Name: A Map of Moominvalley
Author: Tove Jansson

It has been remarked of Jansson’s work that ‘the geography of the stories is very precise’. Jansson’s mother had ‘drawn excellent maps of the Jansson family’s summer islands and the maps of the Moomins’ world resemble them’. Early versions sometimes included incongruous exotic elements such as palm trees, but these were later removed as Jansson refined her setting into a more coherent and recognisably Nordic environment. She came to regard Moominvalley as firmly rooted in Finnish and Scandinavian landscapes:

The world of the Moomins was made up of sea, storms, rugged mountains and caves, but also of flowers and dense forest. Moominvalley was a homely, local and safe environment, along with its opposite as a backdrop to the adventures: an unpredictable and dangerous sea and a mountainous land prone to disasters. The Moomins always found it good to return from the great wide world to the calm of the valley back home. Though, of course, in order to return they had first to leave.

The endpapers to Finn Family Moomintroll feature the first ‘Map of Moominvalley,’ centred on Moominhouse with inset floorplans at lower right. A bird’s-eye view shows the surrounding mountains, rivers, fruit trees, and flowers, with additional insets of Hattifattener’s Island and the Misty Mountains. The playful composition owes much to Bernard Sleigh’s Fairyland map, but transplants its dreamlike qualities into a Scandinavian idiom, and promises adventure as well as refuge.

Ex Carta

The map of Moominvalley situates Tove Jansson’s whimsical creatures within a romantic Nordic landscape, where rivers, mountains, and a distant lighthouse ground the fantastical in the familiar.

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was a Finnish-Swedish artist and writer who grew up in a highly creative household: her father, Viktor Jansson, was a sculptor, and her mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, an illustrator and graphic designer. She studied art in Helsinki, Stockholm, and Paris before establishing herself as a painter, illustrator, and eventually writer. Alongside her own work, Jansson produced illustrations for Swedish editions of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as the acclaimed 1962 Swedish edition of The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Jansson began writing the Moomin books during the Second World War. Writing in 1991, she recalled:

It was the winter of the war, in 1939. One’s work stood still; it felt completely pointless to try to create pictures. Perhaps it was understandable that I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with ‘Once upon a time’

Although she had conceived of the Moomins earlier, it was during the war that she ‘created an entire world for them’, one in which she could take refuge from the ongoing horrors around her (Karjalainen, 2014). Though the stories were born less of commercial ambition than of psychological and imaginative necessity, the first book – The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945) – was published in Swedish before the war was even over. The third instalment in the series, Finn Family Moomintroll (1948) was the first to be translated into English (1950), and the first to become an international bestseller.

It introduces readers more fully to the world of Moominvalley, the central setting for the nine novels, five picture books, and long-running comic strip created between 1945 and 1993. The stories follow Moomintroll, his family, and their eccentric circle of friends in a series of adventures that blend whimsy, philosophy, and gentle satire. It is a body of work that led Philip Pullman (b.1946), author of His Dark Materials, to describe Jansson as a ‘genius’ (BBC, 2014). The Moomin books reflect both Jansson’s love of nature and her subtle exploration of existential themes, though she also denied they had any explicitly didactic intent: ‘I write in order to amuse – but not to educate’.

It has been remarked of Jansson’s work that ‘the geography of the stories is very precise’ (Karjalainen, 2014). Jansson’s mother had ‘drawn excellent maps of the Jansson family’s summer islands and the maps of the Moomins’ world resemble them’. Early versions sometimes included incongruous exotic elements such as palm trees, but these were later removed as Jansson refined her setting into a more coherent and recognisably Nordic environment. She came to regard Moominvalley as firmly rooted in Finnish and Scandinavian landscapes:

"The world of the Moomins was made up of sea, storms, rugged mountains and caves, but also of flowers and dense forest. Moominvalley was a homely, local and safe environment, along with its opposite as a backdrop to the adventures: an unpredictable and dangerous sea and a mountainous land prone to disasters. The Moomins always found it good to return from the great wide world to the calm of the valley back home. Though, of course, in order to return they had first to leave."

The endpapers to Finn Family Moomintroll feature the first ‘Map of Moominvalley,’ centred on Moominhouse with inset floorplans at lower right. A bird’s-eye view shows the surrounding mountains, rivers, fruit trees, and flowers, with additional insets of Hattifattener’s Island and the Misty Mountains. The playful composition owes much to Bernard Sleigh’s Fairyland map, but transplants its dreamlike qualities into a Scandinavian idiom, and promises adventure as well as refuge.