The legacy of Astrid Lindgren and the world’s strongest girl

She’s the strongest girl in the world. With her carrot-coloured pigtails, her striped mismatched socks and her freckles, she’s instantly recognisable. She’s a financially independent child, a reckless but compassionate anarchist with an intolerance for bullies. She’s a feminist role model who has inspired everyone from Michelle Obama to Lady Gaga, Madonna, Amy Poehler, Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She is regularly compared to Greta Thunberg. Bjorn from ABBA is making a musical about her.

Her name? Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump. You probably know her better as Pippi Longstocking. And this year, on 21 May 2020, the most famous creation of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren will celebrate her 75th birthday. First published in 1945, the series is now among the most translated children’s books in the world, with more than 70 million copies sold in 77 languages.

But when The Independent travelled to Stockholm to talk to Bjorn Ulvaeus about the musical, Pippi at the Circus, which debuts this June, it wasn’t Pippi who first came up. “It’s one of my proudest moments, all this time later,” he says, “when I had lunch with Astrid and she said to me, ‘You’re a little Emil, aren’t you?’”

He’s referring to the eponymous hero of Emil of Lonneberga, another of Lindgren’s novel series – a cheeky little prankster. The fact that the global superstar remembers meeting a children’s author as his proudest moment speaks volumes. But Lindgren, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, lives on in Sweden’s cultural imagination just as much as Pippi. Her funeral was even attended by Sweden’s royal family and prime minister.

Ulvaeus, who grew up only 55 kilometres from where Lindgren was born, explains that Lindgren made a deep impression on him. He decided to put on a performance at Stockholm’s decadent Cirkus venue to celebrate Pippi’s 75th birthday. “Astrid is world famous, her stories are world famous, her most famous character is Pippi, so to make a long story short we finally decided to make it a story about Pippi – and this is a circus, so why not Pippi at the circus?”

He’s so gung-ho that he actually sounds a bit like Pippi in her most famous quote: “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that!”

The ABBA artist talks about the comparisons made between Pippi and environmental activist Thunberg. “Astrid would have loved Greta, because she shares a lot of character traits with Pippi – not all, she’s not exactly Pippi – but she’s strong-willed and she stands for something and she is not compromising. She’s completely herself.” There’s even graffiti depicting Thunberg as Pippi all over Stockholm.

Ulvaeus is also writing the lyrics to music by, among others, his former bandmate Benny Andersson. Maria Blom, who joined the project as director and playwright, says that Pippi is still a feminist icon for her. “That’s why she works so well now, she’s entirely relevant, because she’s always herself and she looks on the world from her angle, and that makes us look at the world in a different angle, like you can put your feet on the pillow when you go to sleep, so Pippi is a good reminder to always do that.”

Ulvaeus is producing the musical-cum-circus in collaboration with Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkor, Pop House Productions and the Astrid Lindgren Company, which is owned by Lindgren’s children and grandchildren. Of course, he is no stranger to having his legacy adapted for the stage, thanks to Mamma Mia!

“There are similarities, because Mamma Mia! was a new concept – nobody had ever written a musical like that before, so that’s why it was a challenge – and I think the same goes for this one.”

He adds: “We’re in awe, all of us, and I think sometimes, what would she make out of this? What would she have thought of this? And do I dare do this, dare I put this word in the mouth of Pippi or not? But of course we have this collaboration with her daughter and relatives, and we must assume that when they say it’s OK ... and I’m sure we would never put anything in her mouth that we didn’t think would fit. I would say we tread carefully, cautiously, on her ground.”

But Olle Nyman, Lindgren’s grandson and CEO of the family company, is delighted with the musical, which will also feature a floating orchestra. Nyman tells The Independent: “Imagine being in the audience when Pippi goes to the circus; it’s totally irresistible!”

He says his grandmother was always interested in having her novels become pictures – but that the Pippi image takes some guarding. There have already been more than 70 feature films and TV productions, countless stage adaptations – and, in October, StudioCanal and Heyday Films, heroes behind Paddington 1 and 2, announced a new film adaptation.

Nyman says that the adaptations his grandmother wrote, or productions she was involved in, were vastly superior to the ones that she wasn’t, which became “quite horrible”. He is particularly scathing about the animated TV series from the mid-1990s, and the famous Swedish American film in the 1980s, The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.

Nyman, who worked as a judge until he joined the company in 2014, is much more positive about the most recent musical adaptation. Mike Akers has directed the first UK stage adaptation, with a script by the late John Miller, which premiered at Royal and Derngate, Northampton, in December. The Independent attended a performance, and saw children just as captivated by Pippi, played by Emily-Mae, as they would have been 75 years ago.

“It’s quite amazing,” says Nyman, “that an author who died almost 20 years ago now, and who wrote her last novel almost 40 years ago, is still selling almost 3 million books a year around the world. There are not so many of those.”

In Sweden, Lindgren has a hold on the cultural mindset that exists far outside of Pippi. Devoted grandmother, prolific writer, feminist powerhouse, humanist, activist, political thinker, crossdresser… one of the world’s most translated authors remains a beguiling paradox.

Lindgren was born in 1907, the daughter of a farmer in rural south Sweden near Vimmerby, Småland. She spent a traditional childhood roaming the countryside, but by the time she was a teenager, Lindgren was turning heads with her short hair and male clothes. After she finished school at 16 she went to work for a local paper as a junior reporter. It wasn’t long before she had begun an affair with the newspaper’s publisher – who was married. By 17, she was pregnant. The scandal rocked her village.

Unusually for the time, when he proposed, she turned him down. Instead, she moved to Stockholm, giving birth to a son, Lars, who was fostered in Copenhagen. Although she visited Lars as often as she could afford, the pair were separated for three years. Guilt and sadness over their separation echoes in her work, which is populated by abandoned and orphaned children.

She worked hard and eventually took Lars back after three years. In 1931, she married Sture Lindgren and later had a daughter, Karin, raising her alongside Lars. They moved to Dalagatan 45, the famous address where Lindgren would stay until her death.

In 1940, when Karin was seven, she was sick in bed with pneumonia. She asked her mother to tell her a story about a girl named Pippi Langstrump, which sounded like the Swedish word for daddy longlegs – pappa langben.

“Since the name was remarkable,” Lindgren is supposed to have said, “it had to be a remarkable girl.”

Karin, now 85 years old, tells The Independent that Pippi became part of her childhood, “a normal thing in my daily life”. Her mother would tell her and her cousins Pippi stories during the war. Then, in 1944, Lindgren sprained her ankle, and to pass the time wrote down the Pippi stories as a present for Karin’s 10th birthday.

She sent the manuscript to Sweden’s largest publisher – who rejected it for fear that it was too controversial: that Pippi would be a bad influence on children. The following year, Lindgren resubmitted a slightly reworked version – to a different publisher – and won first prize in their writing competition. The book was published to immediate success, and Pippi-mania swept Sweden.

Karin says it does not surprise her that the books were so popular in the 1940s, “when Pippi was such a shock, so absolutely different from other heroines in children’s books”. Credit, Karin says, must also go to the vibrant illustrations of the Danish artist Ingrid Vang Nyman (no relation).

You can see why Pippi would inspire delight. She is only nine but has no parents, no rules, no bedtimes – but she does have a trunk full of gold coins. Pippi lives in Villa Villekulla with her horse and a pet monkey, and spends her time outraging almost every adult she meets. She plays with fire and doesn’t get burnt. She sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and turns everything upside down. She’s strong enough to heave policemen into bushes and dangle bullies from trees. Lindgren’s biographer, Jens Andersen, described Pippi as a mixture of Huckleberry Finn and Superman.

In an interview with Today, the former first lady Michelle Obama called Pippi her first book love. “I was really fascinated with this strong little girl that was the centre of everything, and she was almost magical in a way. She was stronger and tougher than anyone. She had superhuman strength and I got a kick out of her.”

Pippi’s best friends, neighbours Tommy and Annika, are the embodiment of proper, well behaved and well turned out children – until Pippi turns up and leads them into all sorts of shenanigans. (Karin remembers that she identified more with Annika and Tommy than with Pippi.)

In 1945, in a Europe devastated by the end of the Second World War, millions were fleeing their homes. Many countries were weakened and economically unstable, and hundreds of thousands of children had been orphaned. There was a cultural vacuum, particularly in Germany where the Nazi regime had done away with so many books and children’s touchstones.

And here was a new kind of story: a child who stood for strength, freedom and courage (and financial security) – a girl, no less. Pippi exploded onto the literary scene like a pigtailed stick of dynamite. The first book was quickly followed by two more, then three short stories and picture books.

Lindgren became unusually (for the pre-television era) famous in her native Sweden, and continued to be a prolific writer and journalist, with themes of irreverence and anti-authoritarianism running through her work. She is now the most widely translated writer Sweden has ever had. But Lindgren did not confine her views to fiction. She also became known as a concerted activist. She campaigned for animal rights and against child pornography and violence. In the 1970s, she also wrote scathingly on Sweden’s tax scandals and dearth of women in politics.

When she was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1978, she gave a speech in Frankfurt under the banner of Aldrig Vald! – Never Violence! – an impassioned plea to tackle child abuse. “The children of today,” she said, “will eventually take over the running of our world – if there is anything left of it.”

Stressing that children who are victims of violence are far more likely to become violent adults, Lindgren collaborated with scientists and politicians to achieve a groundbreaking law. In 1979, Sweden became the first country in the world to outlaw corporal punishment against children.

Of course, someone widely touted as a feminist icon is bound to provoke backlash. In the mid-1990s, a Swedish commentator argued in a leading daily that the “cult of Pippi” had negatively affected children: “Pippi-worship has turned everything upside down, in schools, in family life and in terms of normal behaviour.”

In the only interview he ever gave about his Millennium trilogy, Stieg Larsson said that the heroine, the disturbed but brilliant Lisbeth Salander, was based on how he imagined Pippi as an adult. “What would she have been like today? What would she be called? A sociopath?” On the door of Lisbeth’s apartment, the name reads V Kulla, for Villa Villekulla. “I created her as Lisbeth Salander, 25 years old and extremely isolated. She doesn’t know anyone, has no social competence.”

If Lisbeth is one possible iteration for grown-up Pippi, Lindgren, it seemed, another. A tough heroine flouting social norms and patriarchal structures, but also a businesswoman and committed thinker, Lindgren is still present all over Stockholm.

You can walk around the parks where she is said to have formed her ideas, visit the restaurant Teatergrillen on Nybrogatan – the same address where she started work as a secretary, in 1928, and met her husband. You can explore Junibacken, the playful children’s museum she founded to showcase children’s authors and illustrators. You can even ride the magical story train and hear her voice narrating.

Her house, Dalagatan 45, remains exactly as it was while she lived and worked there until her death, with its myriad books, papers and simple furnishings. You can see the wooden cot where Karin slept, where Lindgren told her stories. Elisabeth Daude, a Stockholm guide, has been showing people around Lindgren’s apartment since 2016. “Many visitors are surprised by how humble it is,” Daude says. “She truly was not interested in glamour.”

Daude explains: “To me and many other people in this country, she has been a source of inspiration and fantasy. Only as an adult, though, have I understood her greatness as a human being. It feels like a privilege to show her home.”

This year, the Astrid Lindgren Company has announced a collaboration with Save The Children to launch “Pippi of Today”, raising awareness about displaced young women. According to the latest UNHRC figures, of the 68.5 million people forcibly on the move, half of them are children. The number of girls, at the most risk of exploitation and violence, is at its highest since the end of the Second World War. An estimated 1 billion children experience violence or abuse every year. That’s half the world’s children.

Lindgren’s legacy seems a natural fit for the charity, which was founded 100 years ago by two sisters, Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton, pioneering social activists in their own right who were horrified by the aftermath of the First World War.

Nyman says that he can’t think of a better way to celebrate Pippi’s anniversary than to use her to support the world’s most vulnerable girls. Blom thinks that “at the time we’re living in now, it’s a good time to be an anarchist and to ask questions about things, especially for a child”.

As to Pippi’s enduring popularity, Ulvaeus credits Astrid’s prose: “I think there’s something in the way that she writes, that is never getting sentimental. That story about that little poor girl alone in the big house could easily get melodramatic but she is never even close to that, and I think that’s part of the secret to why it’s timeless.”

Lauren Child, author and former Waterstones Children’s Laureate who illustrated a Pippi text in 2007, said that when she discovered her as an eight-year-old, she wanted to be Pippi. “How extraordinary it must be to never once feel constrained by the opinions of others. Now I am grown up I know this is the single quality I would still give almost anything for.”

At Dalagatan 45, in Lindgren’s bedroom, you can actually see the worn footprint on the floor where she stood up every morning. Daude says that she thinks Lindgren would have liked the idea of young women still following in her footsteps.