5 things to know about the Moomins

Aside from a brief period in the 1990s when those ones with the brightly coloured hair topped every 11-year-old’s pencil, these fuzzy cuddly hippo-like creations have topped the troll polls for decades, undoing all the bad press stirred up by that notorious bridge-dwelling goat-scarer.

As a mark of their enduring popularity 2025 brings the Moomins 80th birthday, and we celebrated it here at the Southbank Centre in May with a recreation of the Moominhouse on our Riverside Terrace as a free public artwork, in partnership with Counterpoint Arts and Refugee Week.

The artwork drew inspiration from the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, in which the Moomins – like many modern day climate refugees – are forced by said flood to seek a new home; and from the door to Moominhouse which throughout the book series is always open, offering shelter, comfort and security to all who seek it. And here’s a little more about these enduring characters and where they came from.

The Moomins are the creation of Tove Jansson…

Born in Helsinki, 1914, to a Swedish speaking family, Tove Jansson may be best known for the Moomins but she was also a notable painter and illustrator and one of Finland’s key visual artists during the postwar period. She held her first solo exhibition in 1943, and continued to exhibit across the next three decades, whilst many of her commissioned murals are still visible on public buildings in Finland. Between 1928 and 1953 Jansson produced cartoons for the satirical Swedish magazine Garm, with a number of her political cartoons during the Second World War reaching international audiences. She later illustrated Swedish-language editions of Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit. 

As well as creating 10 Moomin books, and a further five Moomin picture books, Jansson also penned five novels and a number of short story collections. She was awarded far too many accolades for her work for us to list here, but among them the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966 and the 1993 Finland Art Prize. Aside from a spells spent studying in Paris and Stockholm in the 1930s, Jansson lived her whole life in Finland, her time split between her studio in Helsinki and the small island of Klovharu where she lived with her lifelong partner the American-born Finnish graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä.

Though they may have initially been invented by Jansson’s uncle

Cover the eyes and ears of any nearby children for the second part of this sentence, but Moomintrolls are fictional. We’re sorry. However, there are two different stories – both given by Jansson – as to where they originate from. In one instance the author has explained that the ‘mumintroll’ was an invention of her uncle, who – to deter the young Jansson from taking food from his pantry – told her that such creatures lived in the corners of the store and would rub their noses on her if she entered. 

However, in a 1973 letter to Estonian linguist Paul Ariste, Jansson wrote that it was she who had created the word ‘moomintroll’ as she felt the repetition of the ‘m’ consonant suggested a softness, a sensation she also chose to convey in the shape she chose for the Moomins in her illustrations.

The books weren’t an instant hit

Though the Moomins themselves may offer a softness, the same isn’t necessarily true of the world they inhabit. Jansson’s first two Moomin books were influenced by the upheavals of the Second World War and her own depression during those years. Published in 1945 and 1946 respectively, The Moomins and the Great Flood, and Comet in Moominland see the central characters fight off all manner of threats and foes on their journeys, with later editions of the latter book revised to be a little less fearful for younger readers.

Though these first books found an audience in Scandinavia, it wasn’t until the third book in the series, and the first to be translated into English, that the Moomins really took off. Published in 1948 and translated in 1950 Finn Family Moomintroll, or The Magician’s Hat as it was titled in the original Swedish, became an international bestseller.

The Moomins are musical creatures

With Snufkin playing ‘trills’ and ‘twiddles’ on his harmonica and the rest of the characters regularly articulating their thoughts through singing songs, music is pretty integral to the Moomins. Yet, when the characters first transferred to the stage in the late 1940s and 1950s audiences were disappointed to discover the plays contained no music. Thankfully, before Jansson’s second Moomin play, Moominsummer Madness, was performed in Stockholm in 1959 the director Vivica Bandler intervened, reportedly telling Jansson, ‘Listen, here the people want songs’.

The result was a collection of six songs featuring lyrics by Jansson, set to music and melodies by the composer and pianist Erna Tauro. More songs were added to the Moomin repertoire to accompany a TV adaptation in the 1960s and 1970s, and the full collection was released as Moomin Voices (Muumilauluja) in the 2000s. Most famous among the Moomin songs are ‘Moomintroll’s Song’ and ‘Little My’s Song’, although neither appears in any of Janssons’ books.

They’ve become one of Finland’s biggest attractions

From the 1950s through to the 1980s the Moomins were undoubtedly popular in Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and in the UK, but it was in the 1990s that things really stepped up, with what Finns call ‘muumibuumi’, aka the Moomin Boom. The catalyst was an animation series by Dennis Livson and Lars Jansson (Tove’s brother) called Tales from Moominvalley which became a huge hit in Japan, as did the accompanying Moomin merchandise.

The ‘muumibuumi’ even prompted the creation of a Moomin theme park, Moomin World in Naantali, Finland, which opened in 1993 and is still going strong. Unusual among theme parks in that it contains no rides, instead Moomin World features locations and performances related to the book series. There are also two separate Moominvalley Parks in Japan, where Jansson’s books and characters remain incredibly popular.