Moomin History

The cat is well and truly out of the bag now. As revealed on the Moomin website, I will be doing a reading of Villain in the Moominhouse at the ArchWay With Words Literary Festival on 25th September in Archway, North London. Never heard of the story? That may not be surprising. This final Moomin tale was penned by Tove Jansson in 1980 and only published in Swedish. A Finnish translation followed a while later, but the book was never translated to English and hence an English-language version was never published.

That’s finally set to change. I’ll be reading my original translation for the first time at the festival, accompanied by projections of the images from the books. Rather than illustrate it by hand, Tove called in the services of her brother, Per Olov Jansson, who took photographs of the many scenes in the story. They staged these in the gigantic Moominhouse that Tove and her partner Tuulikki Pietila built by hand, along with figurines representing the Moomins and their many friends. This incredible construction is now on display in the Moomin Museum in Tampere, Finland, and really has to be seen to be believed.

But there’s more. At the same event I will also be reading two of Tove’s very earliest published stories: Prickina and Fabian’s Adventure, and Sara and Pelle and Neptune’s Children.

Prickina and Fabian was published in 1929, and was serialised over seven issues of Lunkentus magazine. It told the story of two caterpillars who fell in love and went off in search of a new home, having many strange adventures along the way. Sara and Pelle predates even this. This tale of two friends whose ride on a home-made car takes them to an undersea kingdom was actually written even earlier, but not published until 1933, and then under the pseudonym Vera Haij. At this point in her life, Tove Jansson was writing for Garm, a very grown-up satirical magazine, and it made sense to keep her children’s writing separate.

Again, this marks the English-language debut for both of these stories and in fact, neither have had much visibility in either Sweden or Finland since their publication.

The event is free so if you’re in the vicinity, come on by and immerse yourself in some Tove Jansson rarities.

May Day is celebrated in many countries in many ways and in Finland, it’s called Vappu. It’s also a significant date in the Moomin calendar as, sixty-five years ago to the day, a meeting took place that was to set in motion the Moomin comic strips.

Muumisisarukset, a Finnish book about the genesis of the cartoons, told of this initial meeting. The book has not been published in English but I’ve been working on a translation. So here’s how it happened…

“The summery days at the end of April promised a beautiful and warm May-day festival. But it was not to be. The icy wind did its best to chill any momentum from Spring, and to even further limit the already-limited sense of rejoicing amongst the Finns.” It was in these cheery terms that the Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat described May 1^st, 1952.

On April 30^th, the day before this most-celebrated Finnish festival, an Englishman arrived in Helsinki. Sporting a grey moustache and a bowler hat, he looked the epitome of a 1950s English Gentleman.

Eight days earlier, he had sailed to Gothenburg where he continued his journey on to Stockholm, arriving on April 29^th. He then boarded a steamer – perhaps the Bore I or the Oihonna, any one of the four that provided the link between the Swedish capital and the port of Turku. Soon after the ship docked at 8:30am the next morning, he boarded the Pohjolan Liikenne red express bus, arriving with typical Finnish punctuality in Helsinki at 12:40pm.

He would have crossed the main square, under the watchful gaze of the Kivimiehet, the giant stone statues who guard the entrance to the railway station like a Soviet-era Argonath. Dodging the trams, he would have made his way up Kluuvikatu, past the elegant Karl Fazer Café, a place that would come to profit greatly from the outcome of the next few days. This brought him to Helsinki’s pretty Esplanade, and his destination: Hotel Kämp, which was and arguably still is the top hotel in the city.

The gentleman with the grey moustache who got off the bus was Charles Sutton, the director of the Associated Newspapers syndicate. He had made the long journey from England to negotiate with the artist Tove Jansson about publishing a comic strip featuring her Moomin characters. Sutton and Jansson had been in close communication since the beginning of January, and things finally seemed to be picking up speed. “Sutton agreed to come to Finland on the eve of May Day,” recalled Tove Jansson of their first meeting, “and so we arranged a business lunch at the Kämp.”

“I was not used to going out of my house during the day, 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.” Sutton asked Jansson if Finns were really always this happy. But the following morning, at breakfast in the same restaurant, Charles Sutton would see the flip side of the coin as, Vappu forgotten, the resident Finns returned to their normal quiet, melancholy manner.

That May Day eve, 1952, was the starting point of Tove Jansson’s journey to international fame and popularity. However at that stage, success was still years away…