For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.
If you were to drop by my apartment, you’d see a lot of Moomins. My girlfriend and I own all sorts of trinkets bearing their likeness: a selection of mugs, a teapot, a tea towel (that we framed and put on the wall), a bedside night light, a pair of light-up key rings, a necklace, a wallet, a plastic model from a vending machine in Japan, at least one Christmas-tree decoration, a poster, and a pair of fridge magnets that, in the absence of a magnetic fridge door, we’ve posed on either side of our fireplace. They look like heraldic bas-reliefs.
What are Moomins, you might be wondering. They’re children’s characters, dreamed up decades ago by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, that are white and rotund, with pointy ears, swishy tails, and rounded snouts; they’re sometimes likened to hippos, which is fair, even if the comparison doesn’t particularly resonate with me. (To me, they just look like Moomins, a fact that is partly because I’ve been familiar with them since my early childhood, but is also a reflection of their singular visual identity; as Sheila Heti once put it in this magazine, they are “strangely familiar, as though Jansson happened to look in a new direction and find these tender and serious fellow-creatures, who had been with us all along.”) Then again, you might not be wondering what Moomins are—they have fans all over the world, and my girlfriend and I are far from alone in having stuffed our home with their merchandise, worldwide sales of which reportedly top eight hundred million dollars per year. (The Moomin mugs, each wrapped in a gorgeous illustration, are the jewels in this crown, and are highly collectible; in 2021, one sold at auction for nearly thirty thousand dollars.) Other fans include the actor Lily Collins, a.k.a. Emily of “in Paris” fame, who not only collects the merchandise but named her daughter Tove and hosted the introductory episode of an official Moomin podcast.
On the podcast, which premièred in the spring of 2023, Collins said that, when she first started collecting Moomin paraphernalia, it was “impossible” to find in the U.S. This has changed in recent years: alongside the podcast launch, Moomin Characters (the company that manages the rights to Jansson’s creations) and Barnes & Noble announced “a significant new partnership to make Jansson’s literature widely accessible to American audiences, both in stores and online” (including, yes, a plan to sell mugs); since then, there have been collaborations with Urban Outfitters and luxury labels including Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. This year, which marks the eightieth anniversary of the Moomins’ début, there have been further signs of a Finnish invasion, including an ongoing exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library—the first ever dedicated to Jansson in the U.S.—which reflects Jansson’s progressive values. She was a committed pacifist and antifascist, and, early in her career, she worked as a political cartoonist, poking fun at dictators; Linda E. Johnson, the president and C.E.O. of the Brooklyn Public Library, has noted that Jansson was also openly queer, at a time when being gay was criminalized in Finland, and that the decision to highlight her work was timed to coincide with Pride Month. “It speaks to what’s going on culturally,” Johnson said, “and lets our audience know: The Brooklyn Public Library is not backing down.” The exhibition is titled “The Door Is Always Open.” (Earlier in the summer, a Moomin public art work in London, produced in partnership with an initiative celebrating refugees, bore the same moniker.)
An executive at Moomin Characters told the New York Times recently that Jansson’s creations “are being discovered in the U.S. by new generations, spreading word from person to person.” Of course, much of this word-spreading is happening on social media. There have long been dedicated Moomin communities on Facebook and Tumblr. The Times reported that Gen Z is intensifying the trend—posting about the Moomins on TikTok, finding old animations on YouTube (that are closer to Jansson’s drawings than more modern 3-D offerings), and, in the process, ushering the Moomins into “a global pantheon of cuteness.” This cuteness is, surely, a key driver of the Moomins’ online appeal, as is the sense that the characters have an “inherent gentle wonderment”—as one writer recently put it after visiting the Brooklyn exhibition—that offers an escape from the many anxieties of modern life. The Moomins’ association with escapism is not a new thing: Jansson once wrote that she created them when she “wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts” and enter “an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign—and possible.” When, in the nineteen-fifties, a London newspaper that commissioned a Moomin comic strip stipulated there be no politics, sex, or death, Jansson is said to have replied that she didn’t know anything about the government, that the Moomins can’t anatomically have sex, and that she once killed a hedgehog, but nothing else.
And yet the books that Jansson wrote about the Moomins contain, sometimes explicitly and other times by way of metaphor, political themes—war, displacement, imminent annihilation, environmental catastrophe—that hardly serve as distractions from the many dangers of the world, then or now. Earlier this year, the author Frances Wilson wrote, in a New Statesman essay about the “dark side” of the Moomins, that “one of the oddest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is how these complex tales of apocalypse, breakdown and disfunction have been consistently misread as cutesy celebrations of domestic life.”
Time to box up the mugs, then? Not exactly. While some of the Moomins’ newer online fans might be ignorant of the angst—not to mention weirdness—of Jansson’s œuvre, I don’t see any incompatibility between her cute illustrations and the ambient existential dread that pervades their adventures. If anything, this juxtaposition makes the Moomins perfect guides through our muddled moment, online and off. Ultimately, we could all usefully spend a little less time doomscrolling, and a little more time Moomscrolling.
Technically, it isn’t quite right to say that this year marks the eightieth anniversary of the Moomins’ début. Jansson first drew a Moomin-like creature (intending it to be ugly, not cute) when she was a child, sketching it onto an outhouse wall following an argument with her brother about the merits of Immanuel Kant; later, her uncle would caution her against raiding the cupboards for a midnight snack by warning that, if she did, the “Moomintrolls” that live behind the stove would press their cold snouts against her legs. At some point after Jansson started contributing satirical cartoons to Garm, a Finnish magazine, she began drawing a character resembling a Moomin as part of her signature. In one cover illustration, it can be seen peering out from behind the “M” of “GARM.” A caricature of Adolf Hitler is perched on the “G.”
During the Winter War—which began when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November, 1939, and would go on to drive hundreds of thousands of Finns from their homes—Jansson started work on what would become the first Moomin book, known today as “The Moomins and the Great Flood,” though it wouldn’t be published until 1945. War was the reality from which Jansson would later say she wanted to escape, but as Heti noted in her review of a pair of works about Jansson, the “Great Flood” is “fascinating for how un-escapist it seems.” The book begins deep in a forest, where a young character named Moomintroll and his mother are searching for “a snug, warm place where they could build a house to crawl into when winter came.” Their subsequent adventures have a dreamlike quality, with each salvation (coming across a garden of lemonade and candy, for example) quickly giving way to a fresh peril (tummyache, in the case of the candy). The gravest danger comes from the titular flood, which drives people from their homes; it would be presentist to read this as a parable for the climate crisis, but it clearly resonates as such. And the illustrations have yet to take on the vibrant, rounded aesthetic that defines the modern Moomin brand. The characters’ snouts are more pronounced. Clean lines sometimes dissolve into washes of dark ink.
The “Great Flood” has often been considered apart from the subsequent Moomin canon: Jansson later referred to it as “a banal story without any personality”; it was translated into English only in 2005, after she died. But similar themes run through the later books. “Comet in Moominland” (1946) can be read as an allegory for the fear of nuclear apocalypse (a resonance that must have eluded me when I read the novel as a child, realizing it only years later during a trip to an exhibit at the Moomin museum in the Finnish city of Tampere). Wilson describes the sixth Moomin book, “Moominland Midwinter,” as containing “the most devastating account of depression in 20th-century literature,” and notes that, in a later comic strip, a psychiatrist puts Moomintroll on meds that shrink him out of existence. The last of Jansson’s Moomin novels, “Moominvalley in November,” sees the Moomin family go missing, and a variety of side characters reflect on their elusiveness. Wilson and others have likened it to “Waiting for Godot.”
This is not to say that the Moomin books are depressing. Some of them have overtly happy endings: the flood leads to a new home for the Moomin family; the comet misses. And they are funny, able to find levity in impending disaster. (When one character defines the word “catastrophe,” another counters that it is, “in other words—‘fuss.’ ”) Over all, my abiding memory of the books is that they are full of life, despite the world’s complications. “It would be awful if the earth exploded,” a different character says, in “Comet.” “It’s so beautiful.” This philosophy, I think, is what keeps the Moomins in my heart (and my home). If the underlying themes can be anxiety-provoking, then the Moomins themselves are anchoring presences—whatever may happen to the world, and whether or not we can control it.
I am, surely, not the only one who sees the Moomins like this—one young visitor to the Brooklyn exhibition told the Times that, in addition to their being cute, she likes that they are “anxious,” a vibe she picked up, apparently, without even reading the books—even if, for other new fans, cuteness alone is the draw. (Being cute, of course, is a major asset online, driving, for example, the recent Labubu craze, which Kyle Chayka wrote about in his New Yorker column this week, though, as Chayka argued, Labubus’ cuteness has a grotesque edge and their popularity reflects a sort of viral “brain rot” made flesh, or cloth, that is at odds with the Moomins’ wholesomeness. “I’m scared they’re gonna labubu-ify the moomins” is a sentence that someone recently wrote on X.) It’s hard to say how Jansson would have reacted to her creation’s growing online purchase; even while she was alive, she, like her books, could be contradictory. (The books can be read as containing anti-consumerist messages, but Jansson had hands-on involvement in the development of early Moomin merchandise.) While rereading “Comet” recently, I was struck by a passage in which Moomintroll tells Snorkmaiden, his love interest, that his father writes down everything he does. Snorkmaiden responds, “Then surely he hasn’t got time to do very much?” It’s a question that could, in this day and age, easily be interpreted as an instruction to touch grass.
Evergreen advice, and anyone minded to log off could do worse than pick up one of Jansson’s books. And yet the Moomins can also serve as an antidote to the toxicity of much modern internet discourse. Already, as the Times noted, they have helped forge bonds between L.G.B.T. Moomin fans, who have used “their affinity with the characters as a kind of double language”; others simply share a delight in the Moomins’ look. Boel Westin, a biographer of Jansson, has described one Moomin philosophy as holding that “life itself isn’t peaceful, but you can form a community of family and other creatures built on solidarity.” And, sometimes, merch. One beautiful mug at a time. ♦
