Just now, holding a book gifted to my brothers at their christening in 1997, I found myself unexpectedly weepy.
Children of the Forest was one of several Elsa Beskow books my (lucky) brothers received. To finally have Beskow stories in our home was, for me, astonishing. These sumptuous picture books weren’t something we’d been able to afford. I’d need to leaf through them at school (Beskow herself had a liberal upbringing in a progressive family and is one of the keystone authors in early-years Waldorf schooling) or at a friend’s house whose bookcase was rainbowed with the instantly recognisable colourful cloth spines and gold foil lettering.
First published in Swedish under the title Tomtebobarnen in 1910 and in English in 1982, Children of the Forest follows the enviable escapades of four mushroom-hatted siblings gamboling through the seasons.
There’s a gentleness to the story, but every page has something to teach and hardships aren’t glossed over; their father, decked in a pine-coat suit with a birch-bark shield, kills Vara the viper (a hedgehog offers to take the body), one boy angers his father by playing with an apple pip instead of learning to recognise mushrooms, and the two brothers end up bitten by ants after poking their nest with hawthorn spears, modelled on the one that killed the snake. “Silly boys,” said their mother, as she put dock leaf ointment on their stings. “Never hurt the creatures of the forest, unless they mean you harm.”
When they’re not wondering where to bury a snake, nursing ant bites or being scolded for not paying attention, the children ride bats, play games with elusive, ‘light as thistledown’ forest fairies, and harvest berries to store for winter, encountering a forest troll when they do because, well, this is Sweden, after all.
The reasons I would constantly reach for these stories as a child are multilayered. I wanted to live under the roots of an old pine, of course, but they also gifted a serene escape from the chaos of growing up in a family of six.
Children of the Forest and every other Beskow story I read instilled in me, a sensitive child who knew she was different but didn’t know why, a profound calm and a sense there was somewhere I could belong. Looking back, I knew as a child what I needed to feel well in the world. Before we moved from the rural village I’d grown up in and from Waldorf education to a town and a state school, I had an impending sense of doom. I knew I wouldn’t cope, and spoiler, I didn’t.
I recall my first Swedish summer, picking blueberries in Värmland, the relief of finally reaching the forests of Beskow’s books. Afterwards, I volunteered to sort the berries before bagging them to freeze for winter. I’d love to meet someone who also finds scattering, scanning and sorting bucket after bucket of blueberries a meditative pleasure.
I felt weepy holding Children of the Forest because I’m nostalgic, but also because I knew from the beginning what I needed to be well. Even as a child, I was already orientating myself towards a slow, seasonal life in the north.
Northern Fever 