Astrid Lindgren

Astrid Lindgren: The Novelist Who Changed the Law

In March 1976 a sixty-eight-year-old children's author discovered that her marginal tax rate had reached 102 percent — she owed more than she earned. She did not hire an accountant. She wrote a fairy tale about a witch named Pomperipossa in the land of Monismania, published it in a Stockholm evening paper, and watched it become front-page news, force a change in the tax law, and help end forty-four consecutive years of Social Democratic government. It remains the most effective piece of political writing produced by anyone best known for a story about a girl who lifts a horse.

Näs

Astrid Anna Emilia Ericsson was born on November 14, 1907, and grew up at Näs, a farm near Vimmerby in the province of Småland, the second of four children of Samuel August Ericsson and Hanna Jonsson. Her older brother Gunnar became a member of the Swedish parliament. The farm childhood — rural, physical, largely unsupervised — is the raw material of nearly everything she later wrote, and she treated it with clear eyes rather than nostalgia.

Stockholm, 1926

She went to work for the local paper, *Vimmerby Tidning*, and at eighteen became pregnant by its chief editor — a scandal in 1920s provincial Sweden severe enough to require her removal. She left for Stockholm, trained as a secretary, and gave birth to her son Lars in 1926. He was fostered for four years before she could bring him home; he died in 1986. From 1928 she worked as a secretary at Sweden's Royal Automobile Club, married her boss, Sture Lindgren, in 1931, and had a daughter, Karin, in 1934. Another secretarial post, working for the criminologist Harry Söderman, later produced her boy detective, Bill Bergson.

None of this reads like preparation for a literary career. She was thirty-eight when her first Pippi book appeared.

A Sick Child Asks for a Story

Karin, ill in bed, demanded a story about somebody called Pippi Långstrump — a name she had invented on the spot. Her mother improvised around it for years and eventually wrote the stories down as a present for Karin's tenth birthday. One publisher rejected the manuscript. In 1944 Lindgren took second prize in a competition run by the publisher Rabén & Sjögren with *The Confidences of Britt-Marie*; in 1945 she took first prize with *Pippi Longstocking*, illustrated by Ingrid Vang Nyman.

Pippi is a nine-year-old with no parents, her own house, a suitcase of gold coins, a horse she can lift over her head, and complete contempt for adult authority. In 1940s Sweden she was genuinely disruptive — not a naughty child to be corrected by the last page, but a child whose autonomy the book simply endorses. The Pippi books have sold around 70 million copies and appeared in 78 languages.

The Editor Who Also Wrote

Lindgren joined Rabén & Sjögren's editorial board, which means that for decades she shaped Swedish children's publishing from the inside while producing her own work — 34 chapter books and 41 picture books, plus screenplays, song lyrics, polemical journalism and memoir, including *Samuel August from Sevedstorp and Hanna i Hult* and her *War Diaries, 1939–1945*.

Beyond Pippi

The range is wider than her most famous creation suggests, and considerably darker. *Mio, My Son* (1956), which won that year's German Children's Literature Award, is about an abandoned boy. *The Brothers Lionheart* is about death, told to children without evasion. *Emil of Lönneberga*, *Karlsson-on-the-Roof*, *The Six Bullerby Children* and *Ronia the Robber's Daughter* range from farce to the frankly mythic, and — as the Swedish government's own account of her notes — recur to loneliness and emotional difficulty rather than avoiding them. She won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1958 for *Rasmus and the Vagabond*, and in 1972 was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By 2012 her work existed in 95 languages and variants — *Ronia* has been translated into Latin — and by 2017 she ranked as the world's eighteenth most translated author. Roughly 80 million copies had sold by her death; some 167 million by 2010.

The Oracle

What Lindgren did with her authority is the part that separates her from every other beloved children's writer. She spent it.

"Pomperipossa in Monismania" ran in *Expressen* on March 3, 1976, and the resulting "Pomperipossa effect" contributed to the Social Democrats losing power for the first time in forty-four years. In 1978, accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, she delivered a speech titled "Never Violence!", arguing that children raised with violence go on to reproduce it. In 1979 Sweden became the first country in the world to ban the corporal punishment of children. From 1985 she campaigned with the veterinarian Kristina Forslund against industrial farming; the resulting animal welfare statute, presented to her as an eightieth-birthday present in 1987, was known as *Lex Lindgren* and was at the time the strictest such law anywhere. She received the Right Livelihood Award in 1994 "for her commitment to justice, non-violence and understanding of minorities as well as her love and caring for nature," the Illis quorum gold medal in 1995, and the title International Swede of the Year on her ninetieth birthday.

Sweden's official account of her is candid about what she became: an oracle, consulted by journalists on everything from dental care to EU membership, on the strength of what it calls her common sense, straightforwardness and warmth.

Why Astrid Is Called a Genius

Two claims, one literary and one civic, and both need stating precisely.

The literary gift is a matter of point of view. Lindgren did not write about children; she wrote from inside a child's reasoning and treated it as authoritative rather than as something to be corrected before the end of the book. Pippi is not a cautionary tale about a wild girl — the book takes her side. That is a technical decision as much as a moral one, and it is far harder to sustain than it looks: the authorial urge to supervise is almost irresistible, and Lindgren resisted it for sixty years. She also refused to protect children from grief, writing directly about death and abandonment in *The Brothers Lionheart* and *Mio, My Son*, on the theory that children already know about both.

The civic claim is rarer still. Very few novelists in any language can point to specific statutes that exist because of something they wrote. Lindgren can point to three: a tax law changed, a ban on hitting children that made Sweden the first country in the world to enact one, and an animal welfare act that carried her name.

The honest counter-case: her prose is deliberately plain and formally unadventurous, and the anarchic child was not her invention — children's literature had that archetype long before 1945. Her standing as a national oracle plainly exceeded her expertise; she was a novelist adjudicating tax policy, and her most consequential intervention began as a complaint about her own bill. Being a Swedish national symbol also makes clear-eyed assessment of her inside Sweden nearly impossible. What is genuinely uncommon is the combination — an exact ear for how children think, plus the nerve and the standing to turn it into law.

Legacy

Lindgren died at her home in central Stockholm on January 28, 2002, aged ninety-four. *Dagens Nyheter* described her funeral at Storkyrkan as the closest thing possible to a state funeral, attended by the King, the Queen and the Prime Minister. The Swedish government established the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in her name — five million kronor a year, the largest monetary prize in children's literature. Her manuscripts entered UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2005; her face has appeared on the 20-kronor note since 2015; asteroid 3204 carries her name, and the Swedish microsatellite Astrid 1 carried instruments named PIPPI, EMIL and MIO into orbit in 1995. In Vimmerby there is a theme park; in Stockholm, the Junibacken museum. She remains the only children's author whose bibliography includes a piece of tax legislation.

Achievements

• Notable work: Pippi Longstocking
• Notable work: Emil from Lönneberga
• Notable work: Karlsson-on-the-Roof
• Notable work: The Six Bullerby Children
• Worked as screenwriter, children's writer and novelist