The Moomins Live in Peace. Their Creator Tried to Do the Same.
Europe was on the brink of World War II when Tove Jansson, the Scandinavian writer and artist, sat down to sketch her first “Moomin” story, about a snout-nosed troll living in a magical land threatened by a rising flood.
The half-written draft was forgotten until after the war, when it was published in 1945 as “The Little Trolls and the Great Flood,” the first in a series of nine Moomin books, which became classics of Finnish literature.
The Moomin characters — adorable Little My, cheeky Snork Maiden and moody Snufkin — gained international fame in 1954, when Jansson made them the protagonists of a comic strip for The Evening News, a newspaper in London.
In the 1990s, the Moomins enjoyed a second wave of popularity when a Japanese and Dutch collaboration created an animated Moomin television program and a Moomin feature film.
