The Moomins are the vaguely hippo-like "trolls" at the center of a series of books and comics by Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson. The characters and their stories span not only these two printed mediums but a wide range of animation series and projects around the world.

The international breadth of busy contributors to these projects is a joy in itself - written by a Finn but first published in Swedish, with contributions by the British, the Japanese, the Dutch, and still others as the Moomins passed through multiple mediums as though they were one. Jansson wrote novels and comic books about the Moomins' adventures, and the animated versions of these stories have achieved cultlike status as well.

One of the most fascinating characters in the Moomins' many stories is the Groke. The description from Wikipedia says it well:

She appears as a ghostlike hill-shaped body with two cold staring eyes and a wide row of white shiny teeth. ... Wherever she stands, the ground below her freezes and plants and grass die. She leaves a trace of ice and snow when she walks the ground. Anything she touches will freeze and on one instance she froze a camp fire by sitting down on it. She seeks friendship and warmth, but she is declined by everyone and everything, leaving her in her cold cavern on top of the Lonely Mountains. The Groke is both a live representation of loneliness and a psychological depiction of very lonely people who have a hard time accepting and expressing love in the right way, making them seem cold and scary to others, which, in turn, only leads to more loneliness.

The depiction of the Groke from shown above is okay, but the one from the stop-motion version (I'm not sure which one this is... there were so many!) is far more interesting. Here's a classic clip.



One of the benefits of a creative mind like Jansson's so thoroughly developing his vision in more than one medium, or perhaps as an additional aspect of the temperament that would inspire him to develop such disparate skills, is that he builds up layers of facts, some of them contested, about his characters. The Groke, for example, is often presented as a sympathetic and misunderstood creature (although doomed to be so), but in other stories the Moomins speak of it eating Moomins (whether this is true or not is never addressed).


- Jeremiah