Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson #ToveTrove

Another 80^th anniversary contribution to the Tove Trove library 

“On the fifth of October the birds stopped singing. The sun was so pale that you could hardly see it at all, and over the wood the comet hung like a cartwheel, surrounded by a ring of fire.”¹
– Comet in Moominland 

Comet in Moominland (or Kometjakten in its earliest Swedish‑language incarnation) is the second book in Tove Jansson’s original series about a family of benevolent, quietly philosophical trolls with downy fur and soft, rounded snouts, who inhabit an unusual house in a beautiful woodland valley by the sea.

I chose to re-read the title now because it is eighty years since this first full-length Moomin novel appeared in 1946 – though Jansson would revise it twice in the decades that followed.² After the worldwide celebrations in 2025 marking the 80^th anniversary of The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), the festivities for this companion volume have been somewhat more subdued. Nevertheless, Moomin devotees have continued to honour this post‑war classic, and I have no intention of letting the moment pass me by.

****************************

“And how beautiful the pale green Snork Maiden was! She had sparkling blue eyes and was covered with beautiful soft fluff. She could weave mats of grass, and brew soothing herb drinks if you had tummy-ache. She always wore a flower behind her ear, and round her ankle she had a little gold ring³.”

Although Comet in Moominland was published in 1946, its origins reach back into the final, uneasy years of the Second World War, when Tove Jansson was already sketching ideas and shaping the early contours of Moominvalley. 

The comet’s slow approach, the sense of looming catastrophe and the characters’ search for safety all bear the imprint of that wartime mood, which weighed so heavily on Jansson, even though the novel itself was completed as Finland stepped hesitantly into peace. It is a story born on the threshold between fear and renewal, confusion and relief, and that liminal quality can still be sensed in its pages today.

The Moominvalley of this book is less a reflection of Finland’s familiar landscapes and more a surreal, shifting terrain shaped by myth and menace. It’s a place of strange topographies and sudden dangers – caves, craters and even the bizarre appearance of a crocodile – far removed from the island-dotted idylls of Jansson’s later works. The valley here feels unanchored, almost dreamlike, as if conjured from the anxious imagination of a world still reeling from war, rather than the grounded, seasonal rhythms of Finnish nature that would come to define the Moomin series.

Early on, the Muskrat, a world-weary philosopher, drifts into the story with the air of someone who has long since accepted the futility of everything, preferring to lie in his hammock and contemplate the void rather than involve himself in practical matters. His gloomy pronouncements – delivered with whiskered solemnity – are both oddly comforting and gently comic, a parody of intellectual-sorts who wander through Jansson’s early work (no doubt based on people she knew). Though he offers little in the way of help (indeed, he can be quite a hindrance), his presence adds a wry, wistful dimension to the tale, reminding the others that even in a world tilting toward annihilation, there is always someone ready to muse about the meaninglessness of it all.

When strange signs start appearing, Moomintroll feels a shiver of unease that even the late-summer warmth can’t dispel. His search for answers draws him, Sniff and the super‑tramp Snufkin – whom they meet for the very first time in this story – beyond the familiar edges of the valley into landscapes that seem to shift under the weight of an approaching threat.

Along the way they encounter a stamp‑collecting Hemulen (a fretful fellow whose cherished dress gets them out of a pickle at one point) and, most importantly, the radiant Snork Maiden and her pedantic brother. With them, they cross forests, rivers and eerie, echoing places where the world is more peculiar than they ever imagined. Their journey becomes almost a surreal quest, one in which companionship means everything. They sense that something vast is approaching – and Moomintroll has already worked out what it is.

Moominmamma and Moominpappa hover at the edges of the adventure like steadying forces, even as they remain at home waiting for the travellers to return. Moominmamma’s calm practicality and infinite kindness linger in Moomintroll’s thoughts as a sort of emotional compass, while Moominpappa’s taste for grand quests and youthful escapades lends the journey an almost inherited sense of daring.

A slight digression here: the expression “strike me pink”, which Moomintroll exclaims numerous times during the story, had me intrigued – partly, I must confess, because I’ve heard a far ruder version, as I’m sure many others have too. A little digging revealed that it is generally considered an old‑fashioned exclamation of surprise, though its precise origin remains uncertain. It began appearing in print in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is strongly associated with Australian and British slang. Most sources suggest it is a euphemistic twist on older ‘strike me…’ oaths, made gentler and rather more humorous by the substitution of pink, and popularised particularly in Australia before spreading more widely. So, there you go: young Moomintroll seems to have picked up this saying from some very naughty Australians! ⁴

Jansson’s influences are wide, and she wrote The Comet with a kind of feverish urgency, as though the story were pressing to be told. In her official biography,⁵ Boel Westin notes that “catastrophes are a thematic marker in [the author’s] Moomin world. Security and terror, stability and chaos clash both in the diaries of her childhood and in the Moomin books,”⁶ much as they did in Jansson’s own memories of wild storms and the perilous situations her father often swept the family into. That tension between exhilaration and unease, wonder and threat, pulses through the book’s shifting moods and gives the adventure its unmistakable charge.

We also learn that “the Bible [was] particularly important in the Moomin books, […] but nowhere is it more pervasively important than in The Comet, both for subject matter and language,” as the story describes an apocalypse on a distinctly biblical scale — complete with Egyptian plagues of grasshoppers and the sudden revelation of dry seabeds”.⁷

It is striking, too, that the Muskrat, who appears “at the door of the Moomin house one rainy evening [,] knows how to interpret signs and believes the end of time is approaching.” He is, suggests Westin a “prophet of ruin,” a role underscored by his choice of reading material: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a “famous book about the destructive cycles of Western civilisation and organisms”.⁸ Heavy stuff, indeed, for a children’s book – yet entirely characteristic of Jansson’s ability to weave profound, unsettling themes into her world of whimsy and charm.

One of the most endearing aspects of Comet in Moominland, I feel, is the way it treats impending doom with a kind of wide‑eyed curiosity. Even as a blazing comet hurtles towards them, the characters pause to marvel at other small creatures, go to a village dance and make new friends with the nieve optimism of travellers who trust the world to surprise them in a kindly fashion. The result is a story where peril and playfulness coexist, giving the adventure a buoyant, slightly comical charm that only Jansson could conjure.

“You must go on a long journey before you can really find out how wonderful home is⁹.”

****************************

My copy of Comet in Moominland – a birthday gift from my mother some years ago – is the Collector’s Edition Moomin Hardback from Sort of Books, published in 2017. It follows the 1968 revision exactly and has been “lovingly restored” to its former striking design. The translation is by Jansson’s friend Elizabeth Portch,¹⁰ whose English rendering has become the version most readers encounter today (give or take a few alterations).

****************************

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9^th August 1914, the daughter of a Swedish-Finnish father who worked as a sculptor and a mother who was a graphic designer. She first trained as an artist and made a name for herself in her homeland as a painter and cartoonist. She became internationally famous after creating the Moomins. She later went on to create novels and short fiction for adults. She worked in her Helsinki studio, moving to a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. She died on 27^th June 2001 at the age of eighty-six.

****************************

REFERENCE LIST

1. Chapter Nine: ‘The sea has dried up’, Comet in Moominland, page 140.
2. “Tove revised [Comet in Moominland] a decade later and again in 1968, reframing adventures (and adding new characters).” This quotation has been taken from the book description at the official Moomin website, Comet In Moominland 80th Anniversary Edition (Moomin Shop).
3. Snufkin first describing Snork Maiden to Moomintroll and Sniff, Comet in Moominland, Chapter Six: ‘Which is about the adventure with the Eagle and finding the Observatory’, page 87.
4. State Library NSW, Strike me pink!, Amanda Laugesen (Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre). Examples of its use in literature are given in the Wiktionary entry, strike me pink.
5. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella. Published 2014.
6. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Chapter7: ‘The Time of the Apocalypse’ (The Comet and the Prophet), page 180.
7. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Chapter7: ‘The Time of the Apocalypse’ (The Comet and the Prophet), page 181.
8. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Chapter7: ‘The Time of the Apocalypse’ (The Comet and the Prophet), pages 183-184.
9. Snufkin to Sniff and Moomintroll, Comet in Moominland, Chapter Eight: ‘Which is about the Village Stores and a party in the forest’, page 121.
10. Elizabeth Portch was “a teacher working for the Finnish-British Society of Helsinki”, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Boel Westin, Chapter 8: ‘Moomin Passion’, page 213.

****************************

Author’s images © Moomin Characters™