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Pippi Longstocking: the Swedish superhero
On the centenary of Astrid Lindgren's birth, Pippi Longstocking has been redrawn for a new generation. Susanna Forest reports
It is hard to resist Pippilotta Comestibles Windowshade Curlymint Ephraimsdaughter Longstocking, with her "hair the colour of a carrot…plaited in two tight plaits that stuck straight out", and a nose "the shape of a very small potato… completely covered in freckles".
If this Swedish girl doesn't bamboozle you with tall tales of her time on the high seas, charm you with a gift bought with her inexhaustible pile of gold coins or turn the world as you know it upside down, then she can always pick you up and leave you hanging from a tree branch, because she's strong enough to benchpress a horse.
If Pippi met Voldemort she'd make mincemeat of him and then, because she's a generous, forgiving soul, sit him down and feed him ginger snaps.
This year she turns 62 (although she's forever nine) and it will be 100 years since her creator, Astrid Lindgren, was born in a small town called Vimmerby in southern Sweden.
Oxford University Press – Pippi's British publisher for half a century – is bringing out a commemorative edition, with a new translation by Tiina Nunnally and illustrations by the wildly popular Lauren Child, who is responsible for the smash hits Clarice Bean and Charlie and Lola. She's an inspired choice to hook a new generation of children on Sweden's greatest literary export.
Child's Pippi has the same droll, slanting eyes as Lola; she looks as though she thinks a little harder than most Longstockings, who tend to be all toothy grins and freckles. She zings about, disappearing over the page on a horse, slipping away from nasty grown-ups and dropping out of the bottom of the book. Child found the red, blue and white print fabrics for the collages at jumble sales, and they have a bright, clean Scandinavian style.
When OUP approached Lauren, she knew she had to say yes: "I have memories of other books from my childhood, but they've faded into a certain feeling or just bits of the book. The Pippi stories are so vivid. They were a shared love with my best friend and we used to talk about the books for hours."
Lindgren was a married mother of two doing war work for the Swedish secret service and dabbling in writing when she conjured up Pippi. Her daughter, Karin, was bed-bound with pneumonia and demanded that her mother tell her a story about "Pippi Långstrump".
The name was enough: Pippi sprang out fully formed – mismatched stockings, potato nose and all – and began to behave in a most extraordinary fashion.
Pippi is an orphan – her mother is "an angel" and her sea-dog father was washed overboard and is the king of a cannibal island.
Far from being tragic, this situation suits Miss Longstocking very well. She waits for her papa in a house called Villa Villekulla "on the outskirts of a tiny little town" not unlike Vimmerby, with a monkey called Mr Nilsson and a horse that lives on the porch.
Here she befriends Tommy and Annika, a brother and sister who have wandered in from another type of children's book altogether – the type written by a grown-up who has forgotten what it's like to be a child, but has lots of notions about what children should be.
Pre-Pippi, Tommy and Annika spend all day playing croquet, keeping their clothes clean and waiting for something to happen.
When Pippi explodes on to the scene like a confetti bomb, they are swept along as she turns the tables on bullies, ejects (like a nightclub bouncer) a couple of policemen who want to put her in a children's home, refuses to learn her "pluttification tables", disrupts a circus and rescues boys from a burning building.
She makes biscuits on the kitchen floor, dances the polka with burglars and tells flamboyant shaggy dog stories about Chinese men with ears so big they can hide under them. The bedtime tales spiralled into a short novel, published in 1945.
Pippi was a bit of a shock to her first readers – and to her author. In Margareta Strömstedt's official biography, Lindgren recalls, "I was personally quite shaken by Pippi, and I remember that I ended my letter to the company, 'In the hope that you don't warn the child welfare officer.'"
Pippi carried all before her in a higgledy-piggledy mixture of controversy and raging popularity that was repeated around the world for decades as new translations came out. Pippi was anarchic, naughty, a bad example, an irresistible delight and catnip to children everywhere.
There have been three Pippi feature films and a Swedish TV series, syndicated worldwide. Lindgren's books, including Longstocking and a host of other characters, have sold 145 million in 91 languages.
In Sweden you can visit Villa Villekulla in the Astrid Lindgren theme park and watch the burglars dance with Pippi. In Germany there are more than 90 schools named after Lindgren; in Portugal there are kindergartens called Vila Pippi; in Iran fresh editions were banned until two years ago on the grounds that Pippi's conduct was out of step with the Islamic Revolution; in France there was an outcry when it was revealed in 1995 that the French translation had been butchered for the sake of realism.
Why does she have such universal appeal? Well, as Lauren Child points out, she fulfils the wildest dreams of both children and grown-ups:
"Pippi is all-powerful. She's completely independent and doesn't have to answer to anybody. She has a chest of gold so she can buy whatever she wants. She's a comic-book superhero with super-human strength, so nobody can frighten her. She just doesn't care what anybody thinks about her." What could be more subversive than that?
I'm pretty sure Pippi is the reason Sweden has more female MPs than anywhere other than Rwanda. If you want to raise generations of young women who make short shrift of sexism, you can't do better than Pippi as a role model. At the circus she challenges the strongman Adolf to a wrestling match:
"Oh but I'm sure you couldn't do it anyway," said Annika. "He's the world's strongest man after all."
"Man, yes," said Pippi. "But I am the world's strongest girl."
And then she whomps him into the sawdust three times.
She does all this without being a monster: she's unruly without malice, and despite being labelled a capitalist by Swedish radicals in the 1970s, has Robin Hood's take on wealth distribution. She's never trite. She has a logic direct from Alice in Wonderland that is, like any child's, absolutely true, absolutely wrong and utterly incontrovertible:
"'Now you'd better go home,' said Pippi [to Tommy and Annika], 'so that you can come back tomorrow. Because if you don't go home, then you won't be able to come back tomorrow.'" Best of all, Lindgren never humbles Pippi – that self-assurance is never hubris.
There's something sweet about Pippi's rise that mirrors Lindgren's life. The farmer's daughter from Vimmerby was a "bad girl" who became a national heroine. Lindgren was a teenage flapper in the 1920s and the first in town to bob her hair; at 17 she was a thoroughly modern career girl – a cub reporter on the local paper.
Then she fell pregnant and fulfilled the worst expectations of conservative Sweden – an unmarried teenage mother.
But she had her baby, and she kept him. She placed Lars with a foster family in Denmark where she could snatch time from earning a living in Stockholm to visit him often, and where he'd be safe from Sweden's notorious child welfare committees who might have left him to fester in a home.
When she married six years later she reclaimed Lars. She gave birth to her second child, Karin, in 1934.
At the Swedish Institute for Children's Books tribute conference in May this year, Professor Emeritus Ulf Boëthius spoke of a visit that Lindgren took to a children's home in the 1930s. She was shocked at the conditions, "decay, hopelessness and a terrible smell", and a child so neglected it couldn't speak. No wonder she made Pippi so formidable.
No wonder either, that Lindgren became a political campaigner who was praised for her contribution to pacifism, and to child and animal rights. By her death in 2002 – she was given a state funeral – she was a grand dame festooned in awards and honorary doctorates.
Thankfully, age cannot wither Pippi. She's still outrageous and contemporary. She has escaped the worst ravages of political correctness – although her American publisher worries about being sued if children follow Pippi's advice and eat toadstools.
In an age where children are coddled and confined by scared parents, we all need Pippi as the ultimate imaginary friend to run along rooftops and beat up the bad guys.
- Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, with a new translation by Tiina Nunnally and new illustrations by Lauren Child, is published this month by OUP at £14.99. To order it for the special price of £12.99 + £1.25 p&p, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112