A Place to Play in Astrid Lindgren's Stories

Toward the end of her life, Astrid Lindgren was approached by Staffan Götestam, a popular Swedish actor and director, about establishing a cultural center in Stockholm devoted to celebrating her many children's books. Götestam had starred in a film version of Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart in the 1970s, and this experience sparked his deep passion for Lindgren's stories. Initially, Lindgren rejected that idea of creating a center focused entirely on her and her books, but she gradually warmed up to the idea of establishing a place that celebrated children's authors and illustrators from Scandinavia. This idea eventually resulted in the creation of Junibacken. Promoted as a "children's cultural center with books at its heart," Junibacken combines the elements of an interactive children's museum, a children's theater, and a children's bookstore. Junibacken opened to the public in June 8, 1996, and Lindgren, along with the King and Queen of Sweden, attended the grand opening.

During Junibacken's first year of operation, a girl named Sanna Pedersen visited the center along with her family. She was six years old at the time, and she enjoyed exploring the center and pretending to be characters from her favorite children's books. She especially liked to play the role of Ronia from Lindgren's Ronia, the Robber's Daughter. The center entranced her, and that spell persists to this very day. In 2011, Sanna joined the staff of Junibacken, and she is now the manager of public operations.

I recently traveled to Stockholm to visit Junibacken and interview Sanna. Stockholm is a city of interlinked islands, and the island where Junibacken is located is often called Museum Island. On my walk from the hotel to Junibacken, I passed several other museums, including a museum devoted to the Swedish pop band ABBA and the Vasa Museum, which houses the historic Swedish warship Vasa that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 but was raised and restored in the 1960s.

As I approached the entrance to Junibacken, I spotted a bronze statue of Lindgren. Created by the sculptor Hertha Hilfon, the statue depicts Lindgren seated, holding an open book in her lap. I arrived early for my appointment with Sanna, so I paused and spent fifteen minutes looking at the statue and reflecting on how Lindgren came to call Stockholm her home. Since I had just read Jens Andersen's Astrid Lindgren: The Woman behind Pippi Longstocking, the details of Lindgren's life were still fresh in my memory.

Lindgren lived in Stockholm for most of her life, but she did not grow up in the city. She was born in the Swedish town of Vimmerby in 1907, and she spent her childhood on a farm that was then on the outskirts of the town. Her parents expected her to help in the fields and do her fair share of chores, but Lindgren had plenty of leisure time (Andersen 23-25). As Lindgren later recalled, these were happy years during which she and her siblings spent countless hours playing. "In our play life," she wrote, "we were wondrously free and never supervised. And we played and played and played so much so, it's a wonder we never played ourselves to death" (Whole World 15).

Lindgren's happy childhood years were followed by a period of rebelliousness. While still a teenager, she had a scandalous relationship with the married editor of the town newspaper, Vimmerby Tidning. When she got pregnant, she and her parents felt it best for her to leave Vimmerby. She moved to Stockholm in the summer of 1926, initially thinking that she would stay there for the duration of her pregnancy, but in the end, she never moved back to Vimmerby. She landed a job in Stockholm at the Royal Automobile Club, where she met her future husband, Sture Lindgren. They married in 1931, and they set up their home in Stockholm (Andersen 90-91). However, once she became an author, she often drew on her childhood experiences in and around Vimmerby...