Tove Jansson; Writer, Artist Who Created the Moomin Troll Books

Tove Jansson, the Finnish writer and artist who created a fantasy world with international appeal in the Moomin family of trolls, died Wednesday in a Helsinki hospital after a long illness. She was 86.

The Moomin series, originally written for children, became popular with all ages and has been translated into 34 languages from the original Swedish, making Jansson the most translated author in Finland.

Jansson wrote and illustrated 13 books about the eccentric troll family between 1945 and 1977. Her work has been compared to that of Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien because of the richness of the fantasy world she created.

It revolved around the Moomins, a family of hippo-like creatures who always kept their doors open for guests and occasionally served dinners of strawberry jam. Along with an assortment of friends with names like Snufkin, Fillyjonk and Tooticky, they suffered many hardships but relied on each other to preserve their idyllic valley.

Alison Lurie, writing in the New York Review of Books several years ago, compared Jansson to A.A. Milne, the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories. “Like Milne,” Lurie wrote, “she is a humanist; and like him, though she writes for children, she deals with universal issues.”

Some of her characters are complex and offbeat. Moominpappa is innocent, boyish and a dreamer. Moominmamma is moral yet open-minded, allowing family members to learn by making mistakes. Moomin, perhaps the most Pooh-like, approaches life with wonder and savors simple pleasures; he is gullible, good-natured and enthusiastic. Snufkin, who looks like a little boy in a slouchy hat, is a philosopher and vagabond.

Part of their appeal is quite literally their sketchiness. The Moomins don’t appear to have mouths, yet seem so expressive. “Every children’s book should have a path in it where the writer stops and the child goes on,” Jansson wrote a few years ago. “A threat or a delight that can never be explained. A face never completely revealed.”

The Moomin trolls became popular in the 1950s in a London Evening News cartoon series. In the 1980s, the Moomins were turned into a Japanese-made television series, and in 1993 a Moomin theme park was opened in Naantali, 155 miles west of Helsinki.

The daughter of sculptor Viktor Jansson and artist Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, Jansson spent her childhood in Helsinki, where the family had a studio-apartment near the harbor.

For much of her later life, she lived in a small cottage on a rugged island off the southern Finnish coast with her longtime friend Tuulikki Pietila, who illustrated some of her works and was the inspiration for the handy and practical Tooticky.

Her first drawings were published in Gram, a Swedish-language magazine, when she was only 15. Later, she took over her mother’s role as Gram’s main illustrator.

The Moomins were born in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power. During a summer in the late 1930s on the Jansson family’s private island, Jansson saw a line from German philosopher Immanuel Kant scribbled on the wall of the outhouse. In disgust, she responded by drawing an ugly troll next to it, with the caption “Cant!”

Her first Moomin book was conceived during Finland’s bitter Winter War against the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940. Jansson once said she wanted to write something that would begin with “once upon a time” but, during such a harsh time, felt that fairy tales were inappropriate. Instead, she replaced traditional princes and princesses with “an angry and ugly” troll, who later grew less grumpy and evolved into the trolls as they are known today.

In addition to the children’s books, Jansson wrote adult fiction, including an autobiographical novel, “The Sculptor’s Daughter.” She also was an accomplished painter whose commissioned work includes a well-known mural of three cadets and a mermaid done for a Finnish restaurant known for inspiring diners to invent an accompanying narrative.

Jansson, who studied art in Paris, Helsinki and Stockholm, also illustrated children’s books, including an edition of Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”

She received about 50 many awards and nominations, including the Nils Holgersson prize in 1953, the Hans Christian Andersen medal in 1966, the “Order of the Smile” Polish children’s award in 1975 and the title of honorary professor, conferred by Finland’s president in 1995.

Jansson has no known survivors, and funeral arrangements were not immediately known.