never Violence
HALF A CENTURY BEFORE ADULT BOOKSHOPS WERE hit by the vogue for Scandi crime, Nordic children’s stories were establishing themselves in the English nursery canon. That was down to two writers, both of whom started arriving in English in the middle of the century: the Finn Tove Jansson (1914–2001) and the Swede Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002). These were both writers whose stories went worldwide and whose characters, as was said of Barrie’s Peter Pan, “impregnate the collective mind of [their] audience […] are immortal by election.”
Jansson’s Moomin stories are among those cultural artifacts where the iconic characters have escaped from the stories in which they first appeared. Every late-twentieth-century child knew what a Moomin looked like even if they had never heard of Tove Jansson: you’d have had a Moomin pencil case, Moomin pyjamas or a Moomin lunchbox, or watched your parents remove a pie from the oven with Moomin oven gloves.
Jansson was described, accurately, by one critic as “an artist with two native languages”: words and pictures. The vibe of her world, its physical oddity, is primarily conveyed by the images with which she accompanied the texts (and, indeed, she turned the Moomins into comic-strips with considerable success – syndicated to 120 newspapers and reaching twelve million readers). Moominvalley, accompanied by Jansson’s own illustrations, offered a vast menagerie of benign oddities: that famous soft, hippo-like family of trolls and their friends and associates in what you might see as a psychedelic Nordic version of Hundred Acre Wood.
Jansson – who had started her career, and still thought of herself, as a serious painter and artist – said later that the characters had come to her “when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely… I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign – and possible.”* The series brought her fame and fortune but she came to resent the way it eclipsed her other artistic work: “Those damn Moomins,” she wrote privately. “I don’t want to hear about them any more. I could vomit on the Moomintrolls.”†
Jansson had grown up in an artistic household – her Finnish father was a sculptor and her Swedish mother an illustrator – and had drawn from a very young age. She studied art, as a young woman, in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris. But the war, which came when she was twenty-nine – the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1939 – was a rupture. Her brother Per Olov was away fighting, and she lived with the constant anxiety that he might not return.
But as much as her books aimed to present a world, like Milne’s, quite apart from and a refuge from our own, Jansson didn’t quite manage it. Moominvalley was more freighted with real-world anxieties than you’d suppose. The first two books – The Moomins and the Great Flood and Comet in Moominland – deal with apocalyptic disasters and picture their characters fleeing through a scary forest as refugees or anticipating the wipe-out of everything they know. Her friend Boel Westin said: “The war had a great effect on Tove and her family […] Tove’s anxiety and grief are embedded in the first two books.”*
The third – which was the first to go into English, as Finn
Family Moomintroll, in 1950 – can be peculiarly dark in tone too. The treasures Moomintroll and Snork Maiden gather in a cheerful afternoon’s beachcombing – among them a lifejacket and a ship’s figurehead – are plainly the flotsam of a shipwreck. Terror is a near-constant: “Sniff lay under his blanket and screamed”; “Moomintroll stared into the darkness […] Moomintroll was terrified and woke Snufkin.” There’s a nightmarish encounter with a blind and deaf species of ambulant grey-white mushroom creatures called Hattifatteners:
And between the trees came still more Hattifatteners, with their staring eyes and silent tread. ‘Go away!’ screamed the Hemulen: ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ But still they came silently nearer. Then the Hemulen picked up his skirts and began to climb up the pole. It was nasty and slippery, but terror gave him un-Hemulenish strength…
If Moominvalley can be said to be dreamlike, let us admit that it’s often a cheese-dream. The magical Hobgoblin’s Hat they find by chance transforms eggshells into lovely, bouncing clouds and river water into raspberry juice; but it also causes a poisonous plant to grow though the Moomins’ home like a jungle; and it transforms Moomintroll into an unrecognizable parody of himself with all his fat parts grown thin and vice versa. He thinks the others are playing a game when they don’t recognize him, and that tips over into panic – the spell is only broken at the last minute by a mother’s love:
‘Isn’t there anyone who believes me?’ Moomintroll pleaded. ‘Look carefully at me, mother. You must know your own Moomintroll.’
Moominmamma looked carefully. She looked into his frightened eyes for a very long time, and then she said quietly: ‘Yes, you are my Moomintroll.’
And at the same moment he began to change. His ears, eyes, and tail began to shrink, and his nose and tummy grew, until at last he was his old self again.
‘It’s all right now, my dear,’ said Moominmamma. ‘You see, I shall always know you whatever happens.’
The characters, too, are prone to more in the way of adult existential anxiety than you normally associate with the inhabitants of a children’s fantasy (Jansson’s first drawing of what became Moomintroll was made after an argument with one of her brothers about the philosopher Immanuel Kant). There’s Snufkin, with his “night wandering.” When we first meet the studious Hemulen he is “in despair” at having completed his stamp collection – “It’s finished. There isn’t a stamp or an error that I haven’t collected. Not one. What shall I do now?” The philosophical Muskrat longs to “retire to a deserted spot and live a life of loneliness and peace, giving up everything.”
Jansson herself, in later life, ambivalent about the success of her most famous creations, did something not dissimilar – she retreated with her life-partner Tuulikki Pietilä to a tiny house they built on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Finland. She had male lovers in her youth, but went to what she called “the ghost side” in the early 1950s – around the time the Moomins were really taking off. She said of her lesbianism, then still illegal in Finland, “I’m finally experiencing myself as a woman where love is concerned, it’s bringing me peace and ecstasy for the first time.”
Astrid Lindgren – who started her career as a local newspaper journalist and secretary (and whose first child was born, scandalously, out of wedlock after an affair with her editor), ended it as one of the most celebrated Swedes on the face of the planet. Her funeral in 2002 was attended by the king and the prime minister, and she gives her name to what’s still the most well-remunerated prize for children’s literature anywhere in the world. They put her portrait on banknotes.
Lindgren wrote books for all ages and in several genres, and is one of the most translated authors ever, with tens of millions of books sold. The Bullerby Children was a realist depiction of family life in rural Sweden, and The Children on Troublemaker Street, relating the adventures of a wilful toddler called Lotta and her older siblings, included both chapter books and picture books (Lotta’s Bike is a classic of velocipedal peril). It’s her more surreal work that really made her reputation in the UK, though.
The Pippi Longstocking series, the first of which was published in 1945, describes a little girl whose exuberantly anarchic adventures offer a vision of female agency – and female agency on its own defiant terms. Pippi is nine years old and lives all by herself in the dilapidated villa villekulla on the outskirts of a tiny little town. “She had no mother or father, which was actually quite nice, because it meant that no one could tell her that she had to go to bed just when she was having most fun. And no one could make her take cod liver oil then she would rather eat sweets.”
Pippi lives from the off outside any family structure, and outside the frame of social convention – and, unlike Peter Pan, she uncomplicatedly loves it. She imagines her mother, who died when she was young, looking down on her from heaven (“Pippi would often wave to her and say, ‘Don’t worry! I can always look after myself!’”) and believes that her beloved father, who was washed overboard while they were traveling the seas, has washed ashore on a desert island and become “King of the Natives.” Until such time as her dad comes back, Pippi is more than happy alone.
Pippi is rich: she has a great bag of gold coins. Pippi has superpowers: she’s strong enough to lift a horse. Pippi owns, as well as a horse, a pet monkey called Mr Nilsson. And she can do exactly what she likes, always. She has a home-made patchwork dress, long ginger plaits, odd stockings, and oversized shoes. She walks backward, tells eye-stretching fibs about her foreign travels, sleeps with her feet on the pillow and her head under the covers, doesn’t mind looking weird or making a mess, and with her huge strength makes short work of bullies, policemen, burglars, circus strongmen, and representatives of the social services.
She represents, in other words, a fantasy of absolute freedom of action and freedom from convention; and she befriends and entrances her next-door neighbors Tommy and Annika, who are “two very nice, well-mannered and obedient children.” When the children encourage Pippi to attend school, or one of their mother’s coffee mornings (where the women gossip and moan about the inadequacies of their servants), she causes chaos. The child reader is able to look at Pippi from Tommy and Annika’s viewpoint, but also to fantasize about being her. Lindgren, who invented the character to amuse her own daughter Karin when she was ill, said Pippi “represents my own childish longing for a person who has power but does not abuse it.”
Marginally less well known now, but even more original, is another of Lindgren’s series. Karlsson on the Roof (1958) and its sequels Karlsson Flies Again (1977) and The World’s Best Karlsson (1980) – another story of a conventional child whose world is enlarged and disrupted by a magical friendship. In this case it’s with a fat little man who lives outside Smidge’s bedroom window and has a propellor on his back, which is activated when he turns a winder on his tummy. You could see Karlsson as a wickedly ungainly male fairy godmother; an imaginary friend who isn’t imaginary. Karlsson doesn’t so much enter seven-year-old Smidge’s world as elbow his way in, and the comedy of his adventures is in Karlsson’s bumptious and boastful personality. Like Pippi, he brings a touch of anarchy into the “very ordinary apartment building on a very ordinary street” in Stockholm where his child friend lives. Like Pippi, he’s kind-hearted; unlike Pippi, he is a childlike character with the pomposity of an adult.
The stories serve very directly and openly that ancient fantasy: for a child to discover that he or she is, after all, special. Smidge first meets Karlsson toward the end of “one of those difficult days when it wasn’t the least fun being Smidge”: a day when he’s told off for making holes in his trousers, for dawdling home late from school, for meeting a dog and wishing he had a dog but knowing that it was another little boy who would be petting that dog at another home that evening.
Retreating to his room in a sulk, with the grandiose self-pity the parent of any cosseted seven-year-old will recognize, Smidge hears a buzzing noise and soon he sees a “fat little man” flying slowly past his window. After a couple of passes, Karlsson hovers outside the window ledge and greets Smidge with the first of his several catchphrases: “Heysan hopsan.”
By the end of that first meeting, Karlsson has described himself as “the world’s best stunt flyer,” “the world’s best steam engine driver” and “the world’s best motor mechanic” (see also: “the world’s best cockerel painter,” “the world’s best meatball fetcher,” “the world’s best jiggery-poker,” et passim); and, in the course of airily trying to prove the second thing by activating the model steam engine that Smidge is never supposed to use without parental supervision, he has burned the varnish on the bookcase and blown the steam engine to smithereens. Another catchphrase: “A mere trifle!”
As we’ll discover, Karlson’s amour propre is invincible. He’s a fat, clumsy little thing, and causes catastrophe with everything he puts his hand to, but describes himself unfailingly (with only vary slight variations over the course of the books) as “a handsome, highly intelligent, reasonably stout man in my prime.” So Karlson is a very attractive figure – he promises unusual adventures (another catchphrase: “It has to go bang and it has to be fun, otherwise count me out.”); he’s an adult who is a fun special friend; and he’s also someone the child reader can laugh at and even somewhat patronize. Smidge is the sensitive, favored younger child; too old, as Lindgren says, to sit on his mother’s lap but always longing to. If you were of a psychoanalytic cast of mind, you could see Karlsson – with his readiness to fib, his selfishness, his boastfulness, his passive-aggression and greed (he’s always extorting toffees out of Smidge) – as externalizing the childlike qualities and appetites that the well-behaved Smidge would be reluctant to admit to.
Karlsson is a secret, at least until the closing pages of the first book: Smidge’s parents believe him to be an imaginary friend; they are understandably skeptical of the idea that there’s an actual stout man with a propellor on his back living in a tiny house next to the chimney-pot on the roof of their Stockholm townhouse. More fool them.
Lindgren also has an extra-literary place in the annals of childhood. For most of their history, children’s stories have contained beatings and spankings and canings and slipperings and clips round the ear as matters of unremarkable course; children take these on the chin (or the backside) as part of the order of things. Even Pippi Longstocking jokingly alludes to it, when Tommy and Annika ask her “who tells you to go to bed at night” when she has no parents: “I do. First I tell myself once, very nicely, and if I don’t obey, then I tell myself again, very sternly, and if I still don’t obey, then it’s time for a spanking, of course.” There’s a moment in Karlsson Flies Again in which Smidge, put under the temporary care of a formidable housekeeper (his mother is away convalescing, his father is away on business and his siblings have scarlet fever), gets a clip round the ear: “Smidge’s eyes had glazed over. He was on the verge of tears. He had never had a clip round the ear before, and he didn’t like it.”
Lindgren didn’t like it either – and she leveraged her fame as an author to end corporal punishment in her native Sweden. Receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1978, she made a speech that has come to be known as “Never violence.” In it, she argued that the violence of adults was inculcated in childhood – and that the non-violent raising of children was the first step to eliminating the violence and bloodshed that plagues the wider world. In it, she told a personal story:
When I was about twenty years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking – the first of his life. And she told him that he would have to go outside and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, ‘Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.’
All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy onto her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself for ever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because violence begins in the nursery – one can raise children into violence.*
She felt strongly about this. When she submitted her speech ahead of the ceremony, the organizers asked her not to give it on the grounds it would be too controversial; she refused to accept the award unless she was allowed to make the speech. It was published that year in book form in Germany and Sweden, and the following year, as a direct result, corporal punishment of children was banned in Sweden – the first such law anywhere in the world.
What came out of the war years, and the decade or two that followed, wasn’t just nostalgia for a lost connection with the past. There were also the first stirrings of a literature that sought not to flee from the post-war world but, in some sense, to re-enchant it. The 1960s were to see the arrival of a cohort of fantasy and genre writers who sought to bring the magic and terror of fairytales, and the real lives of children in a world they would recognize, closer together than ever before.
* Letter to Eva Konikoff, 23 February 1950, in Letters From Tove, Boel Westin and Helen Svensson (eds), Sarah Death (trans), (Sort of Books, 2019), [p].
† Private note, quoted in Mark Bosworth, “Tove Jansson: Love, War and the Moomins,” BBC Magazine, 2014: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26529309.
* Ibid.
* Speech by Astrid Lindgren to the German Book Trade, 27 October 1978.