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A Bold Finnish Artist Brought These Precious Little Hippopotamus-Like Trolls to the World 80 Years Ago
Tove Jansson was a trailblazing illustrator and author—and the inventor of the beloved Moomins, the central characters of her whimsical children’s books
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In 1945, a book about a family of trolls forced to find a new home—in a dark unknown forest with a terrifying serpent—after theirs is washed away, was quietly published in Finland to little fanfare.
Yet, writer Tove Jansson’s introduction of the themes and characters, who look like adorable upright hippos, in The Moomins and the Great Flood set the template for a series of storybooks, daily comics, animated cartoons and films that would become a global phenomenon. In 2020, the New York Times’ Jo Glanville reported that the Moomins are “big business, with an annual retail value of 750 million euros,” over $850 million.
In the United States, the quirky Moomin footprints have yet to leave as big of a mark as they have in their native Finland. But recently, a change in the relationship with American audiences has been in the Moominvalley air, as Jansson’s creations are finding their niche. In February 2023, Moomin Characters Ltd. began a partnership pilot in select Barnes & Noble locations, the company’s first significant toe-dipping into U.S. waters. It proved so successful that books and merchandise are now available in hundreds of Barnes & Noble stores across the country.
And now, the illustrated figures are being feted in a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. “Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open,” which kicks off June 28 and runs through the end of September, chronicles the characters through drawings, videos, archival material and original publications. Beyond celebrating the Moomins, the show also explores the life of their creator, Jansson, who produced a prodigious amount of work while living on her terms.
“I knew Jansson as a child’s author and illustrator, but I wasn’t aware of how progressive she was, including her early satirical drawings of dictators and the rise of fascism,” says Linda E. Johnson, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library. “She was openly queer at a time when that was certainly uncommon, so we made sure to mount the exhibition during Pride Month. It speaks to what’s going on culturally and lets our audience know: The Brooklyn Public Library is not backing down.”
Did you know: What was the first Moomin story?
The Moomins and the Great Flood, published in 1945, laid the foundation of Moomin mythology. In the following 80 years, the Moomin world has expanded with more books, an opera, films, a museum and much more./https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/c4/7b/c47b483e-0fb3-4803-9294-df6da448e564/smatrollen_moomin_characters.jpg)
In 1914, Jansson was born in Helsinki, the eldest of three whose family was part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority community. Her parents were decidedly bohemian, their home a gathering place for colorful, offbeat types, so her upbringing was steeped in art and eccentricity. They even had a pet monkey named Poppolino who was often decked out in argyle sweaters. Her father, Viktor Jansson, was a renowned sculptor of extravagant civic monuments. In the wake of World War I, payment was inconsistent. Her commercial artist mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, a former suffragist, provided for the family by taking gigs like designing book jackets, Finnish and Swedish postage stamps, and political cartoons for the Finnish satirical magazine Garm.
Jansson had artistic talent, too, which was evident early in her life. In 1929, at age 15, she began her career at Garm, where she would contribute all manner of caricatures, covers and illustrations until the magazine was shuttered in 1953. As a teenager, she began taking art classes in several cities, including Stockholm, Paris and London. She found school limiting and routinely dropped out of and returned to different academies. Eventually, she returned to Helsinki to study at what is now known as the Ateneum Art Museum, and she took on a feverish pace creating murals, large frescoes and still-life works using oils, charcoals and watercolors.
In time, Jansson had her own large, dilapidated third-floor studio, where she could work at all hours, which meant living hand-to-mouth. She was known to barter paintings for medical bills, home repairs and tobacco. Underpinning so much of her works was the war consuming Europe.
In late November 1939, three months after the Nazis seized Poland, the Red Army invaded Finland in the Winter War, during which battlefield temperatures dropped as low as minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit. The tiny Finnish Army—utilizing soldiers on skis and bikes—held the Russians to a three-month stalemate. To get back the limited territory lost to the Russians, Finland aligned with the Nazis, until 1944, when the country signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. This, in turn, led to the Lapland War: seven months of fighting with Germany in Finland’s northernmost region. Casualties were relatively limited, but an estimated 100,000 Finns were driven from their homes, half of them refugees evacuated to Sweden, before the Germans were driven out in 1945 in the dying days of the Nazi Party.
World War II came home to Jansson in her constant clashes with her father, who was staunchly pro-Nazi going back to the 1918 Finnish Civil War. He fought for the nationalistic “Whites,” who received major support from Germany against the Soviet-backed communist “Reds” in a short, brutal conflict that brought Finland independence from the Russian Empire. The Jansson rift is captured in her Family painting, a stark portrait of her father and younger brother Per Olov in their military outfits, with the artist in funereal attire brooding over Per Olov’s chess game with youngest brother Lars.
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Helsinki was never under siege, so Jansson and her peers were free to keep their free-spirited ways alive. She was fond of painting all day, partying all night and romancing whomever she chose among fellow artists and philosophers, both men and “ghosts,” her circle’s secret code for gay women. She had a relationship with theater director Vivica Bandler, who, even after they split up, stayed a close friend and collaborator. (Tove, a 2020 biopic covering these years, won seven Jussi Awards, Finland’s major film prizes, including Best Film.) At a Christmas party in 1955, she met the love of her life, fellow artist Tuulikki Pietilä, known affectionately as Tooti. They remained together until 2001, when Jansson died at age 86.
“It’s fair to say when she was younger, she was bisexual, but after a certain point, I think she was done with men,” says Boel Westin, a literature scholar at the Stockholm University and the author of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. “Homosexuality was illegal in Finland until 1971, but she and Tooti openly lived together. Tove was always her own person, going back to childhood. In 1992, they were the first same-sex couple to attend an event at the Presidential Palace, an Independence Day celebration, which got a lot of attention. Tove was never too concerned with what people thought about her.”
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The same can be said of Jansson’s daring work at Garm. She used her platform to mock communism and fascism, Stalin and Hitler. One memorable 1944 cover featured a bunch of Hitlers as two-bit thieves pilfering everyday goods. Near the bottom right corner of the cover, next to the “Tove” signature, was a white, long-nosed, dark-eyed creature nicknamed “Snork” that she’d begun using as a signature in her illustrations. That figure would forever change the course of her life for the better: Snork was the prototypical “Moomintroll,” or “Moomin,” for short.
When Jansson was studying in Sweden and staying with relatives, her uncle Einar Hammarsten wanted her to stop eating at night. His joke was that if she didn’t stop looting snacks, “moo-oo-oomintrolls” would pop out from the cupboards and breathe cold air down her neck. Joyously silly for sure, but no more so than the genesis of the original Snork sketch. That was payback against Per Olov going back to when they were kids, summering at the family’s island home on the Pellinki archipelago east of Helsinki. The two got into a heated philosophical argument, which ended with Per Olov dismissing out of hand her quoting the German Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. Jansson’s revenge came with the debut appearance of Snork, her depiction of “the ugliest creature imaginable,” on their outhouse wall.
The Moomintroll characters in The Moomins and the Great Flood share Snork’s build. Aimed at younger kids, her first book, published in 1945, is now considered a one-off prequel to the eight-book full-length middle-schooler series starring rounder Moomins. These books were known to have mature existential subtext. When Comet in Moominland came out in 1946, Europe was facing the aftermath of World War II, and the story finds Moominvalley facing annihilation from the outer space projectile. Children’s literature scholars have connected some of its passages to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Over the course of the books, Moominvalley’s population grew and grew, and Jansson never wavered from her core belief in creating flexible, welcoming families, even if they look, sound, act or seem nothing like yours. The white, mouthless, hippopotamus-like Moomins would feel at home in a Sandra Boynton book. However, other characters swirling about like Snufkin, Sniff, Little My, Fillyjonks, the Hobgoblin and Stinky have unique looks all their own, be they human, animal or something in-between.
“The Moomins are part of our cultural heritage, and their relationship to nature is a pronounced Finnish trait,” says Juhani Tolvanen, who befriended Jansson in 1980 when the Finnish Comics Society awarded her the Puupäähattu prize; later, at Jansson’s urging, he wrote Moomin Every Day: Tove and Lars Jansson and the Creation of the Moomin Comic Strip. “The character of Mr. Brisk comes to mind, a crazy outdoor sports enthusiast and a mad exerciser, the kind of person you meet in real life and can’t stand them, but you love him as a cartoon.”
Though she was somewhat vague about it, Jansson’s female partners were clearly woven into the series, too. Thingumy and Bob, the funny-looking duo who speak a language all their own and debuted in Finn Family Moomintroll, were based on her and Bandler. She was less coy about the inspiration for Too-ticky, the compassionate, pragmatic, problem-solving friend of Moomintroll who helps get the family through the cold months in Moominland Midwinter, a role not dissimilar to the one Pietilä played in Jansson’s life. The author would eventually write herself into the melancholic Moominvalley in November. Written after her mother’s death in 1970 (and long after her father died in 1958) it’s the story of Toft, a diminutive orphan boy who ventures to the Moomins’ home, looking for them. But they never return, and the final book serves as a long goodbye to a quarter-century of Moomins.
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The books were certainly successful, but it was a concurrent mid-series offer from the London Evening News that took the characters to a higher level of global fame. Editor Charles Sutton hired Jansson to write and illustrate a comic strip with the stipulation, “no politics, sex or death,” the London Standard’s Jessie Thompson noted in 2017. (According to Thompson, Jansson reportedly replied that she “didn’t know anything about the government, sex wasn’t part of the Moomins’ anatomy, and she’d only ever killed a hedgehog.”) The daily Moomin comic strip hit the funny papers in 1954 to an eventual readership of 20 million across 40 countries. In these more sophisticated and adult-themed strips, Moominpappa was frequently drunk, hungover or creating a libation like the potent “Manhattan Dynamite.” The strips started to resonate in the U.K. and beyond.
“University students began adopting a Moomin philosophy to living, that life itself isn’t peaceful, but you can form a community of family and other creatures built on solidarity,” says Westin.
Another major milestone came in 1969, when a Moomin cartoon series premiered in Japan. But it wasn’t up to Jansson’s standards, so she forbade it to be aired in any other country. That was followed a couple of years later by a Helsinki opera. She had become burned out in the late 1960s, and she turned the comic strip fully over to her brother and fellow illustrator Lars. She then set her sights on writing novels and short stories for adults. Her sparse, wry, funny-yet-longing prose was a new direction, one that allowed her the freedom to exhale and retrench.
“A lot of fans in Finland and Sweden didn’t embrace my book because of what I found in the letters Tove gave me,” says Westin. “Mainly that after so many years, she was tired of the characters. At one point, she wrote ‘I could vomit on Moomintrolls!’ because there wasn’t time for her first love, painting.”
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“When she started writing books for adults, it was a way to walk away from the Moomins and ultimately get back to the canvas,” Westin continues. “People wanted to define her either as a painter or a writer. It’s stupid—she was both and had multiple artistic identities. Tove illustrated the storybooks where Moominpappa is writing and Moominmamma is painting, which I think says everything, so to speak.”
Meanwhile, Jansson’s beloved family summer home had become a place admirers would row to in hopes of having a glass of whiskey—she was quite the connoisseur—with their artist hero. So she and Pietilä escaped to an even more remote spot with no electricity or plumbing, Klovharun, farther out in the Pellinki archipelago. It proved to be both a respite from the crowds and a source of material, as it’s where Sommarboken (The Summer Book) takes place. The 1972 novel follows the life of mercurial 6-year-old Sophia and her cranky and unsentimental, but loving, grandmother. It unfolds in the warm months after the death of Sophia’s mother. The novel, recently adapted into a film starring Glenn Close, encapsulates Jansson’s love of rugged isolation.
In addition to the Brooklyn exhibition and the Barnes & Noble partnership, Moomin-themed merchandise has become a hit with fans, including shoes for the Moomin-sneakerhead crossover crowd, collectible mugs and plushies. To grow the brand beyond the books, aficionados can expect more animated features like 2014’s Moomins on the Riviera and 2019’s “Moominvalley” television series, or multimedia projects like the five-part 2023 podcast hosted by actors Lily Collins of “Emily in Paris” and Jennifer Saunders, half of the “Absolutely Fabulous” duo. Tampere, Finland, is home to the Moomin Museum, and Moominvalley Park is found the shores of Lake Miyazawa in Hanno, Japan.
After 80 years, Jansson’s great-nephew Thomas Zambra, director of business development at Moomin Characters Ltd., thinks the time is right for a Finnish Invasion. “Lots of Americans are looking for an alternative to what mainstream entertainment has been serving them. There’s something magical about Finland being the happiest country on earth and the Nordic way of life,” says Zambra.
His favorite character is the Muskrat, a philosopher steeped in the meaninglessness and futility of existence who loves being comfortable in his solace. “Of course in Finland, you find a Moomin on every street corner, but I think Americans are organically gravitating to the characters and Tove’s themes of inclusiveness and a kind of radical acceptance,” Zambra says.
Last week marked yet another collaboration, this time between the Moomins and U.K. Refugee Week. The theme is the same as the one coming to Brooklyn, “The Door is Always Open,” and the Moominhouse ethos of “shelter, comfort and security to all.” Fittingly, the Moomins’ official stateside arrival begins in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty like so many immigrants before them.
“What starts in New York City tends to creep beyond our borders,” says Johnson as the library’s staff put the finishing touches on the display. “I’m hoping our exhibition has the impact of bringing interest in Tove Jansson, the Moomin books and novels, to the rest of the country.”
