Tove Jansson: The Woman Who Built Moominvalley
In the summer of 1944, while Helsinki was being bombed, a 30-year-old painter was drawing covers for the satirical magazine Garm that mocked Hitler to his face. Tove Jansson had already put a small, big-nosed troll in the corner of some of those drawings as a kind of signature. Within a decade that doodle would be read daily by 20 million people, and within a lifetime it would become the most valuable thing Finnish culture has ever exported that doesn’t involve a sauna.
The artist before the trolls
Jansson was born in Helsinki in 1914 into the city’s Swedish-speaking artistic class. Her father Viktor was a sculptor, her mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson a sought-after illustrator, and the family assumption was that Tove would be a painter, a serious one. She studied in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris, exhibited through the 1930s and always considered painting her real work. The Moomins began almost as an argument: family legend says the first Moomin was sketched on an outhouse wall after a quarrel with her brother about Kant.
The war changed the register. Finland’s wars with the Soviet Union left Jansson depressed and furious, and her Garm covers from those years remain some of the sharpest anti-fascist cartooning of the period. The first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was written during the war and published in 1945 to almost no attention. It reads now as exactly what it was: a story about refugees looking for home, written by someone watching Europe burn.
The strip that conquered the world
Comet in Moominland followed in 1946 and Finn Family Moomintroll in 1948, and when the latter appeared in English in 1950 the family found its audience. Then came the offer that made the Moomins global: in 1954 London’s Evening News commissioned a daily Moomin comic strip. At its peak it ran in around 40 countries. Jansson wrote and drew it herself for five years, found the deadline treadmill unbearable and handed it to her brother Lars in 1960 so she could get back to books and painting.
The best of the novels came after she escaped the strip. Moominland Midwinter in 1957 introduced Too-Ticky, modelled on the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä, who became Jansson’s partner for the rest of her life. The two spent nearly three decades of summers on Klovharun, a bare island in the Gulf of Finland with a one-room cabin and no electricity, which tells you most of what you need to know about the Finnish idea of luxury. In 1966 Jansson received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the closest thing children’s literature has to a Nobel. After Moominvalley in November closed the series in 1970 she spent her remaining three decades writing fiction for adults, including The Summer Book, which quietly became a classic of its own. She died in 2001.
The Moomin books, and where to start
People asking about Moomin books usually mean one of two things: where a child should start, or which one the adult should secretly read on the train. The answers differ.
For a first Moomin book, start with Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland. They are the sunniest and most adventure-shaped of the novels and the reason the series took off. The Moomins and the Great Flood is for completists, a short and strange prologue best read once you already care.
For adults, the consensus masterpiece is Moominland Midwinter, in which Moomintroll wakes from hibernation into a frozen, unfamiliar world and has to make peace with it. It is a book about depression and resilience wearing a snowsuit. Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November are the late, melancholy ones, closer to Bergman than to bedtime, and all the better for it. Tales from Moominvalley collects the short stories, including The Invisible Child, which has made more adults cry than any nine-page story has a right to. The comic strips, collected in handsome editions, are the funniest version of the whole universe and the easiest entry for reluctant readers.
The tradition she started never stopped
Jansson made Finnish children’s literature a serious business, and Finland took the hint. Mauri Kunnas turned Finnish history into dog-populated bestsellers that every Finnish child owns. Sinikka and Tiina Nopola gave the country Risto Räppääjä. And the tradition keeps producing: the newest generation includes Anna Kurkijärvi-Willans’s Charlotta ja Seikkailu Nallemaassa, in which a courageous and imaginative eleven-year-old called Charlotta is whisked off to Teddyland with her cheeky teddy bear Nana, only to find the fairytale world in chaos — a theme park is being built on top of the bears’ homes, the forests are coming down, and the wrong kinds of toys are being banished by the cunning Viola Vanamo. It is a story about courage, hope and the idea that every toy, like every person, is equally precious — a premise Jansson, who spent her life defending small creatures against large forces, would have recognised immediately.
Moominvalley meanwhile has become an industry, with a theme park in Naantali, a museum in Tampere and a licensing operation that would astonish the woman who drew trolls on an outhouse wall. The books are still the point though. Start with the comet. Stay for the winter.
