| ▲ | jojobas 6 hours ago |
| Moomins don't depict anything like saving the world, it's a whimsical universe dealing with whimsical non-issues. I can see why Tolkien lovers are upset at these even though I'm not really one of them. |
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| ▲ | Sharlin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The Hobbit is also a whimsical children's book, and doesn't have anything to do with saving the world (a world that Tolkien had not developed anywhere near the state in we see in LoTR when he wrote The Hobbit almost 20 years earlier). |
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| ▲ | jfengel 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The world was pretty well developed, but The Hobbit isn't really set in it. The Hobbit was retconned into his broader Middle-earth as the sequel grew in the telling. He'd been re-writing the material that became The Silmarillion for decades. (And he offered it to the publisher instead of a Hobbit sequel, and they said "what else ya got?) This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf. | |
| ▲ | jojobas 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was a children's book and probably isn't anymore. | | |
| ▲ | hackyhacky 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Was its license rescinded by the International Society of Children's Books? Thanks for letting me know, I'll be sure to tell my child to stop enjoying it. | |
| ▲ | stackghost 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I read it to my daughter when she was six, and she loved it. We did one chapter a night. I did almost no editing as I read. By the time we read LOTR she was eight, and we never did finish ROTK because the Frodo and Sam parts really do drag on (I get that he wrote them this way so that the reader would get a sense of just how arduous the journey was, but...) | |
| ▲ | xyzzy_plugh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Rest assured, I can personally confirm that it is still a wonderful children's book. | |
| ▲ | tokai 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How could that status ever chance? Being widely read by adults doesn't change if its an children's book or not. | | |
| ▲ | npinsker 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Theoretically it could change via literacy rates and attention spans going down? | | |
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| ▲ | mijoharas 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Somewhat whimsical, yet somewhat grappling with dark undertones, possibly due to the trauma of the war. The moomins starts with a great flood that washes them all away to live in a new place (I think this is a parallel to the Finns moving out of Karelia after the war. I believe this was the largest migration of people that had occured at the time, and it has been described as causing generational trauma to the Finnish). In addition I believe MoominPappa deals with issues of depression or something? |
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| ▲ | jojobas 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fantastic creatures diving to retrieve their pantry supplies or the head of a family grappling with a mild midlife crisis is not exactly on the same scale with a band of warriors reclaiming their homeland and in passing dealing with the eternal evil. | | |
| ▲ | lich_king 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I love that you use "fantastic creatures" to describe the world of Jansson, but "warriors" to describe Tolkien. Last time I checked, it had hobbits, dwarves, elves, talking trees... but none of that fantasy nonsense of Moomintrolls, right? There are some seriously dark themes in there - and unlike in Tolkien, the protagonists are completely helpless when facing them. No epic battle in which magical eagles and a magical bear show up to save the day. | |
| ▲ | mijoharas 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Just for the record, I don't at all think they're similar. I just don't think it's correct to call the moomins entirely whimsical (though they are a bit I guess.) Mostly just trying to contextualise the moomins with some info I found interesting and unexpected given that it looks like a children's show about anthropomorphic hippos. | |
| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | bbddg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Comet in moominland is about them learning about a comet heading towards earth that they believe is going to kill them all. |
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| ▲ | antonvs 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It wouldn’t be “Tolkien lovers” who are upset at these, it would be people too narcissistically self-involved with their own preconceptions. |
