How Moomin creator Tove Jansson found her dark side illustrating Tolkien and Carroll

She thought Lewis Carroll was ‘pathological’. Her Gollum was so monstrous that JRR Tolkien amended his book’s text – but copies of Tove Jansson’s illustrated edition of ‘The Hobbit’ fly off shelves even though they remain in the original Finnish. Susie Mesure visits a new exhibition that shows how the brain behind the Moomins turned her vividly macabre eye to transform other classic books

From the cover of Tove Jansson’s edition of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' (Tove Jansson Estate)

In November 1960, Astrid Lindgren got in touch with Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. Lindgren, who wrote the Swedish children’s classic Pippi Longstocking, was also a publisher – and she begged Jansson to turn her imagination to the works of JRR Tolkien. “Who will comfort Astrid if you don’t agree to the proposal I’m now going to make to you?” Lindgren wrote in a letter, riffing on the title of another of Jansson’s recent picture books, Who Will Comfort Toffle?

In the UK, as in her native Finland, Tove Jansson is, of course, best known for the Moomins, an adventurous family of fantastical creatures who live in a magical valley on the edge of a Finnish archipelago. A Moomin comic strip ran in London’s Evening News from 1954 until 1975, reaching millions of readers across the Commonwealth, and, more recently, the first new animation series about the Moomins for nearly three decades – Moominvalley – brought the white trolls to life for a new, younger generation. Fans range from devotees who grew up on books such as Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland, to those with a penchant for collecting Moomin mugs, which Moomin Characters, the family-owned company that looks after Jansson’s legacy, still churns out year after year.  

Less is known, however, about the success Jansson, a Finnish icon who died in 2001 aged 86, had illustrating the work of other writers, something a new exhibition in Paris is putting under the spotlight. Houses of Tove explores how Jansson was so much more than a comic strip creator, a job she came to loathe because it kept her from her true passions: painting and writing. The show includes a first edition of The Hobbit, or Bilbo – en hobbits äventyr, as it is known in Swedish, which Jansson jumped at the chance to illustrate for Lindgren. It also features a number of preparatory sketches she made for the commission, which were used in a 1973 Finnish translation: the first edition, featuring a wonderful red dragon hovering above a tiny army scaling jagged peaks, is on display.