Beyond Pippi Longstocking

Intermedial and International Approaches to Astrid Lindgren's Work

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Astrid Surmatz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136741937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Astrid Lindgren, author of the famed Pippi Longstocking novels, is perhaps one of the most significant children's authors of the last half of the twentieth century. In this collection contributors consider films, music, and picturebooks relating to Lindgren, in addition to the author's reception internationally. Touching on everything from the Astrid Lindgren theme park at Vimmerby, Sweden to the hidden folk songs in Lindgren's works to the use of nostalgia in film adaptations of Lindgren's novels, this collection offers an important international and intermedial portrait of Lindgren research today.

Part I

Different Aspects of International Reception

Chapter One

Pippi Longstocking in the United States

Eva-Maria Metcalf

Pippi Longstocking was published in the US in 1950, five years after the appearance of the Swedish original. As Kerstin Kvint reports in her book Astrid i vida världen, connections and serendipity played a role in the discovery of the relatively unknown Swedish author and her work (Kvint 66). Lindgren’s good friend Elsa Olenius had met Annis Duff, the children’s book editor at Viking at the time, during her trip to the US in 1949, and, as a result, Pippi Longstocking was published by The Viking Press the very next year in Florence Lamborn’s translation with whacky, action-filled and cartoon-like line drawings by Louis Glanzman.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the American children’s book market had exploded and had long since reached a level of self-sufficiency. Under those conditions, a book that faces the stiff odds of a costly translation and an increased uncertainty of success attributable to a public challenged by cultural differences, might not be considered for publication in the first place and, if published, might receive less promotion and fewer reviews. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, the American market has presented and still continues to present extremely high barriers to any foreign-language children’s book. Citing estimates by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center in Madison, Wisconsin from 1996, Carl Tomlinson mentions that only 1.2% of the approximately 4,500 books published for children and young adults that year were translations, and most of these were picture books. Only eight of the fifty-four translations that year were books of “substantial length” (“Children’s Books” 13). Even if these numbers are not entirely verifiable and may vary slightly from year to year, the fact remains that extremely few translations are launched on the American children’s book market.

Figure 1.1 Illustration by Louis Glanzman from Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren. Translated by Florence Lamborn. New York: Viking, 1978.

As Johanna Hurwitz tells us in the 1989 biography of Lindgren that she wrote for a young adult American audience, sales of Pippi Longstocking were slow in the beginning despite the fact that the reviews were good (Hurwitz 32). That fact prompted May Massee, another children’s book editor at Viking at the time, to write to Lindgren on March 30, 1951, “It does not look as though Pippi is going to have the enormous success she had in Sweden” (31–32). While Massee’s prediction held true, sales did pick up, and by the end of the twentieth century Pippi Longstocking had sold more than five million copies in the US (Hurwitz 32). Though impressive, these sales figures have not made Pippi Longstocking into a bestseller in the US. To put these numbers in perspective, compare them to the five million copies that were sold on the first day of issuance alone of J. K. Rowling’s fifth Harry Potter book, Order of the Phoenix, in 2003. The next volume in the Harry Potter series sold 6.9 million copies on its first day, July 18, 2005 (Hoffman and Fineman 2005), and Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic Corporation, announced on July 23, 2007 that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in Rowling’s bestselling children’s series, sold a record 8.3 million copies in the US on its first day (Hoffman and Fineman 2005). Pippi’s somewhat marginal but persistent presence on the American market has much to do with the fact that Lindgren eschewed promotional deals and did not allow merchandising of her fictional characters during her lifetime. Thus, it is actually surprising that Pippi Longstocking has prevailed in the promotion-driven consumer culture and quite self-sufficient market for fiction in the US. While the likeness of Harry Potter adorns writing pads, towels, and scads of other consumer goods, Pippi’s carrot-colored pigtails have almost exclusively appeared on posters and on book, video, and DVD covers.

According to Kerstin Kvint, the US ranked ninth on the list of Astrid Lindgren’s top ten sources of royalties in 1996, just after France and ahead of Poland (Kvint 17). If the data were based on per capita sales, the US would most certainly be much lower down on the list. With sales amounting to 145 million copies worldwide, Lindgren’s books have not done well in the US in comparison with many countries around the globe. Translated into more than ninety languages, Astrid Lindgren holds an impressive twenty-third place on the Index Translationum’s statistics on the number of translations worldwide, ahead of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Karl Marx. Incidentally, first place is held by the Disney Corporation, followed by Agatha Christie in second place, William Shakespeare fourth place, Enid Blyton in sixth place, Hans Christian Andersen in ninth place, and the New Testament in thirteenth place (Index Translationum).

Thanks, in part, to Lindgren’s international standing, Pippi Longstocking is today officially recognized as a modern classic in the US and is listed among the twenty-one “most important” books in the children’s literature canon as defined by Wikipedia along with such twentieth-century classics as Winnie the Pooh, The Little Prince, The Hobbit, and Harry Potter. All three books about Pippi—Pippi Longstocking (1950), Pippi Goes on Board (1957), and Pippi in the South Seas (1959)—have remained in print ever since they appeared, which in and of itself is highly unusual for foreign-language children’s books in American publishing. Austrian writer Christine Nöstlinger, for example, the first writer to win the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (2003), saw a number of her books published in the US in the 1980s after she had received the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1984, but almost all of them had disappeared from the stores roughly a decade later.

Lindgren’s other characters, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, Emil, Mischievous Meg, and even Mio and the Brothers Lionheart have not fared as well either. They are, in effect, quite unknown in the US, and most are out of print. Of the sixteen books that appeared in a recent search for Lindgren books for sale at us.penguingroup.com, eleven were books about Pippi and the remaining five consisted of The Children of Noisy Village, Christmas in Noisy Village, The Tomten, The Tomten and the Fox, and Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter (Penguin Group USA). Searches on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com produced longer lists, including a greater variety of used books and books published in England or in other languages, but the selections offered at those sites were very similar to the selection found at us.penguingroup.com.

Clearly, Pippi Longstocking is Lindgren’s one and only fictional character of fame in the US. The reception history of Pippi Longstocking that I will trace in the following is based almost entirely on the opinions of adults in their roles as critics or mediators of books and films, because adults are ultimately in control of what gets into the hands of children. I have consulted book reviews in newspapers and journals, read articles by literary critics in the academic press, and traced the representation of Astrid Lindgren in children’s literature guides. To cast a wider net, I have also browsed through blogs and customer reviews on Internet sites such as amazon.com, barnesandnoble. com, and goodreads.com to monitor some vocal representatives of the general public. Since the reception of books and films is closely and irretrievably intertwined in today’s world, I will touch on the Pippi Longstocking films as well. Finally, school and library Web sites have provided me with another interesting perspective on the reception of Pippi Longstocking and the ways she is used and abused in the educational setting.

The 1950s and 1960s

While Pippi Longstocking had given rise to contentious debates in Sweden in the late 1940s, its reception in the US seems to have been comparatively calm—one could almost call it routine—and overwhelmingly positive, if one is to judge from the short reviews in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, the New York Times Book Review, The Cleveland Open Shelf, The Horn Book, and Virginia Kirkus’ Service (now Kirkus Reviews). Reviewers did not notice or dwell on the subversive potential of the main character. Instead, they conveniently shelved Pippi Longstocking into the already existing genre of nonsense, fantasy, and absurdist prose for children.

The Horn Book, the authoritative voice for children’s literature at the time, called Pippi Longstocking “a fresh delicious fantasy that children will love” (Book Review Digest 1950: 563) while The New York Herald Tribune labeled it “nonsensical” and The Cleveland Open Shelf called it “absurd and rollicking.” Labeled as nonsense or fantasy, Pippi’s outrageous behavior was not thought to present much moral danger to readers who, it was assumed, would scarcely try to identify with or imitate Pippi. To be on the safe side, however, Pippi’s foreignness and outlandishness and the book’s focus on fun and entertainment were stressed. Thus, Pippi was called “a little Swedish girl” in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review (November 12, 1950: 12), which introduced Lindgren as “a storytelling mother” and the story as “good fun” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 133). The reviewer further assuaged any potential misgivings parents or teachers might have about Pippi’s influence on readers with the following comment: “It is lucky that you can tell the children she lives not in America but in Sweden.” Double distancing—removed both geographically and into the realm of fantasy—thus rendered the main protagonist’s behavior harmless and even beneficial. In The New York Times Book Review (November 12, 1950: 28), Marian Rayburn Brown stressed the compensatory aspect of Pippi’s escapades that “exemplify many of the frustrations of normal children,” noting that “therefore Pippi will delight young readers” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 133).

The reviews of Pippi Goes on Board are a little longer and more detailed than the reviews of Pippi Longstocking, but are largely along the same lines as the reviews from 1950. The New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Margaret Sherwood Libby called Pippi Goes on Board “superior nonsense” and prescribed it as “a book for every child’s library, one that gives the most satisfying release to youngsters who are a bit more circumscribed in their everyday lives than the exuberant Pippi.” Libby also called Pippi “as absurd, funny, and tender-hearted as ever” (Children’s Literature Review 39: 147). A growing awareness of the ethical aspects of Lindgren’s writing comes to the fore in Libby’s review, as it does in Inger Boye’s review in The Library Journal, where Pippi’s absurd and hilarious adventures are “sometimes motivated by generous impulses” (Book Review Digest 1957: 555). Lavinia Davis, who praises Pippi as “gloriously uninhibited” in The New York Times Book Review, is also most outspoken about the core ethical values she finds in Pippi Longstocking, asserting, “Although this is frankly a slapstick modern tall tale, which was primarily intended to entertain, Mrs. Lindgren is far more successful in transmitting the virtues of generosity and loyalty than many more pretentious and moralistic writers” (Book Review Digest 1957: 555).

In 1957, the same year when Pippi Goes on Board was published in the US, a popular American classic appeared that bears some resemblance to Pippi Longstocking and to Karlsson-on-the-Roof. That book was Dr. Seuss’s (Theodore Geisel’s) The Cat in the Hat, which was published as an easy reader by Random House, a publisher of educational books widely used in schools. This slapstick story in easy, playful verse tells about a crazy cat who, by performing amazing tricks, brings playful, exuberant chaos into the lives of a boy and a girl on a gray rainy day when mother is away and the two are left home alone. Its popularity and wide use in schools demonstrates the favorable climate for fictional excursions into a world of unfettered wild imagination that existed in the US of the 1950s and 1960s. As the first easy reader to bring madcap and fast-paced fun and entertainment into school curricula, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat was an immediate success and had sold over seven million copies by 2000 in hard cover alone in the US (Wikipedia, The Cat in the Hat). In the 1960s, Lindgren’s books were also discussed in secondary literature aimed at teachers and educators, such as Huck and Young, Children’s Literature in the Elementary School (1961), Muriel Fuller, ed., More Junior Authors (1963), and Nancy Larrick, A Teacher’s Guide to Children’s Books (1966). Thus, one can assume that a number of primary school teachers began to integrate Pippi Longstocking into curricular or extra-curricular activities.

By 1960, the number of reviews of Pippi in the South Seas appearing in major American newspapers and journals had outnumbered reviews of either of the first two Pippi books, reflecting Pippi’s rising popularity in the US as well as Lindgren’s heightened status as the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1958. Reviewers began to dig a little deeper and were no longer unanimous in their praise of Pippi’s hilarious nonsensical behavior, the goodness of her heart, and the freedom of her spirit. Reviews in The Horn Book and The Saturday Review criticized this third book about Pippi as lacking freshness and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction International and Intermedial Aspects of Astrid Lindgren's Works
• Part I Different Aspects of International Reception
• Part II Intermedial Studies: Films
• Chapter 3 Intermedial Studies: Illustrations and Picturebooks
• Chapter 4 Intermedial Studies: Music, Sculpture, and Architecture
• Selected Bibliography
• Editors and Contributors
• Index