On Moomin Mugs

An essay about objects and loss and little colourful mugs

Hey,

This was originally going to be a short piece about one of my favourite kitchen items: Moomin mugs. I imagined it to be a brief “fragment” that my paid subscribers might enjoy.

Then it turned into something a bit bigger and I thought I’d send it to you all.

I hope you enjoy it,

Wil

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There are no possessions more important to Rob, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, than his vinyl records. Not only does he have a huge collection himself, but he also runs a record store where he spends his days arguing with employees over which records are better than others.

It’s entirely in character then that, having experienced yet another traumatic breakup, he turns to his records for comfort. Specifically, he distracts himself by starting a mass reorganisation of them. But he doesn’t do it chronologically, and he definitely doesn’t do it so crudely as alphabetically. Instead, he does it autobiographically.

Unlike Rob, my record collection is too small to do this for myself.

But one collection I can tell the story of my life through, or at least the adult part of it, is my collection of Moomin mugs.

And, if you’ve never heard of Moomin mugs before, I can be sure of at least one thing about you.

You are not Finnish.

You see, along with an ingenious cabinet above the sink for dishes to drip-dry in, there’s one thing you are bound to find in most Finnish kitchens: a cupboard full of small, colourful mugs decorated with strange creatures that look not dissimilar to hippos.

Those creatures are Moomins, and the mugs are Moomin mugs.

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The Moomins are a family of small, troll-like beings that live in a fictional idyll by the sea called Moominvalley. There, in a “Moominhouse”, live Moominpappa, Moominmamma, and, their son, Moomintroll. Visiting and having frequent adventures with them are a cast of other characters including the itinerant, and deeply philosophical, Snufkin, the neurotic Fillyjonks, and precocious Little My.

They were created by Tove Jansson, the stunningly talented Finnish writer/painter/illustrator, and what has become clear to me is that her Finnishness defines so much of the Moomin world and its inhabitants.

As is so important to Finnish people and culture, the Moomins are deeply connected to nature, there is nothing more sacred than the sanctuary of home, and small joys such as sharing good food and coffee with others are an integral part of everyday life.

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Moomins are big business now, particularly in Finland. But for all the clothing and duvet covers, toys and bags and phone cases that can be found with Moomins decorating them, it is the mugs that are most treasured.

I wonder if this is because the mug corresponds so directly to such a treasured aspect of Finnish life.

In Sweden they have a word for a planned moment to drink coffee and eat some cake. The word is fika. In Norway and Denmark they have a word to evoke that cosy, comfy feeling that might often come with a warm drink beside a fire, hopefully in the presence of loved ones. The word is hygge.

It is strange to me that in a place where such acts are so relied on and so cherished, there is no equivalent word in Finnish. I’m left wondering if this is such a deeply ingrained act, so foundational, that no word was ever considered necessary.

Just as there is no word in England for not talking to other people on the London Underground.

In place of such a word, what we do have are these mugs. In one of our cupboards here in Turku, Finland, we have more mugs than I have yet counted. Probably over 30.

There’s the mug I bought a few weeks before my son was born to give him when he’s older. There’s a similar mug for his sister as well. There’s the mug I bought for my wife the summer I asked her to marry me, a silly, little limited edition thing with, uniquely, a pair of black glasses printed on the inside of it. There are mugs of her mother’s and grandmother’s as well.

Some of these simple mugs have ended up being worth something as they’ve got older and, whenever I suggest to my wife we might put them out of the way somewhere safe, her reaction will immediately be to use one such valuable mug for a cup of tea.

These mugs, you see, are not objects to be hoarded. They are things to be used and to take comfort in. If we are lucky, they are objects we can use with others. And even in the absence of those we love, they can serve to remind us of them as well.

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I met my wife in 2013 and it was just a few months later that she sent me my first Moomin mug. She sent it in the post for my birthday (she lived in Sweden then, me in London) along with a Finnish novel about sexual violence, collusion and resistance in Soviet-occupied Estonia.

In her note with the package she admitted it was a gloomy book. But Finns are gloomy as well, she said, as though preparing me for the life I was heading toward with her. The Moomin mug was her way of balancing it out. A blue mug decorated with a picture of Snufkin.

The dual soliloquy of Finnish life in a package: occasional gloominess, frequent joy.

I didn’t bring much with me 3 years later when I left England to be with her in Stockholm. I didn’t really have much to bring. My childhood was defined, after all, by such frequent house moves that many items that might have become treasured, let alone become heirlooms, have been lost to storage containers and second-rate removal men.

This is why that single suitcase I left England with had only, and could only ever have really, the books I could fit, some clothes, and that little blue Snufkin mug.

I said my Moomin mugs tell the story of my adult life.

That story starts with Snufkin.

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Joy runs through so much of the Moomin stories, but, just as gloominess is a part of Finnish life, nor is the Moominvalley entirely free of sadness either. In fact, I think there is no book that explores loss and absence as well as the Moomin novel Moominvalley in November.

This was the last Moomin novel Jansson wrote. Published in 1970, Jansson was writing the novel when her much-loved mother died, and the sombre tone of the book is considered a reflection of how painful this was for her. As to why she could never write of the Moominvalley and its inhabitants again after Moominvalley in November, Jansson said:

“I couldn’t go back and find that happy Moominvalley again.”

Absence colours every part of Moominvalley in November. It is, for one thing, a Moomin book without any Moomins in it.

Instead, the story tells of a group of characters who all visit the Moominhouse in the hope of spending time with the Moomin family. When they all meet and discover the special family is absent, they wait for their return. And, one by one, having resigned themselves to the fact the Moomin family won’t be returning, they leave.

All, that is, apart from one of the visitors.

A young orphan boy named Toft, who has only ever dreamt of Moominmamma and never met her face to face, chooses to remain.

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There is no object or possession in the Moomin books as important as the company of family and friends. The beauty to me of the final Moomin book, however, is that it is wise enough to remind us that, in the absence of the ones we love, an object or even a place can be some consolation.

This is no more apparent than toward the end of Moominvalley in November.

Toft has just watched the final guest leave and he is finally alone. It is only at this point he does something he hasn’t brought himself to do during his stay with the others in the Moominhouse so far: he goes up to Moominmamma’s room.

“It was white. He filled the water-jug and smoothed out the crocheted bedcover. He put Fillyjonk’s vase on the bedside table. Moominmamma had no pictures on the walls and on the desk there was only a small dish with safety-pins, a rubber cork and two round stones. On the window-sill Toft found a clasp-knife. ‘She forgot it’, he thought. ‘That’s the one she usually makes little boats out of bark with. But perhaps she had another one with her’.”

For almost 200 pages before this moment, the story has convinced us, in the words of Kaye Webb in her original introduction to the book, that: “Moominvalley is Moominvalley still, even without the Moomins in it.” But I believe it is here, when he finally goes into that part of the Moominhouse that is most Moominmamma’s, that he fully understands his sense of loss and longing for her.

Her objects have been collected. They have been picked out for her journey and all those deemed necessary are with her now. Those that remain are surplus.

It would be easy to read this as an abandonment of Toft. That, like the clasp-knife, Moominmamma felt he was not important enough to be taken with her. But the unique detail of Toft’s story is that he is unknown to Moominmamma. His being “abandoned” by her, isn’t a conscious act of hers. In this sense, unlike all the other characters who were known to the Moomin family, Toft’s abandonment was not made out of choice.

Toft’s and Moominmamma’s separation is, therefore, much like the separation between the living and the dead. The dead being those whose absence is unavoidable. This is why what Toft subsequently does to that clasp-knife is so touching. He takes it outside to the workshop and sharpens it. He tries to bring back to life the one object remaining that connects Moominmamma to him.

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After his experience in her abandoned bedroom, the story ends within a few pages. In a run of prose that reads more Beckettian to me than that of a children’s novel, Toft flees into the woods. He is confronted by strange images of the Moomin family and whenever he thinks about Moominmamma he feels only pain. He jumps from anger to fatigue to deep unease. Eventually, he no longer even remembers what Moominmamma, who he has dreamt of for so long, even looks like.

Writing this book having recently lost her mother, I can’t help but read it as a visceral description of the experience of grief. The fact this is all preceded by Toft’s finally coming face to face with those few remaining possessions of Moominmamma’s emphasises to me the powerful effect objects of those absent can have on us.

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Maybe my lack of childhood treasures is why I have a habit of forming attachments to certain objects even now. I’m sentimental that way. I still, for example, keep in my wallet the receipt from the curry I brought back to the hospital for my wife the day our son was born. It’s just a piece of blank paper now. The thermal ink faded entirely.

And I still treasure my Snufkin mug, that vulnerable, brittle thing that could have so easily been lost or broken or left behind these past many years. Being the oldest thing I own now, or thereabouts at least, I wonder if it will ever serve to give my son and daughter a connection to me when I’m gone one day. But this is something I will never know.

Moominvalley in November ends with Toft sat by the water. Looking out to the sea, a light catches his eye. He wonders if it might be from the boat the Moomin family are sailing back to Moominvalley on. And then the novel ends. Jansson keeps him waiting for their return. Such inconclusive endings leave us asking what happens next? But not all ends are also beginnings. Some ends are just ends. And as much as we hope Toft and Moominmamma meet, the novel refuses to tell us that.

It is something we will never know.

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