Moominvalley: Tove Jansson's World for Outsiders

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Text to type: Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1914, and she died in 2001. Her life covered almost the whole twentieth century, with all its wars and changes. She grew up in an artistic family. Her mother was an illustrator and her father was a sculptor, so drawing and making things were normal, everyday activities in her home. Tove was a Swedish-speaking Finn. This is important: Finland has two national languages, Finnish and Swedish, and Tove belonged to the smaller Swedish-speaking minority. She wrote all of her books in Swedish, not in Finnish. In a way, she was already a kind of outsider in her own country, and this feeling appears again and again in her stories.

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Text to type: Before she became famous as an author, Tove was a serious painter and illustrator. She studied art in Helsinki, Stockholm, and Paris, and she painted for her whole life. She often said that painting was her real work. She also drew political cartoons during the Second World War for a magazine called Garm, where she made fun of dictators like Hitler and Stalin. So when she started writing about small, round creatures in a peaceful valley, she was not a naive young woman. She was an adult artist who had seen war, fear, and hate, and who wanted to imagine a kinder world.

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Text to type: The first Moomin book, called The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945, just after the Second World War ended. This is an important detail. Europe was tired, broken, and full of families who had lost their homes. In this small book, a mother Moomin and her child are searching for the missing father, walking through a strange and frightening world of dark forests and rising water. It is a story about being lost and looking for family — exactly what many real people felt in 1945. The next book, Comet in Moominland, came out in 1946. In this story, a huge comet is coming to destroy the world, and the Moomins must travel to find out if they can survive.

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Text to type: Again, the story is gentle, but the fear behind it is real: children in 1946 knew what it was like to hear that the world could end. Then, in 1948, Jansson published Finn Family Moomintroll, which is often the first Moomin book that readers meet today. This one is warmer, funnier, and full of magic hats and small adventures. Together, these three early books built the world of Moominvalley: a place where scary things happen, but where a family and their friends always come home to a lamp in the window and warm soup on the table.

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Text to type: The Moomin stories are famous for their characters, and almost all of them are, in some way, outsiders. At the center is Moomintroll, a young Moomin who is curious, sensitive, and sometimes afraid. He asks the questions that many children and shy adults are afraid to ask: Am I loved? Will my friend come back? What happens if everything changes? His mother, Moominmamma, is calm and warm. She carries a handbag full of useful things and she always has time to listen. For many readers, she is one of the kindest mothers in all of children's literature. Moominpappa is more dramatic. He wears a tall black hat, writes his memoirs, and dreams of adventures on the sea. He can be silly, but he loves his family.

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Text to type: Around this family come the visitors. Snufkin is a quiet, free spirit who travels alone with a green hat and a small tent. He leaves every autumn and returns every spring, and Moomintroll waits for him like we wait for a best friend. Little My is small, sharp, and fierce. She says exactly what she thinks and is never polite just to be nice. There are also stranger creatures: the lonely Groke, who freezes the ground where she sits because no one has ever loved her, and the shy Hattifatteners, who travel in silent groups toward the horizon. Together, these characters show a simple, powerful idea: a good community is not one where everyone is the same, but one where very different people are welcome.

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Text to type: The Moomins did not stay only in books. From 1954, Tove Jansson drew a Moomin comic strip for The Evening News, a big newspaper in London. The strip appeared every day and reached millions of readers around the world. This was hard work, and later her brother Lars took over most of the drawing. Because of this comic strip, the Moomins became truly international, known far outside the Nordic countries. Tove Jansson also wrote for adults. In 1972, she published The Summer Book, a quiet novel about an old woman and her small granddaughter spending summers together on a tiny island. There are no Moomins in it, but the same feeling is there: small moments, honest feelings, and love between people who are very different in age.

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Text to type: The Moomins arrived in Japan in a very big way in 1990, when the anime Tanoshii Moomin Ikka was shown on television. This series was beautiful, calm, and faithful to Jansson's world, and it became extremely popular. For many Japanese fans, this anime is their first and deepest memory of the Moomins. In 2019, Moominvalley Park opened in Hanno, in Saitama prefecture, near Tokyo. It is the only Moomin theme park in the world outside Finland, and many Japanese learners of English have already visited it. Standing in that park, next to a wooden Moomin House by a lake, you can feel how far a small Swedish-language book from 1945 has traveled.

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