Moominblogger
After a first volume that only partly relates to the main Moomin story (The Moomins and the Great Flood, 1945) Tove Jansson published eight Moomin novels, illustrating them all herself: Comet in Moominland (1946: original title Kometjakten, literally ‘comet-hunt’); Finn Family Moomintroll (1948: originally titled Trollkarlens hatt, ‘The Magician’s Hat’ — this being the first volume to appear in English translation, the UK publishers took the bizarre decision to remind potential purchasers of Swiss Family Robinson, a connection entirely unlicensed by Jansson’s text, but hoping thereby to boost sales; and yet this title has persisted in anglophone countries); then The Exploits of Moominpappa (1950 Muminpappans bravader); Moominsummer Madness (1954 Farlig midsommar, ‘midsummer danger’); Moominland Midwinter (1957 Trollvinter); Tales from Moominvalley (1962 Det osynliga barnet, ‘the invisible child’); Moominpappa at Sea (1965 Pappan och havet) and finally Moominvalley in November (1970 Sent i November, ‘Late November’).
The Moomins are trolls, those same beings that are familiar from Scandinavian legend, although Jansson’s trolls are a particular tribe: neither frightening nor predatory, but rather epitomes of a kind of welcoming softness: Jansson chose the name mumin (transliterated into English as ‘moomin’ to avoid Anglophones calling them mummins) because she considered the letters ‘m’ and ‘u’ the softest in speech, and her drawings show rounded, large-snouted, snow-white creatures who are soft without being flabby.
Moominmamma wears a red-white striped apron, and Moominpappa wears a top-hat. The books’ main character, their child Moomintroll, wears nothing. His best friend, Snufkin, is a humanoid of indeterminate age, a person somehow at once a wise old man and a quirky child, who wears a green robe and large-brimmed felt hat, smokes a pipe and sometimes plays a squeezebox. He is something like a wizard, just as Moomintroll is something like a hobbit. Moomintroll has a kind of on-off girlfriend, called Snork Maiden, identifiable by a spread of blonde hair on her big white snouty head, although there is not really any persistent romantic focus in the stories. Rather Moomintroll and his friends — including a kangaroo-like creature called Sniff, a boisterous human girl in a red dress called Little My, a silk monkey and a witch’s granddaughter — play and have adventures in the landscape of Moominvalley and beyond. Critics note how Jansson worked autobiography into fantasy: Moomintroll is a genderswapped version of herself and Snufkin is based upon her onetime lover Atos Wirtanen, although it’s also possible — there is no contradiction here — to read Snufkin as Jansson herself, and various characters as Tuulikki Pietilä, her eventual life-partner. Jansson was a queer woman in a country in which homosexuality was illegal (we in the UK think of the Scandis as progressive, but being gay was not decriminalised in Finland until 1971, and was treated as a mental illness until 1981). Jansson’s private code-word for other lesbians was ‘ghosts’, and there are ghosts, of a sort, haunting Moominworld, called Hattifatteners — floating sock-shaped creatures made in some manner out of electricity. Hattifatteners move in crowds seeking constantly to reach the horizon that constantly evades them; but there is nothing scary or alarming about these ghosts, who drift through the books always on their way somewhere. They recharge their vital force during storms of thunder-and-lightning, and at that time they may inflict electrical burns on people around them, although always inadvertently.
The charm of Jansson’s fantasy realm is how inclusive it is, an extended family in which diversity and eccentricity and nonconformity always finds a home. Not that Moominworld is denatured or over-safe. There are dangers — the approaching comet in the second novel, the great storm in the eighth — as well as various hostile creatures like crocodiles and bears and insects. But the heart of the novels is a tolerant, hospitable, eccentric and slightly shambolic extended family, a place where children (which is to say: people, for we are all children) can play, from which they can venture out to explore and adventure and to which they can always return.
Comet in Moominland owes something to Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s early Tintin book, L’Étoile mystérieuse (‘The Shooting Star’, 1942): a comet approaches Moominworld, threatens to end the world but in the end simply misses and life goes on — although Jansson moves the story from Hergé’s ligne clair realisation of actual France into a softer mode of sketching a fantastical version of Finland. Still, towards the story’s end, as the comet looms blindingly-bright low in the sky, Jansson’s illustrations take on a Peake-y intensity: characters stalk across a huge Gothic stage-set, starkly spotlit. Though there is a profound welcomeness about the Moomin novels, and a beautiful hospitality, they are rarely cosy. The edge of the strange and terrifying that fantasy permits Jansson flavours the novels’ sweetness perfectly.
An episode in the middle of Comet in Moominland, in which Moomintroll and Sniff travel to ‘the Lonely Mountain’, pass underneath it, encounter eagles and chance upon a golden ring, shows that Jansson has read The Hobbit. But though Tolkien was very interested in Scandinavia, Jansson, an actual Scandinavian, takes a rather different approach to the matter of fantasy. She is less interested in warrior culture, and her ethos of heroism is small-scale, familial and amicable, rather than Tolkien’s more belligerent and grand-moral-drama sense of it. And yet, by centring his two big heroic fantasy texts on hobbits, Tolkien shows that he shares an understanding with Jansson about what really mattered.
A couple of the middle Moomin books don’t seem to me to rise to the level of the others. In Moominsummer Madness (1954) Moominvalley floods and Jansson’s characters take refuge in a large theatre that comes floating by, eventually using the stage and props to put on a play of their own: like a children’s story plotted by Ingmar Bergman. And the short stories of Tales from Moominvalley (1962: original title Det osynliga barnet, ‘the invisible child’) are of variable quality. But the opening of Moominland Midwinter (1957) is one of those deeply penetrating visions of solitude that speak to the child’s simultaneous terror and joy at the prospect of being utterly alone. It is one of those pieces of literature I read as a child that has really stuck with me. In this novel we discover that Moomins hibernate during winter months, although on this one occasion Moomintroll, woken by a stray moonbeam, suffers hibernation-insomnia, and spends the start of the book alone in a dark, frozen world.
But the story does not go on in this isolatory manner. Rather Moomintroll finds consolation with his friend Little My, who introduces him to sledging down snowy hills (on a tea tray) and building snowmen and fun is had. But it is the opening that breathes its chilly wonder across the windowpane of my childish imagination.
Something similar happens in Moominpappa at Sea (1965). Moominpappa leads his family to a abandoned lighthouse in a distant sea. He desires to become a lighthouse keeper but finds himself unable to mend the tower’s lantern. The group faces a hostile sea, a barren land, dangerous ants, and overcome it all, eventually mending the lighthouse and reinstating its former keeper. Veronica della Dora, who discusses the novel in her cultural history of lighthouses in art and fiction [Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse (Reaktion 2022)] notes how rare this: in other stories lighthouses are enigmatic remotenesses — Woolf’s To The Lighthouse — or sinister, even nightmarish locations: think of the 2019 Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson movie The Lighthouse. But, characteristically for her, Jansson uses a lighthouse to tell a story about healing, harmony and illumination. As he heads back to Moominvalley at the end of the tale Moominpappa takes one last look:
He came to the edge of the water and stood watching the breakers. There was the sea — his sea — going past, wave after wave, foaming recklessly, raging furiously, but, somehow, tranquil at the same time. All Moominpappa’s thoughts and speculations vanished. He felt completely alive from the tips of his ears to the tip of his tail. This was a moment to live to the full.
When he turned to look at the island — his island — he saw a beam’ of light shining on the sea, moving out towards the horizon and then coming back towards the shore in long, even waves’ [Moominpappa at Sea (transl. by Kingsley Hart), 224]
Finally there is the autumnal Moominvalley in November (1970), a beautiful though mournful book. A group of characters — Mymble, Grandpa-Grumble, Toft, Fillyjonk and the Hemulen — come to the Moomin’s blue house to find the family all away. They occupy the place waiting for their return. Unlike Godot the Moomins do come back, but only at the very end of the story, and the bulk of the story relates the characters’ sometimes fractious interactions. Toft is an orphan, and in mourning; Fillyjonk becomes obsessed with putrefaction and decay. Out if the illustrations in a microbiology textbook they find in the house the two somehow summon a gigantic bacterium, ‘the Creature’, that grows and sparks: ‘And it grew and grew, and now there was more lightning, white and violet! The Creature became bigger and bigger. It became so big that it almost didn’t need any family …’ But as a projection of their own bereaved status, the Creature embodies the exhilaration and terror of familial separation and deprivation, and also, in shrinking down again, the inescapable need for reconnection and belonging.
Toft slumped over the book with his paws clutching his hair and went on describing things to himself, desperately and in a disordered fashion, for he knew that the Creature was getting smaller and smaller the whole time and couldn’t really fend for itself. [Moominvalley in November (transl. Kingsley Hart), 82]
Frank Cottrell Boyce calls this ‘the wisest and most moving book about mourning I’ve ever read’. Indeed Boyce gets to the heart of what makes these books special to so many people:
In most fiction, family is what you escape from if you want to fulfil yourself. For Jansson, family is a place of tolerance, where we can fail and become ourselves. Her experience of growing up gay is there in Snufkin, who is all the more loved for being different. [Frank Cottrell Boyce, ‘Five Things to Learn from the Moomins’ The Guardian (25 December 2015)]
Though she herself valued her other writing, and artwork, it was the Moomin books that made Jansson, as Boel Westin says ‘a megastar in the 1950s’. Indeed, she sometimes resented the disproportionate popularity of these works:
The Moomins were a huge commercial hit, spawning dolls, clothes, soaps, mugs, theme parks and made her famous around the world. But her creation wore her down: she ‘vomited Moomins’, she said. Writing the Moomin books, and, from 1954, drawing a weekly Moomin cartoon strip for the London Evening News, took her away from her other work. ‘By the end I was drawing with hatred.’ Even writing to friends became a chore: ‘I have lost my enthusiasm for writing letters after all the years of Moomin business.’ [Emma Hogan, ‘I Dream of Islands Every Night’, London Review of Books 42:18 (24 September 2020), 20]
As an adult, Jansson knew that earning money was needful, though she somewhat resented that it was through these titles that the money came, rather than from her other ‘grown-up’ art and literature. But she was, again as we all are, also a child. Here’s Boel Westin again:
The best known and most frequently quoted of the few things she wrote about her own profession is her shrewd essay from 1961, ‘The Deceitful Writer of Children’s Books’. In it she discusses the motive force of writing and presents a portrait of herself that is as far from an innocent Moomin or a cosy Moominmamma as it is possible to get. Hidden behind her books is a self-centred author who writes children’s books as a way of coping with childishness in herself, certainly not to please children. A dangerous writer. A childishness unsuitable for the grown-up world, a writer looking for something that existed in the past, something she wants to create again. In the words of the deceitful author, she wants to describe and experience ‘something lost or unattainable’. The search for this is connected to the arcane secrecy of the Moomin books. It gives form to a certain longing that exists in all of us. It can relate to our attempts to break away from roles or expectations, and to our dreams of becoming someone else or disappearing into some other existence. [Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Work (London: Profile Books 2014), 29]
It is this doubled sense that gives these books, in their reenchantment of disenchanted adulthood via a fantastical recreation of childhood, such purchase. As Fantasy, the Moomin books are less engaged with history in a collective, and more with history in a personal and (we might say) psychotherapeutic, sense. The topography of Moominland is both open-ended and specific, simultaneously a version of Jansson’s actual Finland with its myriad islands and valleys, its blanketing winters and great storms — and a dream realm, hospitable to all. We could say that Jansson entered into her own country as if it were a fairy land forlorn, and not altogether forlorn. I’m reminded of Chesterton. Michael Wood summarises:
‘I have often had a fancy,’ G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy (1908), ‘for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.’ The man would arrive, ‘armed to the teeth and talking by signs’, and try to plant the British flag on the Brighton Pavilion. A little later Chesterton says: ‘I am that man in a yacht. I discovered England.’ He likes this trope and returns to it in detail in The Everlasting Man (1925), adding the variant story of the boy who couldn’t recognise the exotic secret of his village until he got far enough away from it. ‘That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any really independent intelligence today.’ Home is not only where the heart is, it is our only chance of having a heart. Everything else is an abstraction.
Only by understanding this proposition ‘can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it’; realise the full excitement of the ‘pursuit of the obvious’; acknowledge that ‘ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary.’
This seems to me to go to the heart of Fantasy as a mode, not just Jansson’s wonderful homely-wondrous novels but the whole mode, at least in its best form. What beautiful novels these are.
