ABSTRACT
Astrid Lindgren’s stories are more than mute words on a page-they reverberate! Voices, verses, music: you can hear the voice of the storyteller, Astrid Lindgren herself, recounting the adventures of the Bullerby children or, as in the fi lm voice over, telling the story of Ronia’s birth. For most Swedes at least, Astrid Lindgren’s voice itself is a collective auditive experience. Moreover, the sound of Lindgren’s stories is also made up of the chorus of different actors who have given life and sound to Lindgren’s characters-the actor Allan Edwall, for instance, as Emil’s father, shouting his patented “Eeemil!” It is, in addition, the soundtrack to the Bullerby fi lms and the Pippi TV series. And it is the soundscape we have come to associate with different media productions: the avant-garde art music of Ulf Björlin in the Salt Crow Island TV series, the composer Georg Riedel’s mix of folk music and jazz, and the medievalisms of Björn Isfält’s music to Ronia. Then there are all of the Lindgren songs that Swedes know and sing and which have entered the popular canon like “Här kommer Pippi Långstrump” [Here Is Pippi Longstocking] by Jan Johansson. Even verses and language games, like the secret language in Bill Bergson’s gang (“kok-a-lol-a-sos-fof-i-non-tott”) or Pippi’s neologisms (“spunk,” “surkus”) and nonsense verses (“Now we’re going to make a pancake, now there’s going to be a pankee, now we’re going to fry a pankye”) have a distinctly aural and oral quality. Finally, as Vivi Edström shows in Kvällsdoppet i Katthult and Det svänger om Astrid, Lindgren’s references to poetry, or to Swedish broadsheet music and psalms (as in the Mardie books) connect her to a common musical and oral frame of reference. Sometimes an entire story, like “Sjung min näktergal, spela min lind” [Sing My Nightingale, Sing My Linden Tree] from the fairy-tale collection Sunnanäng [South Wind Meadow] hinges on a song. Sometimes, like in Ronia, the singing and dancing of the robbers is invoked
again and again, with Lovis’s “wolf song” lullaby functioning as kind of counterpoint. I shall not make the list longer; suffi ce to say that the sound and music of Astrid Lindgren’s stories is a vast area of investigation in its own right. I believe that these oral and aural experiences and sensations affect our understanding and appreciation of Lindgren’s stories.
