Nature & Animals
Real world
Real-world influenceHIGH
- The Gulf of Finland Archipelago
- Islands
- Storms
Tove Jansson spent every summer of her life on the islands and the Moomin books are those islands. Her family summered in the Pellinki archipelago east of Helsinki, and she later lived for decades on Klovharu, a bare rock in the outer skerries with a hut she and Tuulikki Pietilä built. The books are shaped by that weather rather than set in it. Moominpappa at Sea is a family moving to a lighthouse on an islet; Comet in Moominland is an evacuation; the flood and the storm recur because on a small island they are the events that happen. The valley is the inner archipelago and the sea beyond it is the outer one, and Jansson drew both from life. Her late adult novel The Summer Book is the same coast without the trolls.