Moomin History

With the advent of the the Tove Jansson exhibition at Helsinki’s Ateneum and its subsequent tour of other cities, Jansson’s non-Moomin work was finally given the front and centre stage position it deserved. It’s been well documented that the success of the Moomins overshadowed Tove’s other works, often to her frustration. But what of Lars Jansson?

Tove’s brother took up the helm of the Moomin comic strips after Tove’s contract ended, and he drew them for fifteen years; he also collaborated on the TV series and the creation of Moominworld in Naantali. But Lars also had other strings to his bow.

Between 1941 and 1967, he wrote eight novels. The first, Skatten på Tortuga (The Treasure of Tortuga), was written and published when he was fifteen. The story of two boys finding a pirate’s treasure map and stowing away on a boat to the dread island of Tortuga at first seems to be typical teenage wish-fulfilment. But even at the age of fifteen, Lars had a gift for writing, and the structure, pacing and storytelling are surprisingly grown-up.

Less surprising is the fact that a number of the devices employed would find their way into Lars’ later Moomin comics. The Moomins often deliberately or accidentally went on long sea voyages and in fact, Tove and Lars had discussed the possibility of stowing away on a ship themselves – a likely inspiration for the story.

The image above is the cover of the book – this was drawn by Signe Hammerstan-Jansson and hasn’t been seen since 1941.

I’ve been working on the translation of Skatten and here – for the first time in English – is the prologue….

PROLOGUE

In the darkness of a small room of a castle in the middle of the Scottish moors, sat a lone man at an oak table. The room was simply furnished in the old Gothic style, with oak-panelled walls lit by a single lancet window. The floor was covered by a soft carpet, patterned only by the shadows thrown from the heavy iron chandelier.

No paintings adorned the walls. Instead, a variety of guns and weapons revealed the man for what he was: one of Morgan’s Buccaneers, and one who had worked – fought – his way to the dubious top of his profession: a pirate captain. Everything about him spoke of his chosen career, from his wooden leg to his flaming, wild eyes that had the expression of a hunted animal and, despite his fine, aquiline nose, his bushy black eyebrows and bearded visage did little to beautify him.

A half-empty schooner of rum lay on the table in front of him, next to a map. Outside, the wind shrieked as the storm battered the heath, and a loose copper grate rattled somewhere up on the roof. The watchdog howled and tore at its chain. Were those footsteps he heard on the gravel? The man shuddered and looked around, memories of times past chasing each other through his head. Ah, that necklace of black diamonds. Would it never cease to torment him?

He should not have stolen it.

But he was a pirate, and it had looked so tempting, hanging around the neck of the idol in Burma… were the members of the cult still searching for him, or had he finally shaken them from his trail? Together with his comrades, he had buried his cache of treasure in Tortuga, an island North West of Haiti, along with the necklace… did it really have a mysterious curse on it? All of them, to a man, had suffered horrible and gruesome deaths.

He stood up suddenly, the glass clattering to the floor. This solitude, this brooding… it was too much. He would seek out Father McNab; he must have peace in his soul. A swift hand movement, and the map disappeared into one of the hidden drawers in his bureau. Taking up his hat and his stick, he went out into the storm

The people in the field who saw him coming from the monastery in the morning dawn later recalled that the old villain looked happy and calm. And, when he shortly thereafter fell ill and died, with a grand funeral for the repose of his soul, maybe it was explained by the fact that the monastery inherited all of his money and his estate.

Only the furniture went up for auction: the chairs and the tables and the old bureau.

London now boasts two Moomin shops; the original in Covent Garden, and a brand new store in Camden Market’s Stables. The latter had an important visitor this week – Tove Jansson’s niece Sophia, Creative Director of Moomin Characters. After being treated to a glass or two of wine, the audience were held rapt as Sophia related not only the creation and evolution of the Moomins, but some fascinating anecdotes about Tove herself.

“People often ask if she was working up until the day she died. And yes, she was,” said Sophia. In the final years of Tove Jansson’s life, her ability to draw had been impacted by a shaking hand. “People would come to her and say, “Please, draw me a Moomin!” But towards the end of her life, she wasn’t happy to do so – her line was so important to her and she wasn’t satisfied with what she drew.”

But Tove answered letters right up to the end. “She felt that if someone made an effort to reach out and connect, they deserved a reply. Of course, some people did so repeatedly and had to be discouraged.” We learned that Tove’s partner, Tuulikki Pietilä acted as a buffer – more often than not slamming down the phone with an emphatic “No!”

“But sometimes she was a bit too efficient! And Tove would whisper to someone else, “Could you please post this letter for me? Don’t tell Tuulikki!”” During her life, Tove Jansson personally responded to thousands of letters.

We also learned that Tuulikki’s brother Riema was a renowned architect who designed not only Mäntyniemi, the official residence of Finland’s president, but the elegant and organic library in Tampere. After completion, there was a vast basement space that wasn’t being used, and when it was suggested that they take the Moominhouse model built by Tove and Tuulikki, they jumped at the chance. “Tove thought, they can’t just have that on its own… so she donated hundreds of her illustrations, and it became the Moomin Museum.”

We also learned that Tove’s mother, Ham, had been to Britain in her youth, and fell in love with the Lake District. She learned to read in English and encouraged Tove and Lars to do the same from and early age. Stories of the South Seas and Tarzan had a particular impact on the young Janssons; both would make their mark in Moomin stories and also in Skatten på Tortuga, Lar Jansson’s first novel, published in 1941.

It was interesting to hear that after Tove wrote the first Moomin story – The Small Trolls and the Great Flood – it sat in a drawer for quite some time before she was prompted to publish it. When she did so, it was in booklet form, sold from kiosks in Helsinki. Only a few hundred of this first edition were ever printed. Comet in Moominland was a bigger deal, and when an acquaintance asked to translate Finn Family Moomintroll, the international success of the Moomins began in earnest.

In 1952, Charles Sutton from Associated Newspapers met Tove Jansson in Helsinki’s Kåmp hotel. It was April 30th, the eve of vappu, and a day of celebration in Finland. “I was not used to going out of my house during the day,” Tove Jansson once related in an interview, “So I didn’t think that day would be anything special. My god, the atmosphere at Kämp! Children, dogs, balloons… pretty girls climbed onto Sutton’s lap to play with his grey moustache.”

“Charles Sutton was so impressed,” said Sophia, “That he agreed a seven-year commission for a cartoon strip then and there. At least, that’s the version that we’ve always been told!”

As part of the deal, Tove went to London for lessons in creating cartoons. “Her first Moomin comic strip had the text flowing underneath. She had to learn to work in speech bubbles, to end on a cliffhanger. Each strip had to be a story all by itself. And her mother went with her too! She was delighted at the chance to see England again.”

We then heard the stories of the various Moomin television stories, beginning with the first Japanese serial. “There was only one TV channel in Japan at the time, so everyone watched the same thing. So anyone from that generation would have seen and remembered it.” The same applies to the 1970s Polish series, often called the ‘fuzzy felt’ Moomins, which was later adapted for British TV in 1983. And of course, there was the phenomenally successful Japanese anime of the 1990s, which sparked the ‘Moomin Boom’.

Before saying goodbye and leaving the audience to return not only to their wine but to a generous 20% discount for the evening, Sophia reminded us that there’s a new Moomin TV series in the works. “It’s coming in Spring 2019. And it’s going to be wonderful!”

I gave a talk the other week at the Anglo-Finnish Society in London, based on my recent paper. It covered a lot of the same ground, exploring the origins of Tove’s cartoon work and how her own creations developed. But it was also an opportunity to introduce some other bits and bobs, some of which had been rarely seen. These included the image above, one of the promotional pictures that Tove drew to publicise Moomintroll and the End of the World, the first ever Moomin strip that ran in Ny Tid. I also had a chance to show the cover of Skatten på Tortuga, Lar’s Jansson’s first novel. This was created by their mother, Signe Hammerstan-Jansson, and hasn’t been shown in this country before. I’ll go over that and its translation in a future post.

The other book getting its premiere was The Princess Who Never Laughed. Signe (or ‘Ham’) wrote and illustrated her version of this Russian folk tale, and the book was published in 1923. Again, more on that later…

Of course Moomin took front and centre stage, and it was particularly fun to be able to show the first ever Moomin. Following a legendary argument with her brother, Tove ran to the outhouse and scrawled the most hideous creature she could imagine and called it Snork. Snork of course would appear in Garm much later on, before evolving into Moomintroll. But as we can see from this rare image, Tove’s original creation was far removed from the rotund character we came to know and love.

An interesting point here is that while most of the surrounding text is written in Swedish – the Jansson’s were Swedish speakers after all – the line at the bottom is written in Finnish.