The Moomins and the Great Flood – everything you need to know (2025)

This article is a deep-dive in Moominology through the very first Moomin story, The Moomins and the Great Flood. Follow the shortcuts below for easy navigation.

NOTE! This article contains spoilers.

Jump to:

→ The Moomins and the Great Flood compared to other Moomin books
→ Plot summary
→ Illustrations
→ Main characters in the book
→ Side characters
→ Central locations
→ Great Flood Moominology – interesting Moomin facts from the book
→ Context: The Moomins and the Great Flood and the real world
→ Critical reception: how the book was received
→ Adaptations
→ Questions for book clubs

The Moomins and the Great Flood lays the foundation for the Moomin world, establishing many of the themes that were further developed in the later books. One such theme is the importance of family, and the fact that it can be extended beyond blood relations.

In the beginning of The Moomins and the Great Flood, Moomintroll and his mother are looking for a new home and searching for Moominpappa, who is missing. First, there’s only a mother and her son. Along the way they meet a small animal, Sniff, who becomes a part of the family. This typical of the Moomin stories: family is a flexible concept.

The first image in the first Moomin story shows Moominmamma and Moomintroll walking hand in hand – two small, desolate figures without a home, surrounded a looming forest. On the last page of the story, they have been reunited with the missing Moominpappa, and are again holding hands, this time in their new home, the Moominhouse. Between these two instances, their family has faced many dangers, been helped by strangers and helped others in return. The family has been reunited, and also grown through new acquaintances.

In the later Moomin books, the Moominhouse is established as a welcoming place where the door is always open to anyone in need of shelter, a home where one can always add a new bed or even build a new room to make space for newcomers.

Tove Jansson wrote the story during the Winter War in Finland, which started in 1939. The theme of displaced families, homelessness and the threat of annihilation were all too familiar to millions of people around the world. Jansson fictionalised those sentiments, introducing a catastrophe, the great flood, as the frame of her first Moomin adventure. Natural catastrophes became frequent narrative concepts, which she developed further in many other Moomin books. But in her first Moomin story, as always, Jansson wanted to give hope and comfort, so readers can rest assured that there will be a happy ending.

The Great Flood compared to the other Moomin books

Even though The Moomins and the Great Flood is the very first published Moomin story and introduces the Moomins and how they find Moominvalley, it has often been overshadowed by the later Moomin books. When it was published in 1945, it went largely unnoticed by the larger audience. The word Moomin was unknown to most outside of the Jansson family, and so the publisher convinced Tove Jansson not to use the term in the original Swedish title to make it more approachable, instead calling the central characters “Small trolls” (Småtroll).

The story has been referred to both as the grand “creation myth of moominology”, as well as a prelude to the eight official Moomin novels rather than “an official Moomin book”, being quite different from the rest of the series.

Tove Jansson herself did not think highly of the first Moomin story later in life, and has described it as “a banal story without any personality”. It is fair to say that Tove Jansson was only beginning to explore what Moominvalley was about in this story, and had not fully developed her own narrative voice. Yet, many of the main characters and themes that became central to the Moomin canon are introduced in this first story.

Most notably, we meet the small and often scared, but utterly resourceful and life-affirming Moomintrolls. They are faced with many obstacles and a natural disaster in the form of a great flood – a theme that was to reoccur in many of Jansson’s subsequent Moomin books. She loved the thrill of natural disasters – and the relief in finding refuge in the end. Although the Moomins are faced with many threats, the tone is light and more geared towards children than the last Moomin books in the series, which grew more complex and dark.

Story

Moomintroll and his mother are walking in the great forest at the end of August, in search of a home. They stumble upon a little creature (in later books he gets the name Sniff) who tags along. It is dark, but they light their way with glowing flowers. After nearly being attacked by a Great Serpent in a swamp, they meet the blue-haired girl Tulippa who joins them.

Moominmamma tells them how Moominpappa is missing after taking off with the Hattifatteners. She starts crying while telling the story, which gets the attention of an old gentleman who invites them to his place. They climb a rope ladder up to a door in the rock face and after riding an escalator inside the mountain, they arrive in a wonderful landscape. After a while, they realise everything is made of different sweets; Moomintroll and the little creature eat so much that they get a tummy-ache. The next day they leave via a switch-back railway and end up on a beach.

“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know.”

They take a swim and are then attacked by an ant-lion. A boat with Hattifatteners appears and they jump on board to escape the ant-lion and look for Moominpappa. A storm rises and they encounter a sea-troll who takes them into a safe harbour. Ashore, they find a tower-shaped house. In it lives a boy with red hair who gives them food. Tulippa and the boy fall in love and she stays with him in the house.

The others continue their journey. It is very hot and at nightfall, it starts raining. The rain continues for many days, flooding the area. A cat and her kittens come floating past them in an armchair. They rescue the cat family and use the armchair as a boat. The little creature finds a message in a bottle. It is from Moominpappa who needs to be rescued.

“Dear finder, please do what you can to rescue me! My beautiful house has been swept away by the flood and now I am sitting lonely, hungry and cold in a tree while the water rises higher and higher. An unhappy moomin”

Moomintroll finds a marabou stork’s missing spectacles and the stork is so happy that he volunteers to help them search for Moominpappa. They climb onto his back and after a while, they finally see Moominpappa on one of the highest branches of an enormous tree. He is wet and sad, but Moominmamma takes him in her arms and comforts him. Moominpappa tells them about the fine house he had built before the flood.

The next morning, the sun is shining, and the water has gone down. They start walking and come to a beautiful valley. There, they find a house that looks like a tall stove, painted blue. Moominpappa recognizes the house as the one he built, and they all move into it.

Illustrations

The Moomins and Great Flood was not the first of Tove Jansson’s works with Moominlike creatures. In her youth, she had drawn the very first Moomin-like figure called Snork on an outhouse wall. She painted black Moominlike creatures in some of her oil paintings in the 1930s, and small Moomin figures started appearing next to her signature in many of her caricatures for the magazine Garm. But it was only with The Moomins and the Great Flood that Moomintroll was born as a literary figure. The first “literary Moomintrolls” are a lot thinner than subsequent versions, with long, slender noses.

The illustrations in the first Moomin story are expressive. They are a combination of pen and ink drawings and watercolour-like ink washes, a mixed media technique that Tove Jansson only used in her first two Moomin stories. Washing means that the surface is painted with, for example, diluted ink or transparent watercolour paint. With a lot of water in the paint, it can flow evenly onto the surface of the paper without the brushstrokes being visible. This allows for atmospheric representations of darkness, gloom, twilight and different light phenomena. Tove Jansson used the technique to bring the gloomy forests, flooded landscapes and the glowing fires of the displaced creatures to life in beautiful, atmospheric shades of sepia.

“Are you sure this gentleman is to be trusted?” whispered the little creature. “Remember, on your own heads be it.” And then he made himself as small as he could and hid behind Moominmamma.

Learn about Sniff’s family tree here.

“They’re mostly invisible. Sometimes they can be found under people’s floors, and you can hear them pattering about in there when it’s quiet in the evenings. But mostly they wander round the world, don’t stay anywhere and don’t care about anything. You can never tell if a Hattifattener is happy or angry, sad or surprised. I am sure that they have no feelings at all.”

“Those are the wanderers! Those are the Hattifatteners!”

Several characters that we will meet in the later books are mentioned by the boy in the tower house, but they never appear in this story. They are:

Snufkins, Sea-ghosts, Little Creeps and Big Folk, and Snorks. And the odd angler fish, too.

Characters who never return in the later books

Central locations

In this beginning of the Moomin canon, where Moominvalley isn’t yet discovered and the Moominhouse isn’t yet the given point of commencement and homecoming, the story, and the characters, wander from place to place. Some places are frightening, some are sweet.

The great forest

The starting point for the adventure is a dark forest, where the tininess of the Moomintrolls is contrasted by the tall vegetation.

“It must have been late in the afternoon one day at the end of August when Moomintroll and his mother arrived at the deepest part of the great forest. It was completely quiet, and so dim between the trees that it was as though twilight had already fallen.

[…]

So they continued, all three, taking a large tulip with them to light the way. But around them the darkness thickened all the time, the flowers glowed more faintly beneath the trees, and finally the very last one went out.”

The swamp

The swamp is known as the habitat for The Great Serpent and therefore one of the most dangerous places the Moomintrolls and the little creature face. The water and mud is black and bubbling, the air is cold, and underneath the surface something they have never seen before is moving. It is also by the swamp we first hear the little creature (in later stories known as Sniff) say: “On your own heads be it!”

“How will we ever find the sunshine if we don’t dare cross it?” (Moomintroll)

The enchanted garden

The enchanted garden is a colourful, beautiful and sunny world, where almost everything is edible and sweet. Here, dangers are not allowed in, and everything one finds here can offer a moment of immediate joy. Coming from the cold, wet and dark, the enchanted garden seems like a paradise. Indulging in fruits, sweets, ice cream, and lemonade makes it easy to forget the gloomy world outside and the worries it holds.

“It (Moomintroll’s tummy) had become quite round from all he had eaten, and it hurt dreadfully. Beside him sat the little creature, who had got toothache from all the sweets, and was moaning even worse.”

The tower in the harbour

After a wild ride at sea, the group comes to a harbour with a beautiful meadow and a tower, full of windows. The highest floor is made entirely of glass. The tower turns out to be a shelter for all seafarers in need of food and warmth.

“Then all four of them went in among the flowers. The sun was rising now, and there was a glittering and gleaming in the dew.

“This is where I’d like to live,” said Tulippa.“These flowers are even more beautiful than my old tulip. Besides, my hair never really matched it properly.”

The valley and the house

The final destination in the story is the safe haven of the most beautiful valley, later known as Moominvalley, where the house built by Moominpappa surprisingly stands waiting for them.
Contrasting with most places visited during the adventurous journey, the valley and the house, later known as the Moominhouse, breathe safety and harmony.

“And there in the valley they spent the whole of their lives, apart from a few times when they left it and travelled for a change.”

The presence of magic distinguishes the places in this story from many in the succeeding Moomin stories. A land made of candy or someone living inside a flower with a bright shining light is definitely magic. In the later stories, the locations are naturalistic, and magic is present only through the Hobgoblin in the book Finn Family Moomintroll.

Great Flood Moominology – interesting Moomin facts from the book

1. Moomins like to live in tower-like houses

Moominmamma tells Moomintroll how Moomins used to live behind tall stoves in people’s houses and were driven out by the advent of central heating: “‘Some of us still live there now, I’m sure,’ said Moominmamma. ‘But only where people still have stoves, I mean. We’re not happy with central heating.’”

“They sat, all four of them, looking into the fire while Moominmamma told them stories. She told them about what it was like when she was young, when moomintrolls did not need to travel through fearsome forests and swamps in order to find a place to live in. In those days they lived together with the house-trolls in people’s houses, mostly behind their tall stoves.“

2. Moomins can’t stand cold weather

Even though the word “hibernation” is not used in the first story, we learn that the Moomins want to stay inside from October onwards because they can’t stand the cold. In subsequent books, we learn that Moomins not only stay inside, but they hibernate and sleep all through the winter.

“They were out searching for a snug, warm place where they could build a house to crawl into when winter came. Moomins cannot stand the cold at all, so the house would have to be ready by October at the latest.”

3. Everything you need can be found in Moominmamma’s bag

It turns out that Moominmamma’s handbag is a bottomless resource for anyone in need. A few examples of things she pulls out of her tidy black handbag include stomach powder, socks, chocolate bars, and a corkscrew.

“‘Now your feet are soaked. You’re sure to catch cold.” Then she got out a pair of dry socks for him from her handbag”

4. The Moomins are not very logical about their clothes (or lack thereof)

The Moomins don’t wear any clothes in the first Moomin story, yet we learn that Moominpappa has been seen putting his tail in his pocket.

“That couldn’t have been Moominpappa, could it?” cried Moomintroll. “Did he keep putting his tail in his pocket?”

“Yes, he did, actually,” said the boy. “I remember it quite particularly, because it looked so funny.”

5. Moomins can use their tails as paddles

The Moomins don’t use their tails to express emotions like dogs, but they can be very useful for other things, such as paddling.

“They all three stuck their tails in the water as paddles and then they steered straight out into the swamp.”

6. Moomins get tummy-aches easily

“When she woke up again she heard a fearful groaning, and realized at once that it was her Moomintroll, who had a tummy-ache. (Moomins get tummy-aches very easily.)”

7. The Moomins long for porridge

Moominmamma asks the old gentleman in the enchanted garden for porridge instead of all the sweets that surround them. In the original Swedish version, the dish Moominmamma yearns for is actually not porridge, but gruel, a more watery mix of warm milk with oats, rye or wheat.

8. A Moominous way to forget you’re scared is to sing something cheerful

“Don’t be scared, little creature,” said Moomintroll in a quavering voice. “We’ll sing something cheerful and …”

9. This is the only story where the Hattifatteners have visible feet

In The Moomins and the Great Flood, the Hattifatteneres have visible, thin feet in the illustrations, but in Jansson’s later works the Hattifatteners don’t seem to have any feet.

The Moomins and the Great Flood and the real world

To understand all the tones and layers of The Moomins and the Great Flood, it is useful to know the time and the world Tove Jansson created it in.

Tove Jansson wrote the first Moomin story during the hopeless times of the Winter War, fought between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939-1940. She felt that the war had taken all the colours away, and she needed to write something that ended on a happy note. The first Moomin story became a form of escape from the dark shadows of war.

Danger, threats, and fears are present in the story, like they were in people’s lives when the book was written. Loss and sorrow, but also the hope of a better future, were the realities of war. The book has been seen as a story of disaster and survival but also as a story of a family, how it grows and is formed, and how the family finds its way to a safe and wonderful home.

Many Moomin researchers say that the horrors of that time inspired the Moomin books: Moominvalley was an alternative world to the world Tove Jansson was living in—a place where one could feel safe, accepted, and loved.

Even though The Moomins and the Great Flood was written during the Winter War, thestory has remained timeless. Moominmamma and Moomintroll’s quest to find a new home mirrors the realities of millions of displaced people seeking refuge even today.

‘. . . the water rose ceaselessly, and at last they had to climb up on to a small rock so as not to be snatched away by the current. There they sat, watching the rushing eddies come closer and closer to them, and feeling that they were catching cold. Floating around everywhere were furniture and houses and big trees that the flood had carried with it.”

In the video below, Tove Jansson’s niece Sophia Jansson reads passages from The Moomins and the Great Flood and Boel Westin, researcher and expert on Jansson’s life and art, opens up the context of the story.

Critical reception – how the book was received

When The Moomins and the Great Flood was first published in late 1945, the reception was modest, with limited visibility in both Finland and Sweden. Advertised in the Finnish-Swedish press in mid-December, the book missed the critical Christmas market, which early reviewers lamented.

Arbetarbladet praised Tove Jansson’s imaginative characters and artistic talent, noting the charm of the Moomintrolls and the emotional depth of her illustrations. However, the reviwer also expressed concerns about the episodic nature of the story and its whimsical logic, which might confuse younger readers. Other publications, such as Hangötidningen, praised the book as “a dream book for all children,” but this enthusiasm did little to generate widespread attention. In Sweden, the book received even less notice, with only a brief mention in a Christmas gift advertisement.

Despite its creative potential, the book struggled commercially. By the end of 1945, over 2,800 copies of the first edition remained unsold, and fewer than 2,000 copies were sold overall. Danish publishers were particularly critical, terminating their relationship with Jansson in 1955 due to poor sales of her early Moomin books.

For decades, The Moomins and the Great Flood remained obscure, untranslated, and largely forgotten outside Finland. Tove Jansson herself has said that she felt embarrassed by the first two Moomin books, feeling they were unpolished. When publishers later decided to reprint the series in pocket format, Jansson took the opportunity to revise the early books extensively, refining their narratives and illustrations. However, The Moomins and the Great Flood remained untouched, preserving its original form. It wasn’t until 1991 that Finnish and Swedish readers could enjoy the story in their native language, and the English-speaking world had to wait until 2005 for its translation. By then, the Moomins were beloved international icons, and the rediscovery of this origin story was celebrated as a literary treasure.

Adaptations

Unlike later Moomin stories, The Moomins and the Great Flood has not been widely adapted for theatre or film. Tove Jansson’s ex-lover and friend, Vivica Bandler, working at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, invited Tove to dramatize her first three Moomin books, including The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), Comet in Moominland (1946), and Finn Family Moomintroll (1948). The resulting 1949 play was based primarily on Comet in Moominland.

Despite limited adaptations, The Moomins and the Great Flood has been celebrated through special editions. Its 80th anniversary in 2025 features a commemorative release with a cut-and-fold Moominhouse poster, Tove Jansson’s full character descriptions published for the first time, and a new foreword by author and Moomin enthusiast Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

Questions for book clubs

The Moomins and the Great Flood is well suited as a warm-up reading in a new book club or the book chosen for a generally busy period during the book club year, since it is rather short. Also, it makes perfect to combine your book club reading with reading to the kids.