50 Lessons that Moomins
can Teach You about Life
The Moomins of Moominvalley are the characters in a series of delightful illustrated chapter books and beautiful comics by Finnish author Tove Jansson. The characters have since been the basis of numerous television and film spin-offs, including a popular Japanese anime, and even a theme park called Moomin World in Finland. Anyone who grew up with the Moomins knows that they have the secrets of life figured out, and that we’re so lucky they decided to share their wisdom with us.
Here are a few of the Moomins' Life Lessons:
- It is only proper to warmly welcome anyone who comes to your house.
- It’s as important to know how to be alone as it is to know how to get along.
- A Moomintroll must know how to compliment a Snork Maiden properly.
and so I don't spoil the fun, here is the link to the rest of the lessons:
see: http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/50-lessons-that-moomins-can-teach-you-about-life
Waking up while the rest of your family is still hibernating is not as fun as it sounds
Background: The Moomins and the Great Flood began in 1939 when Tove Jansson was 25. War had broken out, and the Finnish writer was thinking about a different world, one not shot through with fear and hatred.
There’s been a fashion, thankfully going out of fashion, that if you are not writing social realism you are wasting time. I am sure that so many adults read Harry Potter because they wanted some magic back. The huge success of books like His Dark Materials, The Hobbit and Coraline, or movies like Up and Shrek, is down to our imaginative need for a world within a world. Part of us is wired to sit around the fire telling stories. And truth is often easier to bear when told at a slant.
Moomin-world is wise. The Groke only cares about riches and freezes everything she touches like a refrigerated Midas. The Hemulen collects stamps but falls into despair when his collection is complete – then he is only an owner. Moomins don’t think much of owning things.
The Great Flood is a story of adventure and reconciliation as Moominmamma and Moomintroll search for Moominpappa, lost at sea, which everyone agrees can happen if you start adventuring, though everyone agrees that adventuring is important. On their travels they adopt a small creature with big ears who explains: “I got lost and thought I’d never see the sun again”. This is Dante opening L’Inferno – “Midday through this life of ours I found myself alone in a dark wood.”
We know what that feels like, when the sun goes dark, whether we are a small scared child or a depressed adult.But here are light-up flowers and bowls of sea-pudding and Moominmamma reliably carries a dry pair of socks and stomach powders in her handbag.
Yet sadness is allowed. When Moominmamma falls into despair, everyone else gets gloomier and gloomier dwelling on the sadness in their lives. Perhaps this is Scandinavian, or perhaps it is just a psychic truth, and we try and protect children from what they know anyway – that life is dark as well as lit up.
Tove Jansson believed in happy endings, though. Not the Disney kind but more solid and ambiguous, which is a paradox, but more truthful than black-and-white solutions. Ever-after is what is invisible on the next page.
Moominpappa is at last rescued from a tree above the flood but his house is lost. Then, suddenly, it reappears – still with the three rooms, one yellow, one sky blue and one spotted, built like a tall old-fashioned wood-burning stove. It has floated by luck to a better place.
Luck and chance are part of Moomin weather. And better than a controlled environment. Happy ever after is much too boring for a Moomin.
'The Moomins and the Great Flood’ by Tove Jansson (Sort of Books, £9.99) is available from Telegraph Books at £9.99 plus £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516, or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Jeanette Winterson loved Tove Jansson’s creations as a child, but she loves them even more as a grown-up. As the Moomins’ very first outing is published in Britain, she explains why in: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9661351/Jeanette-Winterson-The-Moomins-and-me.html
I will never forget it: Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden have captured the annoying sand-spraying ant-lion and stuffed him inside the Hobgoblin’s hat. The hat has magical properties and whatever goes in comes out changed; eggshells into clouds you can ride, water into raspberry juice. To contain the ant-lion’s rage they flatten him down in the hat with the Dictionary of Outlandish Words. “You must take risks when experimenting,” says Snufkin. The dictionary starts to crumple up and all the words crawl out along the floor and up the walls until the ceiling is covered in Outlandish Words.
I was reading Finn Family Moomintroll in the Accrington Public Library. I must have been nine or 10. I went home and put my Collins Gem Englishschool dictionary into my Dad’s trilby. When that didn’t work, I wrote out random words and stuck them on the wall above my bed with flour and water. This got me into trouble but I didn’t care. The words, random, alive, were making a kind of leafmould in my mind. From that rich and fertile place came language of a different order.
Poetic disorder is how language is made. Only later is it codified. Naming starts as joy. Think of the pleasure a child has in finding words and inventing words and forming sentences that are also shapes. Words are ear and mouth before they are pen and paper. Words run away; you have to catch them.
Machine-made language, the language that comes later, in school and then at work, is useful enough but has no life of its own. The job of the writer is to stay on the side of life. The moving words were what I wanted – then and now.
I keep the Moomin books in my study and if I am tinkering about preparing for work I will often open one at random and read a page – they are funny and subversive, (Hemulens of either gender only wear dresses). And playful. Whatever happened to playfulness? Why, as adults, is serious/superficial the boring binary of our lives?
“‘What is it?’ said Moomintroll. Discoveries were his very favourite thing (after mysterious paths, swimming and secrets, that is).”
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