Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

First published:Pippi Langstrump, 1945 (English translation, 1950)

Type of work: Fantasy

Themes: Education, friendship, social issues, and travel

Time of work: Unspecified

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Worldwide

Principal Characters:

• Pippi Longstocking, an orphaned nine-year-old with the independence to indulge her every childlike whim
• Mr. Nilsson, Pippi’s housemate, a monkey
• The Horse, Pippi’s companion without a name
• Tommy and Annika Settergren, the children who live in the house next to Pippi’s
• Villa Villekulla, the cottage where Pippi, her monkey, and her horse live

The Story

Nine-year-old Pippi Longstocking (thus named because she always wears the same unmatched pair of long stockings, one brown and one black) lives with her monkey and horse, but with no grown-ups, in her cottage called Villekulla. Because her mother died when Pippi was only a tiny baby and her sea-captain father was blown overboard in an ocean storm, Pippi may live just as she likes, make her own rules, and do anything her heart desires. In this absurdly humorous never-never land of childhood fantasy, Pippi represents the complete independence and anarchy of which children may dream (as Max does in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, 1963) but which they would not be likely to accept in reality.

A remarkable child, Pippi is prodigiously strong, can buy anything she wants with the gold pieces that fill the big suitcase her father left her, and ingenuously outwits and confuses any adult who expects Pippi to conform and be obedient like her next-door friends, Annika and Tommy. Pippi’s free spirit is immediately recognizable by the two carrot-colored tight braids that stick straight out the sides of her head, her freckled, potato-shaped nose, her wide mouth and strong teeth, and her unusual clothing. She wears a dress that she made herself from an insufficient amount of blue cloth which she extended by adding little red pieces “here and there,” long stockings, and black shoes exactly twice as long as her feet. Perhaps even more noteworthy than her appearance are her philosophy of life—“Isn’t this a free country? Can’t a person walk [or do anything else] he wants to?”—and her exotic, sensitive creativity. Thus, the strength and kindness of Superman are embodied in a child whom other children can admire even more empathetically than they do adult super-heroes.

Pippi tells wondrous stories of places that she visited while sailing with her father, but when pressed to separate fact from fantasy, she sadly calls her fiction lies and admits, “[I]t’s very wicked to lie. . . . But I forget it now and then.” When Pippi’s episodic escapades are added to her stories, the results are pure childhood fantasy.

Pippi unerringly does what children like to do, as exemplified in the “Thing-finder” episode, when Pippi, Annika, and Tommy look for “things.” Finding an old man asleep in front of his home, Pippi decides to “take” him until her attention is diverted by an even more exciting find—a rusty tin can. Later, when Pippi steps in to protect a young boy from bullies, she herself becomes their target. Undaunted, she terrifies the five bullies by picking them up and hanging them over tree branches. What child has not dreamed of what he or she would like to do to the neighborhood bully? Pippi succeeds for all children when she thoroughly embarrasses the ringleader, Bengt, before his cohorts.

Pippi’s unstudied cleverness extends far beyond vanquishing young bullies, as shown first when she deals with policemen who come to put her in a children’s home where she can attend school and later when she frustrates a teacher. Wriggling from the grasp of the policemen, Pippi leads them in pursuit over rooftops and in trees into a game of tag which embarrasses the policemen, who, giving up, say that “Pippi isn’t quite fit for an orphanage.” In a similar vein, when Pippi decides to join Annika and Tommy at school, she is astonished when the teacher asks her how much seven and five are. Pippi responds, “Well, if you don’t know yourself, you needn’t think I’m going to tell you.” When the teacher herself gives the correct answer, Pippi says, “See that! You knew it yourself. Why are you asking then?” After repeated attempts to get Pippi to conform fail, the teacher gives up, saying that perhaps Pippi should come back to school when she is a little older. Pippi wins in each case by making authority figures retreat from what she sees as unreasonable demands. In the process, she causes the authority figures to seem foolish, yet Pippi’s actions cannot be viewed as intentionally disrespectful, since they are tempered by ingenuousness, kindness, and comic absurdity.

Later escapades in the book focus upon Pippi’s inimitable flair for the unusual. They show her outbullying a bull, outstarring the stars in a circus, and turning two fierce burglars into her dance partners. In each subsequent episode, Pippi outshines adults in whatever adults do: She wins at one-upsmanship during a ladies’ coffee-party conversation about maid problems; she saves two little boys from a fire when no one else could; and to cap her year and to end the book, Pippi gives herself a wonderful birthday party, after which she resolves to become a pirate when she grows up. No reader can dare to doubt that whatever Pippi wants, Pippi will get.

Context

Pippi Longstocking belongs to a body of work by Astrid Lindgren that features unusual children who can do what adults do, and do it better than adults because they have not become jaded by the rules that often confine adults.

Lindgren seems to be indicating that the conventions which make children such as Annika and Tommy into perfect examples of charming and obedient children whom adults admire, may also be turning them into dull, uncreative, and boring children who frequently grow up to be the same kind of dull, uncreative, and boring adults. First published in Sweden in 1945 at the end of World War II, Pippi Longstocking may have been an important progenitor of the new genre of books for children which began to take root in the late 1950’s, a trend that abandoned didacticism and convergent thinking and instead heralded creativity and independent thought—a radical departure from the expected childhood mode.