Oddlet: Tove Jansson · 1 min read
Jun 9, 2026
Lights Off
She was being read by twelve million people a day and answered every fan letter by hand. So she dynamited a boulder on a treeless rock and built somewhere to hide.
By 1964 Tove Jansson was fifty, world-famous, and being read by twelve million people a day in a London newspaper. The Moomins had a tower studio in Helsinki and a merchandising empire that would eventually run to eight hundred licensees. She replied to every fan letter by hand. There were about two thousand a year.
So she built a cabin on a rock.
Klovharun is roughly seven thousand square metres of bare Baltic granite, miles from anywhere, treeless, with no electricity and no running water. To clear a foundation she and her partner Tuulikki dynamited a fifty-ton boulder, on the theory their builder had floated that blasting and basements did not count as building. The cabin had four windows, one per wall, and was positioned so that only the chimney showed from the sea.
Even after it was finished, they often slept in a yellow-and-blue tent pitched outside it.
And when a passing boat came too close to the rock, the woman who drew the Moomins and her partner switched off the lights and sat in the dark until it went away. What the boaters made of the unlit chimney is not recorded.
She kept going back every May for twenty-seven years.
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- Wikipedia — Tove Jansson — Core biographical dates, family, relationships (Wirtanen, Bandler, Pietilä), Moomin publication chronology, comic strip details, awards.
- Britannica — Tove Jansson — Birth/death dates, nationality, parents, Moomin comic strip in Evening News, Hans Christian Andersen Medal 1966.
- Moomin.com — Klovharu, the island where Tove Jansson spent her summers — Authoritative source on cabin dimensions, dynamite, Brunström, the boat Viktoria (named after both their fathers), and the four-window storm-facing design; nearly 30 summers; cabin donated 1995; now a nature reserve.
- Tovejansson.com — Island for the Solitary and Free — Location in Pellinge in the Borgå outer archipelago, single-room cabin, first night summer 1963, built 1964-1965 with Brunström and Sjöblom.
- The Gloss Magazine — Notes From An Island — Island size (~6,000-7,000 m²), location ~2.5 nautical miles from Kummelskär, cabin built autumn 1963 with four windows, builder Brunström from Kråkö, 26 summers 1963-1991, left permanently 1991 due to age, cabin given to hunters/fisherfolk; specifies 50-ton 'Big Boulder' and 5m x 2m cellar dug out of granite.
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