The most obvious thing about this book is the quality of the illustrations: in contrast to the crystal clear, crisply drawn illustrations of all the previous books, the pictures in Tales from Moominvalley are rough and sketchy i.e. where one precise line did the job in earlier books, here they take multiple lines to sketch out a character’s outline or other objects, giving a far rougher, hastier, smudgier appearance to the pictures and to the entire page.
Why? Are they early works saved up for this relatively late publication (1962)? Is this her late style? Or did she make a conscious decision to explore a rougher, more sketchy style? In some of the illustrations the familiar Moomin characters barely look themselves. Compare early and late:
- Snufkin discovers Little My in Moominsummer Madness (1954)
- Snufkin talks to a forest creep in Tales From Moominvalley (1963)
Here’s a gallery of illustrations from the book. Judge for yourself how rough-hewn, primitive and unfinished they look, compared with the earlier style.
Nine stories
The book consists of nine short stories. They are all more elliptical and serious than in the previous books. Instead of carefree childhood adventures – as the previous books – they investigate what are essentially adult psychological states.
Thus in the first story Snufkin is happy walking alone through the woods on the verge of creating a new song. He stops to camp by a stream but a little woodland creature plucks up the courage to speak to him, then comes over and starts a nattery conversation and, when he finally leaves, Snufkin discovers to his frustration that the idea for the new song has been completely driven out of his head.
But that’s not all, the little creature had heard of the famous traveller Snufkin, and before he left asked if he could give him a name. A bit irritated, Snufkin names him Teety-woo after birds he can hear singing in the treetops. Next morning Snufkin, still irritated at this intrusion into his solitude, sets off north but can’t get the little creature’s babbling chatter out of his head and eventually turns round and walks back to the woods to find him.
Here he finds Teety-woo and discovers that, now he’s got a name, he is making up for lost time and running round experiencing everything for the first time as Teety-woo! In fact, he’s far too busy living to listen to Snufkin who, only yesterday, he sought out all timid and shy: now he is the brave confident Teety-woo.
He runs off and Snufkin sits, pondering, as does the reader, this parable about identity and existence. Then gets up and sets back off towards the north, whistling. Soon a tune begins to form in his mind. A lesson learned.
See? Not a kiddy adventure, is it? More a life lesson. I wonder what on earth my 8-year-old self made of it.
The stories
All the others are all like this. In one a very nervous fillyjonk, always worrying and fretting about the worst, actually does experience the worst when a terrific tornado blows in from the sea and lays waste her home and, in the end – you know what – it turns out not to matter.
The fillyjonk drew a deep breath. Now I’ll never be afraid again, she said to herself. Now I’m free. Now I can do anything. (p.58)
So far so sort of Moominish. But I haven’t mentioned that the main part of the story consists of a tea party the fillyjonk gives for her ‘friend’, Gaffsie, who is depicted as an empty-headed housewife. The fillyjonk gets more and more frustrated with gossip about the best way to clean carpets and so on and, suddenly – out of nowhere – erupts into a great speech about how disaster is going to strike the world, everything is going to be destroyed, ‘they’ are coming to get us all! Gaffsie looks into her teacup, deeply embarrassed. It is the story of a suburban nervous breakdown.
Maybe this is why the pictures are so different, so much rougher, in this book. Jansson wanted to indicate this was a different, more teenage (at least) type of book.
- A roughly-handled illustration from Tales from Moominvalley
- A crisp and precisely-drawn illustration from Finn Family Moomintroll
Other stories are about:
A Tale of Horror A little whomper who tells such lies his parents send him to bed without tea, so he runs away and, after a scary spell in the dark, stumbles into a house where Little My is hiding on top of the wardrobe and she proceeds to tell such outrageous lies (about a man-eating fungus) that the little whomper is relieved when his daddy knocks on the door and comes to take him home, a chastened little boy.
The Last Dragon in the World Moomintroll catches a teeny, tiny dragon which fits into a jam jar but, when he shows it to the others, it immediately flies to Snufkin and refuses to leave. This makes Moomintroll sad and sulky. Realising this, Snufkin who’s fishing down by the river, eases the sleeping dragon into his kettle and gives it to a hemulen skippering a passing boat, asking him to slip flies down the spout to feed it, and then, after a few days, to release the dragon somewhere miles downstream. When Moomintroll moodily comes down to the river, Snufkin says he hasn’t seen the dragon, they’re notoriously flighty and go their own way, it’s probably flown off. And Moomintroll, reconciled, sits down to fish with him. It has a baby dragon at its centre, but this is quite obviously a story about friendship and understanding.
The Hemulen who loved silence The old hemulen works at a pleasure ground punching the visitors’ tickets and has got sick of the endless people and the blaring noise and can’t wait to retire. One day it starts raining and doesn’t stop for eight weeks. Bit by bit the pleasure ground attractions are washed away and he is glad. All the children are stuck inside their homes with their noses pressed to the windows. The hemulen uncles who owned the park decide they’ll abandon it and build an ice rink. When they offer him a job there, the hemulen says, ‘No, he wants to retire’. The hemulen uncles fall about laughing and give him the key to his grandmother’s old park.
Slowly, at length, the hemulen explores the overgrown gardens – described with typically Jansson-like wondrous spookiness – and settles into his new life of silence. But — the children have followed him and bang at the gates. They tell him they’ve recovered lots of bits of the pleasure ground from the rain and flood and can he put them together again. So, very reluctantly, the hemulen opens the locked gates and drags some of the wreckage inside. Long story short: the parts are too damaged and random to rebuild any of the rides but it does occur to him that he can create a sort of theme park with magic bits and painted faces and so on scattered through the underbrush, and so he does. He lets all the children in on condition they play very quietly. And they do, for that is part of the game in the marvellous jungle playground the hemulen who loved silence has built.
The Invisible Child Too-tickey comes home to the Moomin house one day with a completely invisible friend, Ninny. (Note, this strange new addition to the household, as so many, is a girl. It’s reassuring, the way so many of the characters are female.) Moominmamma makes up a traditional medicine handed down from her grandmother (note the importance of the matriarchy, as in Moominland Midwinter) and it helps start to make some of Ninny visible, but she also requires quite a bit of coaxing and reassurance from the others.
Little My diagnoses the real problem – Ninny has never been really angry and never laughed. They try to teach her games but she doesn’t get them. She doesn’t know how to have fun. Until one day they take her down to the seaside where they’re fixing up the old boat. First of all Ninny is terrified and appalled by the sea, which she’s never seen before – it’s just too big! And then she spies Moominpappa creeping up behind Moominmamma to give her a friendly fright, and Ninny leaps to mamma’s defence, giving Moominpappa a hard bite in the tail. She starts to laugh as Moominpappa curses and, reaching for his top hat which has fallen into the sea, tips over and falls headfirst into the waves. At which Ninny roars with delight and becomes fully visible.
So maybe the story could be retitled ‘the girl who learned how to laugh’. It seems pregnant with significance and meaning, like a fable.
The Secret of the Hattifatteners We’ve met the hattifatteners in numerous previous books. This tale describes how Moominpappa came to feel asphyxiated by happy Moomin family life and just had to get away. Moominmamma encouraged him. So he went to explore a secret bay he had once glimpsed from their boat and is surprised when a little boat with hattifatteners in it floats out. He hops in and spends the next few weeks journeying with the hattifatteners. He discovers they go to remote islands (of which there are thousands on the coast of Finland) and leave rolled-up birch bark scrolls. Not with any hidden messages or treasure maps. Just rolled-up birch bark scrolls.
Slowly Moominpappa feels his own mind becoming flattened and emptied. Sometimes he finds himself staring out over the sea as empty-mindedly as a hattifattener. Eventually they congregate with other boats of hattifatteners at a particular island and there is a big thunderstorm with plenty of lightning.
Moominpappa is knocked flat by a gust of wind and woken from his daze. Looking round at the hattifatteners yearning up into the sky, he realises they seek the lightning in order to come alive.
Only in the presence of electricity were they able to live at last, strongly and with great and intense feelings. (p.141)
Chastened by his adventure, Moominpappa realises that he not only misses home and wants to be back on the Moomin veranda – but that it is only there that he can feel free and adventurous.
Running through this story is a disconcerting anxiety about the act of thinking itself and the kinds of thoughts people have. Right at the start, Moominmamma rationalises her husband’s decision to go by saying that he’d been acting oddly for a while. But is that right? Or was it:
… just one of those things one thinks up afterwards when one’s bewildered and sad and wants the comfort of an explanation. (p.120)
This is a bit more unhappy and psychologically searching than any of the previous books. Later Moominpappa wishes he could communicate with the hattifatteners because talking:
‘is such a good way to keep one from thinking. And it was no use to leave the big and dangerous thoughts aside and concentrate on the small and friendly sort… (p.126)
Suddenly these are characters who have to keep from thinking.
As Moominpappa slowly falls in with the hattifattener way of life he finds his thoughts becoming white and empty. It is only the gust of wind which blows him over during the storm which makes him realise the whole situation and leads to his ‘happy’ realisation that home is where the heart is.
But to the adult reader, this all sounds like a fable working through real mental unhappiness and distress. ‘Fear of the big thoughts’ which make you so unhappy? A wish for an end to thinking, to the hattifatteners’ mindlessness? This is not the clever, warm humour of the earlier books, but something much darker.
Cedric Cedric is the name of Sniff’s toy dog. Moomintroll persuaded him to give it away to Gaffsie’s daughter because he said giving gifts makes you feel good – but in fact it’s made Sniff feel miserable.
‘When Sniff’s thoughts became too black’ he jumped out of bed and went to see Snufkin. Snufkin tells him a fable, the story of an aunt of his who had no husband or children or friends but a house stuffed full of belongings. One day she swallowed the bone in a lamb cutlet and went to see the doctor who told her she had only a few weeks to live. She’d always had an ambition to see the Amazonas and go deep sea diving so she decided to give away all her things and set off. But giving away everything turned into quite a project, especially since she wanted to give some thought to giving the correct things to the right people.
The more she gave away, the lighter and brighter the house became, and friends popped round to thank her. She laughed more, people enjoyed her company, came round for the evening and told funny stories and one day she was laughing so hard at one of these stories that the stuck bone popped up out of her mouth.
Sniff thinks it’s a foolish story and goes back to bed.
The adult reader gets the point – stop being a lonely miser, give away your belongings and become a happy person with lots of friends.
But the acute reader also notices the little trills and grace notes in the prose. In all the previous books these notes and details pointed upwards, they delighted you with sweet and touching details. But in every one of the stories in this volume the details point downwards. Moominpappa can’t bear to be at home any more. Sniff doesn’t just get restless; he gets out of his bed when his thoughts become too ‘black’.
(Compared to the masterpieces of her earlier illustrations, this picture feels roughly done and poor.)
The Fir Tree In which the Moomins are woken from their winter hibernation by a thoughtless hemulen who warns them about Christmas. On the surface the story is meant to be a joke, because the hemulen unwittingly gives the panic-stricken impression that ‘Christmas’ is a monster who has to be placated with a cut fir tree and presents, so the Moomins chop down a fir tree and each chooses a gift to give to the awful god ‘Christmas’.
And the joke is maintained by the way the hemulen is so stressed with all the gifts he has to give, and also by the hemulen’s aunt rushing to and fro in a sledge packed with presents, loudly fretting about what she’s going to cook because, oh dear, Christmas it always requires such a massive meal, and so on.
All round, this ‘Christmas’ thing is presented as an awful, stressful time which makes everyone unhappy and miserable.
The joke ends fairly humorously as a shy timid woody and his family come out, awe-struck, to look at the decorated tree and all the presents in the Moominhouse. ‘Is Christmas coming?’ ask the Moomintrolls, full of anxiety. ‘Why this is it!’ smile the woody and his family. Still scared, the Moomins declare the woody and his family are welcome to it all and sneak off to the veranda to await the disaster.
But there is no disaster. They peek through the window and see the woody and his family merrily eating and drinking and opening presents. Maybe the hemulen and his aunt got it wrong all along. Maybe Christmas isn’t about stress and lists and social obligations and worrying about food. Maybe it is about eating what you like and simply giving something meaningful to others.
Hopelessly confused, the Moomin family sneaks back to their bedrooms to carry on sleeping through till the spring.
The illustrations
I can’t get over how different the illustrations are. Here is Moomintroll from an earlier book, depicted with great clarity and precision, in perfect outlines set against a background created by incredibly detailed shading.
And here is Moomintroll as he appears in this book, looking at the baby dragon in its jam jar. There’s no comparison in the level of artistry. It looks like the roughest or preparatory sketches. Was she ill? Had she lost interest?
Moomintroll and the last dragon in the world
Related links
- Tales from Moominvalley on Amazon
- Moomin.com
- Tove Jannson Wikipedia article
- Tales from Moominvalley Wikipedia article
The Moomin books
1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November
Books & Boots 