Snufkin Nomad Myth

In Finnish “mythology” there is a figure of the free wanderer, the independent traveler, the
nomad that leaves no traces – Snufkin of Tove Jansson’s Moomin saga. Snufkin is an
absolute symbol of everything that has to do with freedom. Snufkin is entirely self-sufficient:
he has no need of other people to make life meaningful, he has no need of
their communities, their discussions or their houses. He lives in his tent (green with
a pointy top) and is seamlessly conjoined with the wildernesses he inhabits. He is
even described as being one of those extraordinary persons who have the “simple
but rare ability to retain their own warmth.” The event of Snufkin passing a village
is described as follows:

Big houses and little houses all very close to each other, some were joined
together and shared the same gutters and the same dustbins, looked in at
each others’ windows, and smelt their food. The chimneys and high gables
and the drainpipes, and below, the well-worn paths leading from door to
door. Snufkin walked quickly and silently and thought: oh all you houses,
how I hate you!

Then one late November he gets stuck in Moominvalley, not with the Moomin family
who usually inhabite the place, but with a bunch of needy, uncertain, in search
of something kind of people. Snufkin is a very reluctant member of this community
and at one point even Grandpa-Grumble looses his patience when Snufkin stays
inside his precious tent and does not participate in a debate on whether it is a river,
a brook or a flood that runs across the valley. He shouts: “You inside there! …
[W]hen are you coming out to take interest in things?” and Snufkin answers peevishly:
”Soon!”

But as things tally on insights start to fall on Snufkin: he realizes that with the
Moomin family everything used to be different. Previously he had always thought
of them as very dependent (of each other, of him) kind of people, who did not understand
his solitary way of life and his needs. Especially Moomintroll, whose longing
eyes sometimes quite disturb Snufkin, had figured not just as a friend but as
something of a burden to Snufkin. As Snufkin now thinks of Moomintroll it is with
longing and insight that he is “the only one who knew how to write to a Snufkin.
Brief and to the point. Nothing about promises and longings and sad things. And
a joke to finish up with.” When it dawns on Snufkin that he has seen the family
from a rather selfish point of view he starts to wonder.

What Snufkin learns about himself and his relationship to the Moomin family and
the world outside himself by large is that both his freedom and self-sufficiency
are not absolute qualities within himself, but something that are supported and
in some respect even given to him by the love of the Moomin family. That his belonging
to Moomin Valley, coming there every summer and being understood and
appreciated and left alone by them, is the basis of his comfort in the wanderer’s
way of life he leads. Of course he could be a hermit and totally outside a need for
others’ caring, but from all accounts this is not at all who Snufkin really is. He is a
social being caring both for how he is perceived and treated by others and very
much for what others do around him, particularly in the way of architecture and
environmental design.

So at the end of the saga Snufkin understands that his freedom consists of two parts:
the going away and the coming back: that without there being a “coming back,”
without some level of belonging, there is no free wanderer, there is just a refugee.
Or in the words of an Asian cultural figure, the Dalai Lama: “Freedom is beneficial
only if all the individual members of society take active responsibility.