![]() Seeing two eyes staring at him from behind a tree, Moomintroll stiffens with fear, but the eyes belong to “really a very little creature” who is equally scared. He is either lost, or dead, or now “mostly invisible” like the deaf and mute Hattifatteners, fungus-like creatures with whom he has wandered off. Moominmamma and her son are searching for somewhere to hibernate, but they are also searching for Moominpappa, who has disappeared. Half her year was spent in her overloaded Helsinki studio and the other half on the simple and isolated island in the Gulf of Finland where she tried to disappear.Ī border can be breached, and the horror of the Winter War, as the 1939 attack was called-when 300,000 Finns were made homeless and the country responded with the kind of ferocity currently shown by Ukraine-provides the warp and weft of the first Moomin book. Moomintroll had always liked those last weeks of summer most, but he didn’t really know why.” Jansson was born in August, but August was also, she said, “the border between summer and autumn,” just as twilight was “the border between day and night” the border was “longing,” and to be on the border was “to be on the way.” Jansson herself lived on the border: she was half-Swedish and half-Finnish, half-artist and half-author, a lover first of men and then of women. Late August, Jansson observed in Finn Family Moomintroll, is a time of year when “there was expectation and a certain sadness in the air…. A threat or a delight that can never be explained. Where have Moomintroll and his mother arrived from? Children, Jansson believed, are “spellbound by what is unspoken,” and children’s books “should have a path…where the writer stops and the child goes on. We know, for example, the quality of the dark, the density of the silence, the month of the year, and the hour of the day, but the most important information is elided. The simple-seeming sentences carry a good deal of freight. The Moomins, when we first meet them, are similarly suspended, half-awake, half-asleep, motionless in the middle of things. ![]() “One isn’t really living, one just exists.” “Life is just waiting now,” Jansson said of the war years. Here and there giant flowers grew, glowing with a peculiar light like flickering lamps, and furthest in among the shadows moved tiny dots of cold green. It was completely quiet, and so dim between the trees that it was as though twilight had already fallen. ![]() It must have been late in the afternoon one day at the end of August when Moomintroll and his mother arrived at the deepest part of the great forest. ![]() Scandinoir was born in November 1939, when the Soviet Army invaded Finland and the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson wrote a story in which a mother and child find themselves in a wood: “Once upon a time a Moomintroll was walking with his mother through a very strange forest.” When the story was published in 1945 as Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen ( The Moomins and the Great Flood), this opening was revised so that the creatures are no longer walking, and the events begin in darkness: ![]()
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