“I’ve been at Furusund more than normal, since it was necessary (and I wanted to) in order to write Lionheart,” noted Astrid in her diary at Christmas 1973. “Almost nothing I’ve written has kicked up more fuss than this book. I’ve been interviewed into oblivion, and people have been writing and phoning and thinking and opining, it’s quite astonishing. The reviews have been virtual panegyrics in most cases, although some people think the book is too sinister or the wickedness too much.”
Political undertones can also be found in her portrayal of the Che Guevara–like resistance leader Orvar, whom the brothers Jonathan and Karl “Rusky” Lionheart rescue from imprisonment in Katla’s cave: “Orvar may die, but freedom never shall!” Equally political, of course, are the passages about the uprising itself. The warlike Orvar and pacifist Jonathan are in fundamental disagreement about the best strategy, and there are many words and phrases in their conversations that could easily have appeared in one of Sven Wernström’s red-to-the-core young-adult novels: “The storm of freedom shall come, and it shall crack our oppressors like trees crack and fall. It shall enter with a roar, sweeping away all our servitude and making us free again at last!”
Instead of pointing out political parallels between her fantasy novel and reality in the year 1973, Astrid Lindgren talked in interviews about a conflict that has played out again and again over the course of human history, leaving its mark throughout the history of literature: the struggle between good and evil. As in Mio, My Son, she had chosen to view this ancient mythological clash through the imagination of a small boy.
On the one hand is evil incarnate—Tengil—and on the other is goodness, in two different versions: Orvar and Jonathan. The two leaders of the uprising both want evil destroyed, but profoundly disagree about how best to do so. Should terror be fought with evil or with goodness? The narrator, Rusky, the reader’s eyes and ears on this journey through good and evil, sketches out the problem in perhaps the book’s most important piece of dialogue:
“But I can’t kill anybody,” said Jonathan. “You know that, Orvar!”
“Not even if your life were at stake?” asked Orvar.
“No, not even then,” said Jonathan.
“If everyone were like you,” said Orvar, “evil would rule for all eternity!”
But then I said that if everyone were like Jonathan, there wouldn’t be any evil at all.
The words “if everyone were like Jonathan” are carried throughout the book like an invisible torch, as is another distinctive phrase that underscores the necessity for compassion, solidarity, and moral courage in a civilized society. This phrase is often quoted in attempts to explain what it was Astrid Lindgren wanted to do with her writing, apart from telling good stories: “There are things you have to do, or else you’re not a human being but just a bit of filth.”
If it was rare for a Scandinavian children’s book author in the 1970s to write about oppression, terror, and treachery in such a fantastical, allegorical way, it was virtually unheard of for a modern children’s book to depict death so naturally and unashamedly, venturing deep into childhood notions of what comes after life.
Telling children about death has always demanded a certain ethical and moral sensibility in a writer, argued Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup in his essay “Morality and Children’s Books,” printed in the 1969 scholarly anthology Books for Children and the Young (Børne-og ungdomsbøger). The book sat in Astrid Lindgren’s study in Dalagatan and was probably read by her, given that it took a highly pragmatic approach to Scandinavian children’s literature and also featured a ten-page analysis of Mio, My Son. The Danish philosopher argued that children’s book writers always considered what effect the main character and the ending would have on the reader, to avoid “infecting the child with hopelessness,” as he put it.
The risk of depressing the reader had never previously been a concern for Astrid Lindgren, but perhaps this was what made her hesitate and doubt herself as she struggled with the final chapters of The Brothers Lionheart. The small group of people who knew the novel’s contents at that stage included some of the author’s grandchildren, remembers Karin Nyman: “She read Lionheart to her grandchildren while it was still a work in progress, but I never thought of it as her seeing what they ‘could cope with,’ just to test whether the wording was fine. I saw her doubts and the long slog as a question of finding the right way to express this big subject.”
For the first time in her career, Astrid Lindgren felt a kind of fear of the blank page. It wasn’t about writer’s block: this was a moral dilemma arising from the conclusion to the novel, in which a child chooses to leap to his death with his dying brother. Would it be clear enough that this leap was taking place “only” in Rusky’s imagination, or would too many children assume it was real and be “infected with hopelessness”?
Astrid’s feelings on this issue are clear from the many stenographic pads she went through in 1972–73. No. 50 in the archives at the National Library contains a draft chapter from Lionheart as well as sketches for a few longer letters; most remarkable, however, is the cardboard back of the pad, where Astrid Lindgren penciled a gravestone with both the Lionheart brothers’ names and their dates of birth and death: Jonathan 1885–1898 and Karl 1888–1901. Above and below the gravestone is written: “A gravestone I came up with for Lionheart (which makes it clear that Karl outlives Jonathan by three years and uses that time to write the whole story).”
Whether the drawing on the back of the pad was meant as a sketch for a possible Ilon Wikland illustration at the back of the book, making it clear to readers that the whole story, including the dramatic ending, took place in Karl’s imagination, is unknown. What the drawing does indicate, however, is that at some point before the book was finished Astrid Lindgren was in two minds about whether her readers would end up feeling comforted.
That her work on The Brothers Lionheart was hindered by more than just aesthetic issues is clear from a letter she sent to Gunnel Linde on July 1, 1973. The chairwoman of BRIS (Barnens Rätt i Samhället, Children’s rights in society), she was eager for Lindgren to collaborate on a project and had written her a series of letters that went unanswered. When the author finally resurfaced, she explained the reason behind her unresponsiveness: “You should know I’ve been living like a hermit as long as I can remember, doing nothing but working—early this morning I finished off the book I’ve been fiddling with for more than a year. Still, I’ll end up rewriting the last chapter several times before I let it go. I mention this so that you understand my silence. For all practical purposes I’ve been out of my mind all spring and up to now—now things will be different, I hope.”
Children and Death
In the years following its publication, The Brothers Lionheart was met with both enthusiasm and criticism from political, pedagogical, and psychological quarters. This was a piece of literature that shifted the boundaries of what was permitted in a children’s book, and repeatedly Astrid Lindgren was asked: should a story for children end so mysteriously, so uncannily? Each time she answered with a sureness and calm that revealed none of the uncertainty she had experienced during her unusually protracted writing process: “For a child it’s a happy ending. The only thing children are really afraid of is loneliness. Being abandoned by the ones they love. The two brothers venture into another land together. They’re together forever. And that’s the kind of happiness children dream of.”
Lindgren made this argument in December 1973 in Politiken, where the interview with the now sixty-six-year-old writer focused on the book’s thematization of death and the way it related to the reader. Could Scandinavian children cope with the terrible truth about death? asked the Danish journalist. Astrid Lindgren answered: “Why not? Children are nowhere near as scared of death as adults. Many adults seem to have an intense horror of death, I discovered after The Brothers Lionheart came out. . . . For me there’s nothing wrong about familiarizing children with death through an adventure. They don’
t yet have enough experience to get a sense of the realities. . . . Children aren’t afraid of death yet. They’re afraid of being left alone.”
Yet the author’s observation that The Brothers Lionheart was also a book about loneliness seems to have been largely ignored. The subject’s most prominent treatment is in the final pages, as Rusky makes his decision: “No one has to stay behind alone, grieving and crying and being afraid.” Astrid Lindgren did what she could to feed this compassionate message into the media storm when the book came out and the questions rained down. In the Expressen on December 2, 1973, she was quoted as follows: “Children are just as afraid of death as adults. Above all, what they’re afraid of is being abandoned, and that’s what I’ve tried to illuminate in the book. That’s how Rusky feels. He can face any death so long as he’s with Jonathan. It’s really not a sad ending, it’s not, it’s actually a happy one. . . . I believe every single child has to have a good emotional bond with at least one adult to feel safe, or they won’t cope.”
Over and over, Astrid Lindgren was asked to account for her work, to explain and defend why she had written about death in a book for children. Even in a self-professed age of rebellion, where dogmas were felled one after the next, certain taboos were unshakable. Yet Astrid Lindgren did her best, for instance by pointing out the thematic connections that already tied together several of her books, and by appealing to the ancient tradition of fairy-tales, which didn’t shy away from death as a topic. On January 2, 1974, she commented to the Vecko-Journalen: “Yes, I’m sure there are similarities between The Brothers Lionheart, Mio, My Son, and South Meadow. They’re all fairy-tales, after all, and both folk fairy-tales and modern fairy-tales are about the same themes, the struggle between good and evil, love, death, they’re ancient motifs. An Andersen researcher in Norway has worked out that five-sixths of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tales are about death. More or less. And without wanting to compare myself to him, the same goes for my fairy-tales—more or less.”
In the 1970s, it was mainly children who understood what Astrid Lindgren was trying to do with her book, and the one question many of them wanted to ask was what happened next to Rusky and Jonathan in Nangilima. The interest from her many dedicated and curious readers was so overwhelming and the piles of letters so impossible to get through that Astrid Lindgren decided to write a brief epilogue and circulate it in the media, reassuring everybody that Rusky and Jonathan were living contentedly on the other side.
Among those many letters were grateful messages from terminally ill children and their relatives, thanking her for everything The Brothers Lionheart had done to comfort them. Indeed, this was what Astrid hoped deep down the novel would be for many people: a comfort. As she explained to Egil Törnqvist in Svensk Litteraturtidskrift in 1975: “I believe in children’s need for comfort. When I was a child I thought you went to Heaven when you died, and that idea was definitely not much fun. But if we could all go up there together, then . . . Anyway, it would be better than lying in the ground and not existing. But today’s children don’t have that comfort. They don’t have that fairy-tale anymore. So I thought: maybe I could give them another fairy-tale to keep them warm while they wait for life’s inevitable conclusion.”
This had been her experience with Karl-Johan and Malin’s little brother Nisse in 1972–73, when the eight-year-old boy brooded so much about death that his grandma sometimes wished she could comfort him a little. As she later explained in an article, “No, Be Quite Calm,” which was printed in the anthology The Meaning of Life (Livets mening): “I read the story of The Brothers Lionheart to the boy who was so afraid, and when I got to the end he smiled slightly and said: ‘Well, we don’t know what happens, so it might well be like that.’ He was comforted by the book.”
The First Thing-Seeker
Another person in need of comfort was the author herself. So many close friends died in 1974 that by Christmas, when Astrid usually summed up the year, she began by sticking four small photographs into the pages of her diary: her housekeeper Miss Nordlund, her older brother Gunnar, literature professor Olle Holmberg, and radio host Per-Martin Hamberg. Then she began to write. “Well, 1974 has been a year of more deaths than ever before, and these four are the ones who’ve left the deepest void. I miss them, miss them, miss them. . . . Years that end in 4 are always significant for me in some way, and it was logical to expect it would be death that made it significant now. What else could I expect?”
It was a great personal loss for Astrid Lindgren. Olle Holmberg and Per-Martin Hamberg had been close, loyal, inspirational friends for decades, each significant for Astrid’s artistic development in his different ways, but the biggest shock was when her housekeeper, Gerda Nordlund, died. One Sunday in February, twenty-two years to the day since she had entered Astrid’s employment, “Nolle” dropped by Dalagatan to help with lunch. She turned down coffee and pie because she was going to the movies, shouted goodbye from the hallway, and was later knocked off her bike and died at the scene, a dangerous set of traffic lights near St. Eriksplan.
Yet it was Gunnar’s death on May 27, after several years battling heart problems and breathing difficulties, that caused her the greatest sorrow. Before the funeral at Pentecost 1974, Astrid Lindgren wrote in her diary: “I’ll never forget the night we sat him up so he could breathe more easily, how pitifully he clung to our arms, and the death sweat on his brow. No, I’m not able to write any more; I’m grieving for him. It’s so terrible to be reminded of how close we were as children—Noisy Village’s Lasse, the first thing-seeker, is dead. The first broken link in the sibling chain.”
In addition to running the farm at Näs, Gunnar had been a political force in contemporary Sweden. For ten years he was a member of parliament with the Farmers’ Union, which in 1957—the year after Gunnar Ericsson withdrew from party politics—changed its name to the Center Party. Afterward he dedicated himself to political satire, publishing an annual chronicle with the illustrator Ewert Karlsson about very real politicians transplanted into Viking times in Svitjod (an old Norse name for Sweden).
Norse languages were Gunnar Ericsson’s great passion, and “the United States of Scandinavia”—connected via an Øresund bridge—was one of his big ideas. For several decades Gunnar was also an avid artist, exhibiting his pastels under the name “G. E. Näs” in various places, including Helsingfors and Vienna. But he was never happy as a farmer; his intellectual aspirations were too ambitious for that. The farm wasn’t the aspect of her brother’s multifaceted life that Astrid emphasized when she described Gunnar in a 1957 radio program:
There’s a fierce energy about the way he lives, and he’s a very spontaneous man. Suddenly one day he began to read Finnish, suddenly one day he began to paint, suddenly one day he sat down and wrote about what “happened in Svitjod.” . . . Gunnar’s also musical. He can take a pencil and drum it on his skull so that it produces fully audible melodies. And if he holds his nose and sings, he sounds exactly like a Hawaiian guitar. I’ve often felt astonished that they had someone like him in parliament. But maybe he doesn’t sound like a Hawaiian guitar there.
Gunnar was far from the only one of the Ericsson children with a flair for the political, but unlike Gunnar the three sisters were involved more with ideology than party politics. Public-mindedness and participation in grassroots democracy was something the four children had inherited, recalls Karin Nyman:
Brother and sister posed at the end of the 1950s for the radio program Hörde ni (Did you hear), where they were supposed to talk about each other. Astrid succeeded in illustrating what Gunnar had said when he left Swedish politics: “It felt as liberating as going home from the dentist.”
Both Hanna and Samuel August took it for granted that they would help out and take responsibility for the community in Vimmerby—each of them held a position of trust—without feeling the least urge to agitate. Perhaps Hanna had role models for that in her own family. Her mother was involved in poor relief so
mehow. Ingegerd was never politically active, but as a journalist she dealt with issues concerning agriculture and domestic management. She accompanied Gunnar to his youth politicians’ meetings in the 1930s for as long as she was living at home. Stina was a committed socialist like her husband, the author Hans Hergin, and although she was capable of arguing for socialism she was never active, as far as I know.
And Astrid? After Gunnar’s death in 1974 it almost seemed as though she had decided to pick up the family torch as protector and spokesperson of the people, a role that Kerstin Ekman characterized in a 2006 essay as akin to the spirit of the Roman Plebeian Tribunes. In any case, less than eighteen months after Gunnar’s death, she began to get involved in social causes of local as well as global relevance, which for the next twenty years encompassed everything from Swedish tax policy, Charter 77, nuclear power, child pornography, and the closure of public libraries to racism, animal welfare, the European Union, seal killing, and housing shortages for young people.
Without really wanting to, and with no particular objective, in the second half of the 1970s Astrid Lindgren acquired more political clout than any other author in the history of Scandinavia. The downside to this became apparent almost before she had begun. In June 1976, Astrid’s good friend Rita Törnqvist-Verschuur, a translator, received a deep sigh of a letter: