I have been reading a lot of children’s books recently, either to the boys at bedtime or to vet them for future bedtimes. Our kids tend towards fantasy and tales of knights and wizards, and I try to find books that are suitable for 5- and 8-year-olds that I’ll enjoy reading too. I’ve been keeping Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter to the side for a year or so, waiting while we finish the current lineup, and I recently bought The Brothers Lionheart to see if that might interest them as well.

Both are by Astrid Lindgren, whom many will know for her Pippi Longstocking and The Children of Noisy Village books, but these could not be more different from those series, or even from each other. The Noisy Village books gently tell of a group of children growing up together in Sweden in the first half of the last century: Their adventures are those quotidian experiences that all children have. The high-spirited Pippi also inhabits a familiar world, though her immense strength, great store of gold and lack of parents make her a child’s fantasy rather than a portrait of a real girl. But Ronia and The Brothers Lionheart are (almost) pure fantasy, conjuring up worlds filled with monsters and events straight out of fairytales.

Of the two, I find Ronia easier to enjoy, a book that will be returned to again and again for the adventures that befall the young robber’s daughter. It is part Romeo and Juliet (the children of rival brigands befriend each other, to their fathers’ displeasure) and part My Side of the Mountain (the friends run away to live in a cave in the forest, and must learn to fend for themselves), set in a world at once familiar and fantastic. The setting seems to be in some northern European land hundreds of years ago, but it is a land inhabited by harpies and bad-tempered dwarves, introduced so matter-of-factly that there seems no question that they exist. Despite the conflict between parent and child, Ronia is a happy book, full of good humor and high spirits, and in its heroine children may find much of what they love in Lindgren’s Pippi.

The Brothers Lionheart is a much more melancholy affair, a tale of sacrifice and loss that demands a greater maturity on the part of the reader. Young Karl Lion (nicknamed “Scotty” after the biscotti cookies he loves) is a sickly child, a boy who encounters the world through the window of the room where he lies, and through the stories that his brother Jonathan tells him each evening; Both children know that Scotty has not long to live, and Jonathan comforts his brother with the assurance that they will not be separated for long, but shall meet again in the land of Nangiyala, where it’s “still the time of campfires and sagas”.

It is Jonathan, however, who is first to make the journey to that other land, dying as he rescues Scotty from a fire in their home. His brother soon follows after, only to find that Nangiyala is not the promised peaceful haven, where the cares of their past life are forgotten, but a land threatened by the cruel Tengil, who would conquer and enslave its inhabitants. The story becomes one of rebellion and of treachery, and in the end, Scotty must decide whether he can make the same sacrifice for Jonathan that his brother had made for him.

Lloyd Alexander has written that “what sticks in the mind are the endlessly fascinating questions [The Brothers Lionheart] raises. Lindgren is speculating not only on the human situation but on the very nature of what may or may not lie very darkly beyond it. It may be unsettling, but that’s exactly as it should be.” I can not disagree, but I would favor Ronia for the younger reader or listener, and save The Brothers Lionheart for an older child more ready to probe the deeper questions that it poses. And I would caution the fan of Lindgren’s works that it is far removed from the light-hearted adventures drawn up in her more familiar works, so much so that it seems almost the work of another author.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 10:44 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.