• 1 As Elina Druker points out, “My” is Greek (µ) for “micro” (“a millionth”). Moreover, when Little My (...)
• 2 In this article, the focus is on the Moomin book series, not on the Moomin picturebooks, but a simi (...)
• 3 I do not propose “muminalism” as a critical term but employ it here as a figure of speech for rheto (...)
• 4 Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter, 1968, Trans. Kingsley Hart, London, Sort of Books, 2018.
• 5 Gaston Bachelard, “Miniature”, The Poetics of Space, 1958, Trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, Beacon, 1969 (...)

1Tove Jansson’s Moominland is large. There are deep seas, high mountains, and endless forests. It is a place of momentous catastrophes and long journeys. But Moominland’s dimensions are also relative, and the apparent grandeur of the setting is constituted on the diminutive size of most of the creatures that inhabit it, such as Little My1 and the “little creature” Sniff. The Moomintrolls themselves are small too – an artist’s signature to begin with and tiny trolls in the first book of the series.2 In fact, size matters in Moominland and is indicated throughout the Moomin narratives in various ways. In this article I will analyze and discuss a few of these examples of Jansson’s art of the miniature, or “muminalism” to use a Jansson-related neologism3. The main aim, however, is to show that Jansson’s predilection for the small, the diminutive, and the decorative goes beyond creating contrast, even if it is that too, and is essentially about small-scale world-building. Moominvalley itself, comes across as a miniature re-imagining of her grandfather’s island paradise as described in the first chapter of the autobiographical Sculptor’s Daughter4, and is at the center of this minimizing project. The maps of Moominvalley, as well as her comic strips and use of vignettes, elaborate initial letters, doll-houses – all of these represent condensations of – or points of entry to – her created world. We also witness how Jansson’s created characters, in turn, engage in acts and make use of things that relate in different ways to the aesthetics of the miniature: Moominmamma’s bark boat, Moominpappa’s crystal ball and lighthouse model, the Fillyjonk’s shadow-play, the Hemulen’s magnifying glass and so on. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s seminal essay on the miniature in The Poetics of Space5, I claim that Jansson’s “muminalism” is a particularly apt example of the miniaturizing imagination.

• 6 J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, Tree and Leaf, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1970.
• 7 Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1989.
• 8 Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., p. 158, his emphasis.
• 9 Ibid, p. 172.

2Fictional “worldbuilding” is often associated with fantasy writing, Science Fiction, and other fictional “secondary worlds,” to use J. R. R. Tolkien’s term6. Worldbuilding in such genres is associated with the creation of a plausible geography, ecology, history, social customs, language, and technology. Yet all fiction and art – realistic or otherwise – are fruits of the imagination and (re)create an imaginary space (world) for the reader7. In that sense, all authors and artists (and readers!), engage in world-building. Gaston Bachelard does not use the concept “worldbuilding”, but his “poetics of space” is primarily concerned with how different literary devices can open up “an entire world” to the “dreamer” – that is, to the reader who is able and willing to take part in acts of imagination, expressed in term of space. Moreover, Bachelard calls these spaces/worlds “realities of the imagination”8. For Bachelard the spaces that are particularly apt to attract and concentrate the poetic imagination are representations of objects like houses, drawers, chests, wardrobes, forests, nests, shells, closets, corners, and houses – keywords gleaned from the table of contents of The Poetics of Space. But they can also be conceptual in nature, like “immensity,” “roundness” or “miniature.” In both cases, the keywords are associated with fantasies of home and dwelling, or with Bachelard’s formulation “nests of solitude in which he [the reader] dreams of living”9.

• 10 Ibid, p. 170.
• 11 Ibid, p. 155.
• 12 Ibid.
• 13 Ibid.
• 14 Ibid, p. 170.
• 15 Jansson readers are of course reminded of the many instances of microscopes and telescopes in the M (...)
• 16 Ibid, p. 154.

3In this article, I mainly seek inspiration from Bachelard’s meditations on the miniature. Bachelard writes that the “macrocosm and microcosm are correlated”10, and that the miniature works as an imagined center: “a nucleus, a spore, a dynamized center”11, and show how when we observe the miniature we tend to use imagery and metaphors from the macrocosm in order to describe it: a tuft of grass becomes a forest, ants are seen as marching battalions and so on. Thus, “large is contained in small” as Bachelard writes12. Bachelard proceeds to alternate between the metaphor of the miniature as a “nucleus” or “a world in itself” and that of the gate: “Thus, the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness”13. The creative work of the miniaturist is an act of love: “One must love space to describe it as minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule of drawing”14. Further, the artist/writer can be likened to “the man with the magnifying glass15. For “[t]he botanist’s magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives back the enlarging gaze of a child”16. The magnifying glass is also important to Bachelard since it serves to bar “the everyday world” and makes the reader focus his attention on the miniature.

• 17 Lisa Sainsbury, Ethics in Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.
• 18 Susan Hancock, The Child that Haunts Us: Symbols and Images in Fairytale and Miniature Literature, (...)
• 19 Elina Druker, op. cit., p. 24.
• 20 Ibid.
• 21 Björn Sundmark, “’A Serious Game’: Mapping Moominland”, The Lion and the Unicorn 38 (2014), p. 162- (...)
• 22 Björn Sundmark, “Tove Janssons tecknade muminserie ‘Muminfamiljen och havet’”, Historiska och litte (...)
• 23 Tove Jansson, “The Doll House”, Art in Nature. Trans. Thomas Teal. London, Sort of Books, 2012.
• 24 Ida MoenJohnson, “’Absent Illustrations’ in The Listener. Visual Narration Across Tove Jansson’s Au (...)

4Bachelard does not discuss children’s literature – even if he (as we can see above) recognizes children’s “enlarging gaze” and also mentions fairy tales such as Petit Poucet – but as Lisa Sainsbury has shown in Ethics in British Children’s Literature, Bachelard’s theoretical framework provides a particularly good fit to children’s literature17 – from fairy tale examples such as Tom Thumb and Thumbelina (H. C. Andersen) to Nils Holgersson (Selma Lagerlöf), The Borrowers (Mary Norton) up to Toy Story. According to Sainsbury, the child reader is uniquely positioned to “engage with the issues raised by miniature life” (190). In another study, The Child that Haunts Us: Symbols and Images in Fairytale and Miniature Literature, Susan Hancock brings together Jungian psychology and bachelardian concepts in her analyses of “Fairytale mannikins,” “Nineteenth century female miniatures,” “Suffering children,” and more18. The focus, however, in both Sainsbury and Hancock is on the child reader and fictional child character, rather than on other aspects of the miniature. Elina Druker, also drawing on Bachelard, has written specifically on Tove Jansson’s use of the miniature in Moominpappa at Sea. She recognizes that “the tension between the gigantic and the microscopic in size and scale is something that Tove Jansson employs consistently in her picture books and novels”19. This observation clearly relates to Bachelard’s idea about the reciprocal relationship between the microscopic and macroscopic. In another article, focusing on Jansson’s illustrations to Nalleresan [Teddy’s Journey] by Solveig von Schoultz, Druker discusses how flight and exile (and homelessness) often relate to size in children’s literature20. In my own previous work on Tove Jansson’s maps as well as her comic strip art I have also touched on how Jansson simultaneously details and compresses narrative content through her chronotopic maps21, and in her use of sequentiality in the Moomin comic strips22. I would argue that the comic strips in their deceptive simplicity is an extremely demanding form of miniaturist art (Jansson has even written a short story on the topic23), but at the same time congenial to Jansson’s temperament and artistic project. Finally, Ida Moen Johnson approaches the subject from a different vantage point in her analysis of the “absent picture” – something that could be said to represent a “degree zero” miniature, perhaps. Her observations on the nature of small and insignificant details or just hinted at (but invisible) visual elements has a bearing on the present discussion24.

• 25 Boel Westin, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Trans. Silvester Mazzarella, London, Sort of Books, 20 (...)
• 26 Tove Jansson and Per Olov Jansson, Skurken i muminhuset [the burglar in the Moomin house], Helsinki (...)

5Tove Jansson herself was uniquely suited for the “miniature life,” with artist parents who gravitated between the monumental and the minimal – her father’s sculptures and monuments, and her mother’s book illustrations and stamp engravings25. One can also refer to Jansson’s early investment in Moomin merchandise, specifically the handmade trolls (see cover of Westin’s biography), on which she placed strict requirements, or her work on the Moomin house with Tuulikki Pietilä (the book, Skurken i muminhuset, co-written with her brother Per Olov Jansson26). These two latter examples show that Jansson’s miniaturist art was not restricted to words and pictures, but to artifacts and architecture as well. It is not surprising therefore that in almost every aspect of Tove Jansson’s work – with words as well as picture – we see the miniaturist in action.

• 27 Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea, 1967, Trans. Kingsley Hart, London, Macmillan, 2010.
• 28 Tove Jansson, “The Doll House”, op. cit.

6Interestingly, the making of doll houses – like her own work on the Moomin house – crops up in her writing several times: the miniature lighthouse in Moominpappa at Sea27(analyzed below), and in the short story “The Doll House” in the collection Art in Nature, a story in which a doll-house project becomes an all-consuming passion, threatening to undermine the friendship between two partners28. In Moominpappa at Sea the model lighthouse and the map of the valley, including the lighthouse island, serve as “apple seeds” to use a wonderful bachelardian metaphor. These are the objects that will take hold of your imagination, grow, and become real. We can see this exemplified in the following quotation which starts as a description of a lighthouse model only to gradually assume more and more reality, indicated by the identification of Moominpappa and Moomintroll with the place, and the use of the present tense:

• 30 Elina Druker, op. cit., p. 24.

7Druker identifies this as a key scene in Moominpappa at Sea, one in which artifacts are “imagined to exist”, and where the microscopic imaginary points to something macroscopic (“gigantic”) real30. Moomintroll is transported to a seemingly real lighthouse by the help of the model and Moominpappa’s storytelling.

• 31 Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea, op. cit., p. 15.
• 32 Ibid., p. 16-17.

8A similar epiphany occurs when Moomintroll focuses on the flyspeck-small dot on “the big map hanging on the wall, the one showing Moominvalley with the coast and its islands”31. Moominmamma has just pointed it out to him, and he starts thinking about it: “And suddenly he saw the sea around the island begin to rise and fall. The island itself was green, with red cliffs. It was the island he had seen in picture books, a desert island, inhabited by pirates”32. Again, a miniature transforms into imagined, large-scale reality.

• 33 Tove Jansson, The Moomins and the Great Flood, 1945, Trans. David McDuff, Toronto, Drawn & Quarterl (...)
• 34 Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland, 1946, Trans. Thomas Warburton, London, Sort of Books, 2017.
• 35 Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley, 1962, Trans. Thomas Warburton, London, Penguin, 1973, p. 14.(...)

9Indeed, the world is big and dangerous in Jansson’s fictional universe”, and its inhabitants small. Originally, they were even smaller, which is not surprising since Moomintroll started out as part of Tove’s signature in her artwork and illustrations. Being small can either be good, or dangerous. On the first page of The Moomins and the Great Flood, when Moomintroll is feeling anxious, his mother comforts him, saying: “I hope we’re so small that we won’t be noticed if something dangerous should come along.”33 In this first Moomin book, the trolls are only a few inches tall. A snake appears as a “Giant Serpent,” and Moominmamma is almost devoured by a sand lion. They ride on the back of a Marabou stork, sail on a “big round water-lily leaf,” and are able to light their way with “big glowing flowers.” The Moomintrolls may be small, but in relation to “the little creature” (Sniff), who they befriend on their quest, Moomintroll and Moominmamma appear large. Sniff, too small to have a name in this first Moomin book, returns with a name, more personality, and bigger somehow, in the next Moomin book, Comet in Moominland.34 His situation is slightly similar to that of the Creep in “Spring Tune” in Tales from Moominvalley who is “so small that [he hasn’t] got a name”35 (14), but whose personality and attitude grows significantly after Snufkin gives the Creep the name “Teety-woo.”

• 36 Ibid., p. 46.

10The contrast between the big and threatening world and the smallness of all living things is borne out in another short story from Tales from Moominvalley. Here is the Fillyjonk, in “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters”: “Dear Gaffsie, believe me, we are so very small and insignificant, and so are our tea cakes and carpets and all those things, you know, and still they’re so important, but always they’re threatened by mercilessness”36. The Fillyjonk may be small and insignificant, yet it is interesting that she names the small things that she surrounds her with and calls them important. Maybe it is because she is a Fillyjonk, but there is more to it than that, I believe. Jansson recognizes that the naming and identifying of all these little things are acts of world-building. Things and details can clutter our lives and imaginings – that is the Fillyjonk-streak in all of us – and we need to be able to let go, Snufkin-like to the things that bind us and grow out of hand. But the small things are important too, something we are reminded about, in this story, where nothing remains of the Fillyjonk’s old home at the end except a smiling chipped China kitten and her carpets.

• 37 Tove Jansson, The Memoirs of Moominpappa, 1950/1968, Trans. Thomas Warburton, London, Sort of Books (...)
• 38 Ibid., p. 46.

11Decoration and detail can serve to conjure up an imaginative space. The cover of the original Swedish edition of The Memoirs of Moominpappa with its wreath made up of the dramatis personae of Moominpappa’s early life interfoliated with meticulously rendered flowers and leafs can serve as one example37. But the love of detail and condensation is also present in the vignettes, the elaborate first letters, and chapter summaries of the same book. An example ot the latter can be found in chapter two “Introducing the Muddler and the Joxter in my Memoirs, presenting Edward the Booble, and giving a spirited account of the Oshun Oxtra and its matchless launching”38.

• 39 Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., p. 159.
• 40 Ibid.
• 41 Björn Sundmark, “‘A Serious Game’:Mapping Moominland” op. cit., p. 162-181.

12This has a bearing on what Bachelard writes about medieval illuminated manuscripts and the “patience that brings peace to one’s fingers” in filling a single letter with as many details and beauty as possible39. The miniaturist master, he says, “must love space to describe it as minutely as though there were world molecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule of drawing”40. Jansson is such a master, and not only in her decorative pieces, but of course, just as much or more, in her time-consuming and detailed full-page illustrations, for example in her endpaper maps. I have elsewhere analyzed Jansson’s maps and shown how they stimulate the imagination and condense the time and place of the book’s story-world.41 Another way of expressing it is to say that these maps display a “love of space” and “spectacle” and are made up entirely of “world molecules.”

• 42 Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., p. 157.

13The miniature is associated with the imagination and world-building. Yet, what is often overlooked is that it is also about taking control of one’s (or someone else’s) creation. The miniature allows for control, or “domination,” to use the bachelardian term. For this purpose, the crystal ball is perfect. Bachelard writes: “[t]he dreamer can renew his own world, merely by moving his face. From the miniature of the glass cyst, he can call forth an entire world and oblige it to make ‘the most unwonted contortions’”42. This example points to another instance from Moominpappa at Sea, where the first chapter is called “The Family in the Crystal Ball,” and where Moominpappa uses his crystal for this exact purpose: to control and conjure forth his private family fantasy.

• 44 Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November, 1970, Trans. Kingsley Hart, London, Penguin, 1974.
• 45 Ibid., p. 49.
• 46 Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November, op. cit., p. 50.
• 47 Ibid.
• 48 Boel Westin, op. cit., p. 415-418.

15However, the ability to control and contain the creative impulses is not only negative; in some situations, it can be necessary, as when the crystal ball reappears in the final book the Moomin series, Moominvalley in November, where it is given a salutary function44. In Moominvalley in November the little creature Toft fantasizes about Moominvalley and the Moomin family, but after he has gone to the now moomin-less valley he finds it harder and harder to see them in his imagination. Instead, he finds comfort in a large book on natural history, “a very big book which had no beginning and no end and the pages were all faded and had been nibbled by rats at the edges”45. In it, he reads about a sea-creature, a minuscule “Nummulite”. Gradually, the developing story-reality of the Nummulite takes over. Toft “tried to describe the Happy Family, but he couldn’t. Then he told himself all about the solitary creature instead, the little Nummulite who had something of Noctiluca about him and liked electricity”46. The Nummulite was “evidently very tiny and became even tinier when he was frightened”47. But after a while when Toft imagines it, electric thunderstorms are let loose over Moominvalley, and the Nummulite starts growing. It also affects Toft’s temperament, making him angry. Eventually, the Nummulite becomes a threatening presence and prowls around the house, groke-like, until Toft confronts it, and it is finally absorbed by Moominpappa’s crystal ball. Boel Westin has pointed out the similarity between the names Toft and Tove; it is a likeness that extends to Toft’s and Tove’s outward appearance as well. Westin has also noted the anagrammatic likeness between the Swedish “Mumin” and “Nummulit”48 But it is of course as creators that the similarity between Tove and Toft becomes most apparent and significant. They both create from scratch, from the miniature; they begin with a mysterious word, a name, and from there, a character takes form, becomes real. But eventually, the created Moomin/Nummulite out­grows the fantasy, becomes a threat to itself and to its creator, and needs to be contained. Toft uses the crystal ball – a device made for showing and minimizing – to help the Nummulite, and himself.

• 50 Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea, op. cit., p. 159.
• 51 Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness, 1961, Trans. Thomas Warburton, New York, Macmillan, 2010, p. 5.
• 52 Ibid., p. 152.
• 53 Ibid., p. 151.

17Finally, let us turn to Moominmamma as miniaturist. What comes to mind first is perhaps her Moominvalley fresco landscape in Moominpappa at Sea, the one where she mysteriously enters the painting she has made herself on the wall in the Lighthouse50. However, I would like to bring up another example. In the first chapter of Moominsummer Madness, Moominmamma is making a model bark boat, a schooner. In a foreshadowing of what is to come a “big, black flake of soot” lands “amidships on the deck” of the schooner, interrupting Moominmamma’s work51. She rises and goes to Moomintroll. He has been lying by a pond all the time. He knows that she is making a bark boat for him, and wonders if it will come with a “dinghy so small that you hardly dare take it in your paw”. It is an exquisite model ship, but Moominmamma has forgotten to make the dinghy. However, “it balanced beautifully over its own reflection and started away in the port tack as if manned by old salts”. Thus, the miniature ship is already imbued with potential. In the very last chapter, the ship is miraculously found again: “The back stay had gotten entangled in a bush, but it was undamaged. Even the little hatch was in its place over the hold”52. In a sense the lucky fate of the seaworthy bark ship replicates that of the Moomintrolls through their tsunami adventure. “It was as if nothing had ever happened and as if no danger could ever threaten them again”53. Yet something – adventure – has happened. And Moominmamma in a final act perfects the ship and the story by giving Moomintroll the dinghy. It is as if the entire story had been played out to arrive at this point – where the model schooner and its dinghy can sail away immaculate.

• 54 The idea that all art can be considered as miniatures is widespread, see for instance Claude Lévi-S (...)

18In this article I have exemplified and analyzed Tove Jansson’s art of the miniature, something that is recognized as a defining trait of her work as a whole: the art, the comics, the picturebooks, her dolls and doll-houses. Tove Jansson’s predilection for the miniature is not unique, of course. All art is in some measure Kleinkunst in that it provides a smaller, but more graspable world than the real54. However, drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s essay on the miniature, the claim put forth in this article is that Jansson’s muminalism is a particularly apt example of what Bachelard calls the miniaturizing imagination. Bachelard argues that the miniature, instead of implying reduction, is a condensation and enrichment. He goes on to compare the “minuscule” with “a narrow gate” that “opens up an entire world.” Tove Jansson’s muminalism provides that gate, opening up the fictional world of the Moomintrolls. The focus in this article is on the nine books in the Moomin series, but could be applied more generally to her work. The analysis has dwelt both on the visual and verbal aspects (the illustrations as well as the writing) of her Moomin novels. The miniature is manifest both in chapter summaries, in elaborate initial letters and decorative details, as well as in the themes and descriptions of smallness: the small trolls, the miniaturizing crystal ball, the model lighthouse, the minuscule bark boat, and the Nummulite protozoa.