The first Moomin was an ugly doodle mocking the philosopher Kant
After losing an argument about Immanuel Kant with her brother, the young Tove Jansson drew the ugliest creature she could imagine on the family outhouse wall and labelled it Kant. Softened and fattened over the years, that scowling doodle became Moomintroll, star of books translated worldwide and a strip read by millions.
Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9 August 1914, into Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and an artistic household: her father was a sculptor and her mother designed many of Finland's postage stamps. Summers on the islands of Pellinki, east of Helsinki, shaped her love of the sea. She wrote and illustrated her first picture book at 14 and trained in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris. The name Moomin came from an uncle in Stockholm who, to stop her raiding the pantry, warned that a Moomintroll lived in the kitchen closet breathing cold air down people's necks.
The first Moomin book appeared in 1945 and sold poorly; Finn Family Moomintroll, the third, made her famous in 1948. Early stories are adventures with floods and comets, the comet sometimes read as a nuclear allegory. From Moominland Midwinter onward the tone deepened, and Moominvalley in November, written in the year her mother died, leaves the Moomins out entirely. Afterwards she said she could not find the happy valley again and stopped. Many characters had real models: Too-Ticky was based on her partner Tuulikki Pietilä, and Snufkin on the journalist Atos Wirtanen.
In 1952 the British journalist Charles Sutton invited her to draw a Moomin comic strip for the London Evening News, then the world's largest daily paper with a circulation of 12 million, and it spread to newspapers in 12 countries. Earlier, working for the satirical magazine Garm, she drew Hitler as a wailing baby being fed slices of Europe like cake, and mocked Stalin's absurdly short sword.
Jansson regarded painting and writing as equally important, held solo exhibitions from 1943 and painted murals in public buildings. She illustrated editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Hobbit, won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966, and from 1968 wrote fiction for adults, notably The Summer Book, about a girl and her grandmother on an island, filmed in 2024 with Glenn Close. She died on 27 June 2001.
Source: Tove Jansson
