This unexpected opportunity arose during a decade that saw a boom in magazine culture. It was just before radio became the dominant family-oriented medium, and there was still a large market for more or less trivial literature, which could be read aloud on holidays and commercial celebrations like Mothers Day in May. Children’s literature of the type found in publications like Landsbygdens jul was particularly despised by the literary establishment, even though a considerable number of prominent Swedish authors contributed to such publications at the beginning and end of their careers. In 1945 children’s literary critic Eva von Zweigbergk called the stories that appeared in such annual magazines “opportunistic fairy-tales,” arguing that all these works of dubious literary merit were drowning out the genuine article: “It’s lucky that in every generation there have been storytellers with their own voice, voices one wants to listen to and won’t forget amid the dreadful output characteristic of the modern age. Weeklies, Sunday supplements, and cheap Christmas magazines are streaming toward children with hastily scribbled stories about trolls and princesses.”
Zweigbergk’s harsh critique was immortalized in Children and Books (Barn och böcker) in 1945, which may explain why Astrid Lindgren later disavowed her fairy-tales and stories in Landsbygdens jul (and, after 1939, in the magazine Mother’s Praise [Mors hyllning]), dismissing them as “youthful sins” and “idiotic tales.” Clearly she wasn’t proud of them, and it has since become a dogma of Astrid Lindgren research that these fifteen or so short pieces of children’s prose shouldn’t be considered as anything other than curiosities—pieces revealing artistic weaknesses that Lindgren had put behind her by the time Pippi Longstocking appeared in 1945, the same year Eva von Zweigbergk published Children and Books with her fellow critic Greta Bolin. Zweigbergk and Bolin lauded good, artistically valuable literature for children of various age groups while pointing the finger at authors who wrote assembly-line stories: “It’s probably just as easy to write such fairy-tales as it is to knock out romantic short stories for weekly magazines, just with more irresponsibility hidden behind the ostensibly good intention of entertaining the young. For the child’s mind is more impressionable than the adult’s.”
Today these preliminary attempts are available to read in Astrid Lindgren’s archive at the National Library, as well as in the anthology Santa’s Wonderful Radio of Pictures (Jultomtens underbara bildradio), and a more nuanced perspective suggests itself. True, the stories do contain many clichés, and in certain cases are just as moralizing as Zweigbergk and Bolin accused the interwar “opportunistic fairy-tales” of being. Yet there are also some overlooked gems, including “Maja Gets a Fiancé” (Maja får en fästman, 1937), “Also a Mothers Day Gift” (Också en Morsdagsgåva, 1940), and “Thing-Seeker” (Sakletare, 1941). These three texts—more short stories than fairy-tales and appealing almost as much to adults as children—are clear evidence that Astrid Lindgren was progressing as a writer at the end of the 1930s. She was rapidly finding the distinctive perspective and voice that would write her name into the history of children’s literature, on a par with such classic authors as Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, and Elsa Beskow: authors who, like Lindgren, depicted children in their natural state, independent of the adult world.
The happy family in Stockholm, 1933. In a letter to his brother-in-law in 1931, when Gunnar was about to marry Gullan, Sture wrote: “I have the unconquerable urge to tell you that marriage is the greatest gift nature can squander on two people who suit each other—in the long term, too.”
In young Astrid Lindgren’s fiction from the 1930s and early 1940s, the author inevitably comes across as uncertain and unpracticed, searching for a style and tone, yet unafraid to aim high or be unconventional. Take her debut story, for instance, “Santa’s Wonderful Radio of Pictures,” which first appeared in the Stockholms-Tidningen’s Christmas supplement in 1933 and was reprinted in Landsbygdens jul in 1938.
The reader is introduced to a Lasse-like seven-year-old, the inquisitive and plucky Lars from Backagården. One day Lars ventures into a cave, where he finds one of the planet’s most fabled father figures sitting in an ordinary armchair with a pair of headphones on his head. Santa is online, as we’d say these days, plugged into a hi-tech radio with a screen, which is linked up to surveillance cameras in every Swedish household. “You see,” as Father Christmas says to Lars, “even Santa has to keep up with the times.”
It was indeed a new age in Sweden, an age in which northern Europe had been struck by unemployment and widespread agricultural and industrial crises in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Yet in Sweden—at least among the younger generation—there was a palpable and increasing sense of faith in the future. Some people have suggested that this optimism was due to the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, which showcased a new age and new mindset through its emphasis on functional design, promising new apartments in bigger cities, more cars, and radios and movies for the common man. Others have explained it with the rise of the Social Democrats to power in 1932. Four years earlier, Per Albin Hansson had presented his vision of Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, when he spoke about future welfare for all and emphasized that there were neither “favorites nor stepchildren, the privileged nor the vulnerable, in a good home.” It set in motion progress away from poverty toward the welfare state, which would come to have a huge nationwide impact on the notion of what it meant to be Swedish.
Sharp-witted and imaginative readers of the Christmas story in the Stockholms-Tidningen’s 1933 supplement might even have wondered whether the futuristic Santa represented the newly powerful Social Democrats, who had formed a government one year earlier, promising shared social resources as well as equal rights and opportunities for citizens. Was it, perhaps, the prime minister himself, Per Albin Hansson, whom the unknown female writer had dressed up in headphones and a big beard for her humorous Christmas story? It’s a rather far-fetched interpretation, admittedly, yet her depiction of old St. Nicholas was certainly highly sophisticated, playing with the frightening thought that Santa can spy on individual citizens from their earliest childhood, stepping in as their moral guardian: “Because Kalle has been naughty every single day, he’s not getting any Christmas presents.”
Sermonizing
If there’s one thing that characterizes Astrid Lindgren’s work, it’s the absence of Sunday school stories, or what she called sermonizing. In her initial years writing for Landsbygdens jul, she clearly struggled to free herself from the old-fashioned style of didactic writing she had grown up with as a child among the storytellers on the farm, but at the apartment in Vulcanusgatan, sermonizing and Sunday school stories were rare. And she would launch into stories at any time or place, remembers Karin Nyman. “It wasn’t like she would settle down to tell a story. The story always arose out of something else. Except at bedtime, when she had to entertain Lasse or me by reading stories. She made up her own or retold other people’s.”
Elves and trolls were everywhere in the Lindgren family. Magical creatures that emerged from the Småland-made nooks in Astrid’s memory, or from the Scandinavian folk tales and picture books by Elsa Beskow and John Bauer that Astrid, Sture, and the children studied diligently in the 1930s. Karin Nyman recounts that her father was supposed to go into town one day to buy a new suit of clothes but instead came home with an illustrated two-volume edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tales in Danish, which took a place on Astrid Lindgren’s bookcase alongside other family classics: “We read Elsa Beskow’s picture books, of course. All of them, I’m sure, and above all Hans Christian Andersen, which our mother read or retold for us, especially ‘Little Claus and Big Claus,’ though I remember ‘The Tinderbox’ best myself. And we got Winnie the Pooh, Doctor Dolittle, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Mark Twain, Swedish folk tales, One Thousand and One Nights, the satirical adventures of Falstaff, fakir, and the magazine Bland tomtar och troll [Among pixies and trolls] regularly. When Astrid told stories, she only ever did it o
n impulse. If she was thinking of them in moralistic or didactic terms, then that went right over my head.”
Proud grandparents at Christmas and New Year 1934 at Näs. Karin is on her grandmother Hanna’s lap, Lasse in the middle, and Gunvor, daughter of Gunnar and Gullan, in her grandfather’s arms.
Just as the stories Lasse and Karin’s mother came up with weren’t intended to be educational, her ideas when it came to child-rearing weren’t rigid or formulaic. Astrid’s teaching was neither old-fashioned nor modern, says Karin Nyman, but imbued with the common sense she and her three siblings at Näs had been brought up with: “The upbringing I got when I was young was quite conventional, I suppose. My father never got involved. I was mostly a ‘well-behaved’ child, and Astrid was the one who scolded us when necessary. Most likely her ideas about raising children were the same as the ones she had experienced as a child—total parental authority, but without unnecessary meddling in the child’s life and without any hectoring. I was expected to curtsey to adults, say my bedtime prayers and ‘obey.’ But I got exaggerated praise for most of what I did, teaching myself to write at the age of five, writing short stories and that sort of thing.”
On the few occasions Astrid Lindgren did moralize to her children, she found that they saw through it. In literary terms, she discovered that didactic elements in stories and fairy-tales weren’t merely superfluous but that they underestimated children’s ability to think for themselves. This experience would become a cornerstone of Astrid Lindgren’s work. That both Lasse and Karin helped shape this foundation is documented in their mother’s many small observations about her children at various ages and stages of development, which were either noted in the account book or immortalized in diary entries and letters to friends and acquaintances. Later in life, Astrid Lindgren was able to recall off the top of her head some of the moments when Lasse or Karin realized she was sermonizing. In a Swedish newspaper in the mid-1950s, for instance, Astrid described the wish lists she always wrote for Lasse and Karin when they were young, so that they knew what gifts their mother wanted: “Once, when the children were little, I concluded the list with a sanctimonious wish for ‘two well-behaved children.’ But my son justly remarked, ‘Will there be space for all four of us?’ So I struck that one out.”
Another example Astrid noted in the account book was from Christmas 1930—Lasse’s first in Sweden—which was celebrated at Näs. As usual, lutfisk was served at the Ericsson family table, and as usual Astrid’s stomach turned at the sight of the jellylike fish, though evidently her son’s didn’t: “Lasse ate lutfisk, which I’ve never been able to bring myself to do. I praised him and said that Santa would definitely say he was a good boy. Lasse’s question in response: ‘Okay, then what’s he going to say to you?’”
Such spontaneous, morally disarming remarks were a large part of why the didactic tone in Astrid Lindgren’s first works of fiction quietly disappeared. There were clumsy messages in stories like “Johan’s Christmas Eve Adventure” (Johans äventyr på julafton) from 1933, where children were informed that you can get into trouble if you’re naughty and mean to others. And there were moral lessons in “Hocus Pocus” (Filiokus) from 1934 and “Pumpernickel and His Brothers” (Pumpernickel och hans bröder) from 1935, which were about what happens to children if they’re disobedient and lazy. By 1936, however, something had happened to Astrid Lindgren’s writing: that year, she sent two distinctly different stories to Landsbygdens jul, “The Big Rat Ball” (Den stora råttbalan) and “Christmas Eve in Lilltorpet” (Julafton i Lilltorpet), each of which addressed readers on two separate levels.
“The Big Rat Ball” takes place in the fall. Mice and rats, returning indoors, organize a party that will never end. The story is an allegorical, satirical depiction of the social mechanisms that become apparent during celebrations, and was thus a tale more for adults than for children—something underscored by the author’s use of long compound Swedish words for terms like “rat society,” “gentlewoman,” “charming,” and “railway town.” “Christmas Eve in Lilltorpet,” on the other hand, was aimed at the younger readers of Landsbygdens jul. This deeply melancholy fairy-tale is about Death, who comes, instead of Santa Claus, to visit an impoverished rural household. A single mother of six is ill, and the doctor can’t get through in the snowstorm. Ten-year-old Sven, desperate enough to try and fetch help, also has to give up the battle with the forces of nature, and as he sits crying, hungry and numb with cold in Lilltorpet with his four younger siblings, his big sister Anna-Märta keeps watch over their mother’s deathbed:
She’s sitting on a chair at the head of the bed, a melancholy little figure in a blue dress she’s long since grown too big for. Her index finger traces the woodwork on the bedstead pensively while she waits. It’s cold in the room, where the fire is rarely lit. Anna-Märta is shivering a little. For the last time, her mother Katarina wakes up from her torpor. She looks at her daughter and stretches out a groping hand. With her last ounce of strength, she forces out a few words: “Anna-Märta . . . I’m dying . . . look after the little ones.” Anna-Märta nods mutely. Then suddenly all is still.
The narrator pulls out all the stops in this sentimental, social-realist story. For the first time in these early Astrid Lindgren tales, one senses a narrator who is mature and omnipotent yet shows interest in and solidarity with children, and who in certain passages is both empathetic and intellectually perceptive: “Anna-Märta recognizes the silence; it was the same when her father died.” There is no moral to the story, and no blame laid on anyone or anything. None of her readers are made to feel guilty. They are, however, invited to feel sympathy for a child grown up much too fast and much too brutally, and who receives the narrator’s full attention to the very end: “Evening came. All of them went to sleep except Anna-Märta, who still had plenty to do. At last she too was finished, and crept into the wooden bench beside her little brother. Now it loosens, the lump that’s been stuck in her throat all day long. Anna-Märta cries, hushed and still, so as not to wake her siblings. Anna-Märta is just thirteen. Perhaps she’s a heroine anyway. But she doesn’t understand that. Outside it’s still snowing.”
What Does an Engagement Cost
A year later, with the story “Maja Gets a Fiancé,” printed in Landsbygdens jul, Astrid Lindgren inhabited her main character fully, observing the world through the eyes of a five-year-old. His name is Jerker, and—like his two older siblings—he thinks the family’s maid, Maja, is the loveliest surrogate mother in the world. Not only can she cook and look after children, she tells fairy-tales and radiates a warmth and intimacy the children’s mother can’t compete with. The latter is more interested in her social standing, and one day, when the grandest ladies in town are visiting, carrying on a lively, carping conversation over coffee and cakes, Jerker overhears them say that Maja is so ugly she’ll never get a fiancé.
Jerker knows the word “ugly” and his mind boggles, because in his eyes Maja is beautiful. The other word the grand ladies keep repeating—“fiancé”—Jerker doesn’t know. The boy thinks it over and realizes that he needs to get Maja a fiancé, cost what it will. So he empties his piggy bank and heads down to the local shopkeeper, who is new in town. On the way Jerker thinks: “There’s no knowing how much a fiancé might cost, but for five öre I should be able to get a really nice one.” The young shopkeeper listens with interest as Jerker explains his errand, the five-öre piece clenched in his fist, and Jerker is pleased. He isn’t used to grown-ups listening to him: “He still wasn’t laughing, Jerker realized with satisfaction. It often happened that grown-ups acted serious at first, then suddenly, when you least expected it, started laughing at you.”
Karin was born at 12:50 a.m. on May 21, 1934, weighing ten pounds, nine ounces. In the days leading up to the birth Astrid had been feeling run down, suffering from a cold, exhaustion, and a “heavy stomach,” as she put it in her private notes about the birth.
The shopkeeper asks casually why Jerker wants to
buy a fiancé. Who is it for? The boy can’t help but pour his heart out to the sympathetic grown-up. The shopkeeper listens with even more interest, and says that Jerker can easily get a fiancé for five öre, but that he can’t carry one home himself. For that he needs a grown man, so the kindly shopkeeper volunteers to drop by that evening: “‘Oh, but I’ll be asleep then,’ objected Jerker. ‘There’s no other way. I can’t leave here any sooner, you see.’ ‘Then it’s a deal,’ decided Jerker. Then he went home, very pleased with himself. The matter was settled. Maja was going to get a fiancé, just like all the other young ladies.”
This charming tale from 1937, in which children’s and adults’ different perspectives on the world collide but eventually accommodate each other, is the first example of Astrid Lindgren’s ability to enter the mind of a child and interpret reality with a child’s logic. Her stories for children soon became increasingly ambitious. From 1939 on, some of them were also printed in Mors hyllning, which was published annually before Mothers Day. Fairy-tales and fables about pixies, trolls, and talking animals had to cede ground in the late 1930s to more contemporary, realistic stories drawn from the everyday lives of children, informed by the author’s familiarity with what motivated and concerned them.
These efforts were virtually identical to the program for a new kind of children’s literature laid out by Alva Myrdal in 1939, in the preface to the Swedish edition of Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s classic Here and Now Story Book. Myrdal, on a trip to the United States in the 1920s, found Mitchell’s book, a collection of experimental fairy-tales for children aged two to seven. The Swedish politician, who had a particular interest in the family, wrote books about the welfare of children and adults in urban environments in the 1930s, as well as about toys and the education of small children. In her preface, she remarked that contemporary writers for children needed to be more in tune with both children and the modern urban life into which more and more of them were being born. New, contemporary children’s literature must engage with the child’s own tangible reality and vibrant internal world: “Children’s literature is changing. People are beginning to look for ‘real’ fairy-tales: fairy-tales that are suited to children as they really are. Adult power is diminishing. . . . More than anything else, then, contemporary storytelling must bring urban environments and modern working life into the fantastical world of the child.”