The New Yorker:

As Tove Jansson’s lovable creatures turn eighty, new generations are discovering a world where “trolling” means weathering life’s many anxieties.

By Jon Allsop

If you were to drop by my apartment, you’d see a lot of Moomins. My girlfriend and I own all sorts of trinkets bearing their likeness: a selection of mugs, a teapot, a tea towel (that we framed and put on the wall), a bedside night light, a pair of light-up key rings, a necklace, a wallet, a plastic model from a vending machine in Japan, at least one Christmas-tree decoration, a poster, and a pair of fridge magnets that, in the absence of a magnetic fridge door, we’ve posed on either side of our fireplace. They look like heraldic bas-reliefs.

What are Moomins, you might be wondering. They’re children’s characters, dreamed up decades ago by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, that are white and rotund, with pointy ears, swishy tails, and rounded snouts; they’re sometimes likened to hippos, which is fair, even if the comparison doesn’t particularly resonate with me. (To me, they just look like Moomins, a fact that is partly because I’ve been familiar with them since my early childhood, but is also a reflection of their singular visual identity; as Sheila Heti once put it in this magazine, they are “strangely familiar, as though Jansson happened to look in a new direction and find these tender and serious fellow-creatures, who had been with us all along.”) Then again, you might not be wondering what Moomins are—they have fans all over the world, and my girlfriend and I are far from alone in having stuffed our home with their merchandise, worldwide sales of which reportedly top eight hundred million dollars per year. (The Moomin mugs, each wrapped in a gorgeous illustration, are the jewels in this crown, and are highly collectible; in 2021, one sold at auction for nearly thirty thousand dollars.) Other fans include the actor Lily Collins, a.k.a. Emily of “in Paris” fame, who not only collects the merchandise but named her daughter Tove and hosted the introductory episode of an official Moomin podcast.

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