The beautiful blend that can come of mingling domesticity and the fantastic is having a moment right now, as exemplified by the genre of cozy fantasy, but as we would expect, contemporary writers aren’t the first to notice how well those elements can combine. The classic children’s fantasies of the Norden all have strong elements of what might be called coziness in current times. Rather than a setting steeped in fairy tale elements like kings and princesses, these books use a solid grounding in everyday, homely things as a runway for taking flight into the fantastic.
Possibly the most famous Swedish author worldwide, Astrid Lindgren (1907–2002), wrote some children’s books that used more typical fantastical settings. Mio, My Son and The Brothers Lionheart are sword fighting adventures no one could quibble about calling fantasies. Ronia the Robber’s Daughter is an interesting midpoint, with an historically tinged setting and clearly fantastical elements like harpies and gnomes. But many Anglophone readers have never heard of these works and mainly know Lindgren for one thing.
Which raises the question: is Pippi Longstocking a fantasy? Surely so in the other, non-genre meaning of the word: Pippi is the pure wish fulfillment of children who don’t have to go to school or go to bed when they’re told. She tells lies that she knows are lies—she acknowledges it to Tommy and Annika in their first conversation. But plenty of children’s stories feature elements of wish fulfillment without crossing the line into the fantastical. Pippi’s ridiculous misapprehensions of Swedish manners at the time might have been purely comedy or surrealism—and often they are just that.
Her stories cross the line into the fantastic, though, with Pippi’s proto-superheroic feats. “The strongest little girl in Sweden/the world” could have been written to beat a strong man arm wrestling, but instead she juggles strong men. We’re told at the outset, “She was so spectacularly strong that in the whole wide world there was no one as strong as she was, not even a policeman. She could lift up a whole horse if she wanted to. And she did want to.…when it was time for Pippi’s afternoon coffee she picked him up and put him in the garden with no problem at all.”1 The horse, who never receives a name, is equally often ridden and carried in the course of Pippi’s tales. But on the other hand—notice that the comparison for strength is “a policeman,” rather than a mythic creature or even a singularly famous person. The scale here is simultaneously fantastically vast and incredibly small.
And the balance is constantly maintained between these two elements throughout the books. Pippi bakes pepparkakor (Swedish ginger cookies)—albeit so many of them that she has to roll them out on the kitchen floor instead of the table. She washes the floor by skating around on it and packs the picnic lunches that she feasts on with her friends Tommy and Annika. She also eats death cap mushrooms with nary a qualm, breaks the horns off a charging bull, and hangs a gang of bullies from the trees and gateposts. As for a pair of burglars—“Pippi prodded them with her index finger and they ended up in opposite corners of the room. Before they had time to stand up, Pippi had found a rope and quick as lightning tied it round the thieves’ arms and legs.”2
This is just the sort of vanquishing of evildoers that we often see in superhero narratives, interspersed with the saving of larger-scale days: the fate of the city at least, and sometimes the fate of the world. Pippi, though she has traveled and does travel, is not particularly concerned with the fate of the world. Her magic and her superpowers are employed for the village, more particularly its children, most particularly her dearest friends, Tommy and Annika. Pippi’s personal warmth may be quirkier than Superman’s, but it’s equally part of her superpowers.
The other powerhouse of classic Nordic children’s fantastic literature is of course Tove Jansson (1914–2001). Though she, like Lindgren, wrote a variety of other things, she is best known for the Moomins, a set of fantastical troll characters with round, soft snouts and bellies, surrounded by an equally fantastical cast of friends. Both setting and narrative are far more overtly fantastic than the Pippi books, and the domestic note gives an air of calm to proceedings that might otherwise become frenetic. For example, when the Moominhouse is magically overgrown with jungle plants and Moominpappa asks what happens, Moominmamma replies, “We must have been careless with the Hobgoblin’s Hat again. But come up here—I’ve found a gooseberry bush in the wardrobe.”3 The calmness and sense of fun that pervades the characters’ attitudes spreads to the reader as well.
The trappings of ordinary life become tools for magic and adventure rather than obstacles to them. When encountering the race of Snorks for the first time, Snufkin has just dug himself out of prison with, of all things, a can opener, and when Moomintroll has to free the Snork Maiden from a poisonous and carnivorous plant, we must hear that he uses “his penknife (the new one with a corkscrew and an instrument-for-taking-the-stones-out-of-horses’-hooves).”4 Domestic tools matter at the most fantastical of times, bringing a note of humor along with the grounding in the familiar to keep the explorations of the weird and whimsical from veering into the horrific or chilling.
The anchor for the domesticity of this domestic fantasy is often Moominmamma, who remains calmly assured that adventurers—having very real and sometimes frightening adventures!—will be home in time to lick the cake batter bowl. She is the only one who recognizes Moomintroll through the Hobgoblin’s Hat’s enchantment of him to look utterly different, a use of her anchor role that is nothing short of magical. Her welcome is assured for all creatures, no matter what their shape, size, or magical status—her main concern is their comfort. More standard adventure fantasy for children often feels the need to get parents, especially mothers, out of the way of their children’s adventures; the Moomin books use Moominmamma’s handbag as a cozy bed for the mouse-sized sentients Thingummy and Bob, and she and Moominpappa are far more likely to participate in the adventures than to object to them. Aligning the fantastic with the domestic rather than opposing the two thus allows more inclusive narratives as well as warmer ones.
Despite being the first female Nobel Prize winner and the first female member of the Swedish Academy, Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) is less well known than the other two. Like them, she wrote in other fields. Her major fantastical children’s work is The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (sometimes published in two volumes in English as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Further Adventures of Nils, neither of which is a literal translation of the Swedish title, which is more like Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Trip Across Sweden). In it a stubborn farm boy—fourteen in a time when “teenagerhood” was not a recognized category—is turned into a tomte (variously translated as elf, thumbling, etc., a very small fantastical human-shaped creature) for his cruelty to tomten and animals. He travels across Sweden with a flock of geese and must learn kindness to return to his human family.
Nils is an explicitly didactic work, with its focus oddly on Swedish geography rather than any kind of details of moral conduct. The book starts with lyrical passages about the beauty of the Skåne rural landscape and remains dedicated to its romantic view of Swedish vistas throughout. But these are rarely truly wild scenes, nor are they intended to be. Nils’s companion in flight with the wild geese is a tame goose, a barnyard companion to his family; the perils that they face together are far more focused on the fox—homely scourge of domestic poultry—who is now of a size to menace the tiny Nils, than on anything more exotic or unfamiliar to him. Even a flock of chickens can become a present danger to a gnome-sized boy—the house cat must be feared almost beyond all things.
For Nils, the comfortable and the domestic must achieve a magically outsized status before he can appreciate them for what they really are. “He ought to have recognized this place,” we are told, “for it was not very far from his home.”5 But before the events of the book, we realize, Nils has not bothered to know the small magics of home particularly well. The geese teach him loyalty and care for others; the cows cry out for justice and teach him its worth. Old grannies are not frightened of the uncanny presence of elves, and other children take it for granted. It’s Nils who has to learn both the mundane and the fantastic dimensions of his home in order to return to it—and the magic he appreciates in the end includes post offices and pharmacists as well as elves and wild cranes. In a world where the Ice Witch battles the Sun for the north, the opening of one young person’s heart is still shown to matter deeply.
It’s easy to assess cozy fantasy’s popularity as filling the need of a moment, but the domestic threads of classic Nordic children’s fantasy highlight how much broader that need, or that pleasure, can be. Whether it’s the romantic farm landscapes of Nils, the surreal humor and superheroism of Pippi, or the Moomins’ headlong and straightforward joy in their magical surroundings and companions, domestically grounded fantasy doesn’t have to go far to go deep, thematically and emotionally.
1 Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, Susan Beard translation.
2 Ibid.
3 Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson, Elizabeth Portch translation.
4 Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson, Elizabeth Portch translation.
5 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, by Selma Lagerlöf, Velma Swanston Howard translation.
© 2025 Marissa Lingen
