Latest news with #Moomintroll
Hindustan Times
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
The adorable trolls behind the memes: Enter the world of Tove Jansson's Moomins
The English-speaking world tends to be resistant to children's literature from other languages. 'Serious' literature — whether in French, Russian, Spanish or Sanskrit — finds its way across language barriers, helped along by awards and prizes, but this genre has it harder. How many young Indian readers have heard of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi and her book, Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window (1981)? It is the bestselling Japanese book of all time, and has been translated, among other languages, into Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. Nikolai Nosov's 1980s stories about Dunno the Know-Nothing were very popular behind the Iron Curtain but are virtually unknown in the West, for both ideological and linguistic reasons. The Brazilian José Mauro de Vasconcelos's Meu Pé de Laranja Lima (My Sweet Orange Tree; 1968) is a children's classic in the Portuguese-speaking world, but is far less-known in the English. One children's classic that has made it past the language barrier and into the popular cultural consciousness, albeit belatedly, is Tove Jansson's Moomin series. Beloved in Scandinavia, particularly in the author's native Finland, and immensely popular in Japan, the Moomins are now having their moment in the sun in the English-speaking world too. Moomins are a kind of troll. They look like bipedal hippopotami, and are small and soft. You can draw a moomin's shape with a single stroke of the pencil. Jansson (1914-2001) once said they were partly inspired by a story her uncle once told her, about strange little creatures who lived in his pantry and came out to rub their cold noses on food thieves. Tove Jansson once said the Moomins were partly inspired by an uncle's story about strange creatures who lived in his pantry and rubbed their cold noses on food thieves. In 1939, Jansson, who was already a published author, illustrator and cartoonist at 25, found herself facing up to the reality of World War 2. 'One's work stood still; it felt completely pointless to try to create pictures. Perhaps it was understandable that I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time'... What followed had to be a fairytale… but I… (avoided) princes, princesses and small children and chose instead my angry signature character… and called him the Moomintroll,' she wrote, in the introduction to the first in the series, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945). This was followed by Comet in Moominland, published in 1946, with the comet standing in for shadow of the atomic bomb. But it was with the third book, Finn Family Moomintroll (1948), that the series really took off. .Over the next two decades, Jansson wrote six more novels featuring a recurring cast of characters: young Moomintroll; the affectionate and capable Moominmamma; the adventurous Moominpapa; cowardly little Sniff, Moomintroll's companion; carefree Snufkin, a thinker and wanderer; and Hemulen, the family friend from a collection-obsessed species. There were also picture books and a syndicated comic strip that, at one point, ran in 120 newspapers across 40 countries. In Finland, there are Moomin cafes. There's a museum devoted to Jansson and her creations. Some Finnair planes have her characters painted on their sides. The Moomin World theme park is one of the country's biggest tourist attractions. There were animated TV shows, starting as far back as 1959, in Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Japan and even the erstwhile Soviet Union. In 2019, the most recent such series, a Finnish-British collaboration with Taron Egerton as Moomintroll and Rosamund Pike as Moominmamma, was released. There are videogames as well. The most recent, Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, was released by Hyper Games last year. Last month, to mark 80 years since the first book, the first-ever Moomin exhibition in the US opened to visitors at the Brooklyn Public Library (it is on till September 30). For its fans, Moominvalley is a safe, gentle space where Moominmamma is always at hand, in her red apron and handbag, ready with a kind word or a hot meal. Storms and comets may come and go but there is always room for kindness and gentle humour. And order is always restored. It is this mood that permeates the memes by which many more now know the books. The valley was intended as a happy place. But in another theme resonant today, Jansson's creatures were also occasionally cast as migrants, searching for a new home, mourning lost loved ones. The sense of loss would intensify, and a feeling of absence permeates the last Moomin novel, Moominvalley in November. Published in 1970, the year of Jansson's mother's death, the book aches with poignancy, making it more suitable for adults, despite working well as a children's book. 'Snuffkin padded along calmly, the forest closed round him and it began to rain. The rain fell on his green hat and on his raincoat, which was also green, it pittered and pattered everywhere and the forest wrapped him in a gentle and exquisite loneliness...' she writes in chapter one. 'There are those who stay at home and those who go away, and it has always been so. Everyone can choose for himself, but he must choose while there is still time and never change his mind.' Jansson's mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, was an artist as well, and a big influence on her life. When she died, Tove couldn't return to Moominvalley in quite the same way. There would be no more Moomin novels. (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tove Jansson's Moomin books explore the power of adventure and transformation
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the first Moomin tale, The Moomins and the Great Flood. In the book, Moomintroll and his friends embark on a journey to find their home after a great flood devastates Moominvalley, meeting odd creatures and new friends along their journey. The book was first published in creator Tove Jansson's native Swedish in 1945. However, the first Moomin book to have an English edition was in fact the third of the Moomin books, Trollkarlens Hatt (The Hobgoblin's Hat). It was translated by Jansson's friend Elizabeth Portch and reached its widest English-speaking audience when it was published by Puffin Books in 1961 as Finn Family Moomintroll. At the beginning of the story Moomintroll finds a magical top hat. It can transform anything that is placed inside of it into something else entirely – and so the adventures begin. This is part of a series of articles celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Moomins. Want to celebrate their birthday with us? Join The Conversation and a group of experts on May 23 in Bradford for a screening of Moomins on the Riviera and a discussion of the refugee experience in Tove Jansson's work. Click here for . Unlike the Swedish-language edition, Portch's translation of Finn Family Moomintroll begins with a letter from Moominmamma. It's written in a curly cursive and dotted with love-hearts and an image of an apparently 'hand-drawn' troll. The letter is addressed to a 'dear child' who is 'overseas'. In it, Moominmamma expresses disbelief at the idea that there may not be any Moomins 'there over' and that the child she is addressing may 'not even know what a troll is' (hence the illustration). Moominmamma's wonder at the differences in custom between her own land and 'your country' is based on an assumption that the two must be somewhat alike. Similarly, her explanation of what Moomintrolls are depends on their difference from the 'usual common trolls', which means there must be familial similarity between them. Both Moominmamma's wonder at and explanation of difference assume an underlying essential similarity or sameness between Moominvalley, where she lives, and the reader's home. This is significant in a story that explores ideas of foreignness and translation, change and transformation. Though the adventures in Finn Family Moomintroll might be said to only truly begin on the spring morning when Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin find 'a tall black hat', the book opens with the Moomins settling down for their winter hibernation and closes with the valley in autumn. The changes wrought by the Hobgoblin's hat are 'quite different' because 'you never know beforehand' what they will be. However, their extreme nature is framed and contained by a world in which there are known and predictable changes in the seasons, as well as routine – though sometimes dramatic – changes in the weather. The Hemulen is unperturbed by the hat's transformation of eggshells into fluffy little clouds that Moomintroll and his friends are able to ride. That's because he is 'so used to [them] doing extraordinary things'. But when Moomintroll is transformed by the hat into 'a very strange animal indeed', so much so that his friends do not recognise him, it's a very different matter. A moment of real jeopardy occurs when Moomintroll's own mother does not seem to recognise him either. But this is soon dispelled when Moominmamma looks 'into his frightened eyes for a very long time' and quietly declares: 'Yes, you are my Moomintroll.' This moment of recognition breaks the spell and Moomintroll changes back into 'his old self again'. One of the crucial features of the hat is the changes it makes are only temporary and this, together with Moominmamma's reassurance that she will 'always know [Moomintroll], whatever happens', suggests an ultimately unchanging essence to things that cannot be denied. On the other hand, the book suggests that some change is to be embraced. Sniff's desire for things to stay the same 'for ever and ever' is portrayed as immature and wrong-headed. As is the Muskrat's obsessive quest for peace and stillness which ends up with his apparent, though temporary, transformation into a monster. Snufkin's point that 'life is not peaceful' offers a gentle rebuke to the Hemulen, who also wishes to 'live his life in peace and quiet'. But perhaps the clearest indication of the book's attitude to changelessness is the monstrous Groke. She is motivated by an unwavering drive to recover the 'King's Ruby', not because this thing which 'changes colour all the time' is 'the most beautiful thing in the world', but because it is 'the most expensive'. The Groke's inability to appreciate the ruby aesthetically is presented as being rooted in her own immutability. That the Groke's hostility to change is itself deadening, becomes evident when she sits 'motionless' before the Moomins and their friends, staring at them in a way that makes them feel 'she would wait for ever' and eventually departs leaving the ground behind her frozen in the wrong season. This, then, is key. Adventure, transformation and change in Finn Family Moomintroll are both necessary and desirable, but they are also contained within a reassuring frame of reliable predictability. The final lines of the English translation are: 'It is autumn in Moomin Valley, for how else can spring come back again?' This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Sue Walsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
