Summer of Love
Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, first published in the fall of 1981, is about two children who, like Henry David Thoreau, turn their backs on the materialistic order of the world. Each has grown up as the only child in a separate half of the same castle, each living among a patriarchal gang of robbers where life revolves around stealing from others and waging war with the rival gang. Eventually the two children decide to leave home, in a youthful, antiauthoritarian protest against their fathers’ norms, embracing the boundless freedom of the woods instead. They plan to build a new home and live in harmony with nature, “in day as well as night, under sun, moon and stars, and during the silent passing of the seasons.”
Eleven-year-old Ronia and Birk are described at the beginning of the novel as loners, à la Thoreau. They have no need for the company of others, and from a young age they have learned to roam through the woods, where they feel no more lonely than the sunrise, the blueberry bushes, the rainbow, the North Star, or the squirrels, elk, foxes, and hare. As the novel’s narrator observes of Ronia: “She lived her solitary forest life. Yes, she was solitary, but she never missed anybody. Who was there to miss? Her days were full of life and happiness.”
Things change, however, when Ronia meets Birk, and after overcoming various social barriers they “become affectionately attached,” as Astrid Lindgren put it in an interview before publication in 1981. This attachment centers around a psychological affinity and connectedness to nature, something that’s emphasized in a near-wordless scene after the children have survived both a forest witch and a waterfall. They lie hidden underneath the dense green branches of a big tree: “‘My sister,’ said Birk. Ronia didn’t hear him, but she read his lips. And although neither of them could hear a word, they talked. About things that had to be said before it was too late. About how nice it was to love someone so much you didn’t even need to fear things that were terrifying. That was what they talked about, although neither of them heard a single word.”
Another emotional force in the novel, equally powerful as the one that unites Ronia and Birk, is their devotion to nature. “The wild woods are dear to them,” the narrator declares of Ronia and Birk, who live in triumphant harmony with all the living creatures around them. A “summer’s ecstasy” was Astrid Lindgren’s term for their intense day-to-day life in the woods: “‘We have only this summer, you and I,’ said Birk. . . . Summer doesn’t last forever. He knew that, and Ronia knew it too. Yet they began to live as though it did.”
It was exactly this concentrated, vegetative calm that Astrid Lindgren sought and found on Furusund. A life purposefully inactive, simple, and quiet, in glaring contrast to her stressful urban existence in Dalagatan, with its daily meetings and countless tasks. Out among the islands, Astrid did nothing, she felt, except give herself over to nature and her books and stenographic pads. Here “life played with her,” as she explained in a letter to Anne-Marie in July 1980, after the operation on her gallstone: “The glorious thing about being a convalescent is that you can do absolutely nothing without feeling guilty. Now I’m going to hurry down to the mailbox with this letter—oh yes, I can cycle—and afterward I’ll ride home again and do nothing. Life is glorious.”
Nowhere in her work is the symbiosis between humanity and nature, so essential to Astrid Lindgren, more accurately described than in Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. The two children haven’t yet left the castle for good, but after being cooped up all winter they’re both eager to escape into nature. As spring puts its soothing arms around them, they feel six months’ cold and darkness trickle out of every pore:
For ages they sat there, silent, being in the spring. They heard the blackbird sing and the cuckoo call, filling the whole forest. Newborn fox cubs tumbled around outside their holes, a stone’s throw away. Squirrels scurried around in the treetops, and they saw hares come bounding over the moss and disappear into the underbrush. An adder, soon due to give birth, lay peacefully in the sun nearby. They didn’t disturb her, and she didn’t disturb them.
All her life, Astrid believed in a connectedness to nature that was rooted in the intuition and immediacy of children. As Melker Melkerson wonders during a contemplative moment on Seacrow Island: “Why can’t we hold on to the ability to see earth and grass and pattering rain and starry skies as blessings all our lives?” Melker’s question is prompted by his youngest son, Pelle, a child of nature who experiences life as a series of miracles, and is always busy examining nature down to the tiniest detail. While Melker struggles to find the child of nature within himself, Astrid Lindgren was an example of the possibility even for an adult to “be one with nature, to be immersed in it and feel its power wash over you,” as she said in an interview in the newspaper Göteborgs-Posten in May 1983. “It’s a love I’ve never lost,” she added. “It’s a love you keep for as long as you live.” In her book about her parents from 1975, and in the illustrated volume My Småland (Mit Småland) from 1987, Astrid described the huge significance nature had for her as a catalyst for childhood memories: “If somebody asks me what I remember from my childhood, my first thought isn’t people, actually. It’s nature, which encircled my days and filled them so intensely that as an adult it’s hard to grasp. . . . Stones and trees were as dear to us as living creatures, and nature was what surrounded and sustained our games and dreams.”
Astrid Lindgren wasn’t much older than Ronia when she first expressed this closeness in writing. In 1921, the thirteen-year-old schoolgirl wrote a school paper titled “En promenad från Vimmerby till Krön” (A walk from Vimmerby to Krön), which depicted a young girl’s delight in nature and her Ronia-like intimacy with the magic, beauty, and stillness of the woods:
I don’t really know how it happened, but I found myself standing on the edge of the woods one winter’s morning, looking at the earnest trees, heavy with snow, which gazed questioningly down at me as if to say: “What do you want here, little human child?” “I think it was longing for you and all the other wonderful things about nature that drove me out here, before anybody else in the house had awoken, and before the sun had risen,” I answered softly. I stood there for a while, sunk in thought. “Everything is so beautiful,” I thought. . . . By the road a little farther away stood a tall spruce. Several stumps around it revealed that they had been chopping down the young trees previously encircling the larger one. I leaned up against the trunk and stroked the tree’s rough bark, asking: “Poor old Father Spruce, who’s taken your children?” Old Father Spruce shook his head mournfully in reply. . . . I enjoyed it indescribably, filling my lungs with fresh air. It was completely silent inside the temple hall. The silence was only broken now and then by a startled bird, and the occasional bell tolling in the distance. I felt so solemn and grave.
The Swedish Animal Factory
Humanity’s relationship with nature was such a key issue for Astrid Lindgren that it became the focus of her last major political efforts: fighting for animal welfare in Sweden and protecting the country’s open spaces. Like the Pomperipossa debates, these efforts attracted huge attention from the media, those in power, and the Swedish people at large. They would last more than ten years, from her initial articles in 1985 to her final, impassioned call to arms in the Expressen in fall 1996: “Hello? Does anybody remember an interview in the Expressen on October 27, 1985? No, we didn’t think you would. But it was around that time we were promised by our then prime minister Olof Palme that we’d get new legislation regarding animal welfare, so that the poor hens didn’t have to live their whole lives indoors, trapped inside cramped cages.”
Her animal welfare campaign in the 1980s and her conservation campaign in the 1990s made Astrid Lindgren a major force in the green movement in Sweden, which had mobilized as a result of the nuclear power debates in the 1970s and the referendum about nuclear power in 1980. She had participated in those debates at the time, arguing that the nuclear power issue was something that concerned all humanity. As she put it unequivoc
ally in the magazine Året Runt in December 1979: “It’s not just a bunch of hysterical women who are against nuclear power, as some people try to make themselves and others believe!”
Out of the protests against nuclear power grew a powerful environmental movement in Sweden. De Gröna—The Greens—were formed in 1981, the same year Ronia the Robber’s Daughter came out, with a lush green jacket, and Ulf Lundell wrote the first lines to his patriotic, romantic song “Öppna landskap” (Open landscapes).
The animal welfare debate, which Astrid Lindgren sparked in 1985 with veterinarian Kristina Forslund, who became her faithful collaborator and source of expertise, did eventually result in new legislation—the “Lex Lindgren,” which drew international attention when it took effect in 1988. Astrid Lindgren had so much political clout in modern Sweden that prime minister Ingvar Carlsson turned up to the author’s grand eightieth-birthday bash at the Göta Lejon movie theater in November 1987. In the middle of the stage, Carlsson embraced the garlanded Lindgren and announced that the government was going to secure decent living conditions for Rölla the cow, Lovisa the hen, and Augusta the sow. It was the best gift Astrid Lindgren could have received, and her celebrants were moved. But when the final phrasing of the new legislation was unveiled, Lindgren resolutely disavowed it. She wrote, in the Expressen on March 23, 1988: “Lex Lindgren—who came up with the idea to call the new piece of legislation that? Am I supposed to be flattered by having this law—meaningless in its current form—named after me? And who has frightened the government into this hollowed-out interpretation of a noble promise: All animals shall have the right to a way of life that’s natural for them?”
The tone was straightforward and challenging. Astrid knew whom she was dealing with. In 1985–88 she had written open letters in the Expressen to the minister for agriculture, Mats Hellström, and the prime minister, Carlsson, who had assumed leadership of the Social Democrats after Palme’s assassination in February 1986. The nation’s new leader had recently developed an interest in organic farming, having eaten a soft-boiled egg that wasn’t laid by a battery hen. In an open letter that played on her well-loved Karlsson character, Astrid dubbed him “Best Carlsson!” and in a longer opinion piece on October 27, 1985, in the Expressen—again lending space to one of Lindgren’s critical campaigns—she introduced him to Lovisa the hen and Augusta the sow with a line adapted from Karlsson-on-the-Roof: “The prime minister? Well, he’s a handsome, thoroughly clever, and suitably fat man in his prime.”
As in the Pomperipossa affair in 1976, it was a stroke of rhetorical genius to give the debate a fairy-tale tilt, which Astrid accomplished primarily through the text’s orality and familiar, jaunty tone. Writing a contemporary political discussion in an ancient literary genre that nearly all human beings have imbibed with their mother’s milk was a brilliant move, because it awoke people’s curiosity and, more important, prompted their active involvement.
Livestock, which in previous agricultural discussions had been termed “production units,” were suddenly given names—Rölla, Lovisa, Augusta—and this cozy humanization of them prompted a sizable chunk of the meat-eating Swedish population to take an interest in the debate about animal welfare. Their eyes were opened to something that had never previously been articulated in Sweden: “Our animals are living creatures, which can feel suffering and fear and pain just like people. . . . Do we have the right to prioritize ourselves above animals’ need for a good life, just so we can have cheap food?”
The carefully judged political activism in these elegant articles was based on Kristina Forslund’s veterinary knowledge, and thus Astrid was scrupulously accurate about feeding, living space, antibiotics, and slaughtering. At the same time, her accounts were framed in a way that made you feel like Astrid Lindgren was actually sitting at your breakfast table, reading aloud from the newspaper: “Hello there, all you piglets and calves and chickens in the Swedish animal factory!”
Astrid Lindgren’s alternative form of political speechmaking rested on the fundamental notion that a democracy is disempowered when the populace no longer understands or listens to those in government. As she had pointed out during the Pomperipossa debate in a 1976 interview in Husmodern, in which she’d sounded a call to arms: “Politics is much too important to be left to politicians.”
Lasse’s Death
Astrid Lindgren and the political establishment had no direct confrontations in 1986, although the debate about agricultural policy continued to simmer in newspapers and on television and radio. As Astrid Lindgren and Kristina Forslund observed in My Cow Wants to Have Fun (Min ko vill ha roligt, 1990), which collected their articles from the 1980s, “In 1986, so much happened that shook us all.” They cited the murder of Olof Palme and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, but not the fact that Astrid’s own world had ground to a halt in July, when Lasse died of cancer, five months before his sixtieth birthday. In an interview with the Svenska Dagbladet several years later—in August 1989—she was asked, “What has been the biggest blow of your life?” She answered: “It was when my little Lasse died. That was without doubt the most terrible blow. I still cry about it sometimes. I think of him when he was little. For that matter, I think about him when he was older, too.”
Lasse had once been her life’s greatest joy. Even after he became an engineer and a father in the 1950s, she still occasionally called him “My little Lasse Lucidor,” referring to the orphaned Swedish psalmist and songwriter Lars Johansson (1638–74), who was known during his short, solitary, stormy life as “Lasse Lucidor, the Unhappy.”
Lasse was also the major, decisive problem in Astrid Lindgren’s life. That was how she put it in her diary in 1972. A child born into foreign surroundings, whom she’d had to give up, whom she had missed so desperately, tormented by indescribable pangs of guilt, yet for whom she had done so much, hoping that the boy’s life would be as harmonious and happy as it was during his first three years at Håbets Allé and the next eighteen months at Näs. Only after all that had the nearly five-year-old Lasse been reunited with his real mother. It had been difficult for them both, and it never got easier. “My little slowpoke” Astrid called him in June 1946 in a letter to Hanna.
It was painful, but she was forced to acknowledge that the first five or ten years of a person’s life were crucial in determining how the rest of it would turn out. In part, it was this recognition that enabled her to write with such authenticity and power in her fiction and in her articles, speeches, and columns about upbringing and the parent-child relationship. As she phrased it in her ambitious essay “More Love!” in 1952, a message echoed twenty-five years later in her Peace Prize acceptance speech in West Germany: “No treatment in the world can replace the love he didn’t get before he was ten.”
Neither of those texts was explicitly about Lars Lindgren, but they were both about children who had bad starts in life and ended up alone and unhappy because they didn’t feel safe and free enough in early childhood. “Those are the two things,” wrote Astrid in 1952, “that the human plant cannot do without if it’s going to flourish.”
Lasse’s significance for Astrid Lindgren’s work, in which unhappy, lonely, parentless boys abound, has often been noted. We have to go to the National Library, however, to discover that Astrid Lindgren realized it too. In pad 343, we find a note to Margareta Strömstedt in which she put words in her biographer’s mouth, though she didn’t want to be quoted directly. Some parts were crossed out:
There are critics who have objected to Astrid Lindgren’s sensitivity and sentimentality when she tells stories about children in trouble. It’s true that there are flashes of unrestrained emotions in her books, emotions that can be read as sentimental, but those who perceive this negatively and believe it to be a cover for something false, something suspect, haven’t learned enough about Astrid Lindgren’s deep and unfailing commitment to vulnerable children. This commitment is no doubt connected to her experiences in Copenhagen before Christmas 1926, when Astrid gave bi
rth to had her child and was obliged to give him it up, and it was reinforced over the difficult years that followed, when young Astrid began to fight to be able to take care of her child her Lasse.
Lasse died on July 22, 1986, leaving a wife and three children. It took Astrid the rest of the year to get through the initial, paralyzing grief, but by January 1987 she was settling once more into the role of environmental activist. And it proved a formidable comeback.
Her piece in the Expressen on January 14 was about a dream she’d had, in which God had come down to Earth to conduct an inspection of Sweden. He wanted to see how animals were being treated, he said, and in the dream Astrid Lindgren was the guide he had chosen to show him around. The Lord’s reaction had been unmistakable: “What kind of pea-brains have I given dominion over all Earth’s creatures?” Minister for Agriculture Mats Hellström also put in an appearance during the heavenly tour of inspection, not as a “pea-brain” but as a prince, one who possessed the philosopher’s stone: agricultural legislation that set appropriate goals for the future protection of Swedish livestock.
More than ever, the Social Democrats’ leadership was keenly aware that the party must not commit the same tactical errors as Gunnar Sträng had during the Pomperipossa debate. So when Astrid Lindgren wrote an open letter to Ingvar Carlsson on September 20, 1987, published—thanks to the Expressen’s and the author’s exquisite sense of timing—to coincide with the Social Democrats’ annual convention, the prime minister made a surprising response. The tone of the beloved author’s letter left him no choice: “Dear Ingvar Carlsson! Sorry for disturbing you in the middle of the party convention. I know, of course, that you’ve got a lot on your mind, both at home and among all the bigwigs and presidents in the outside world. Yet I come to you in the modest hope that you’ll devote a little time and consideration to the pitiable situation of creatures in this country. After all, in the final analysis it’s you and your government who are responsible for the way Swedish farm animals are kept.”