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The Moomins may look like hippos in aprons and top hats, but they’re more than just adorable characters from children’s books. Over the decades, these gentle creatures have become part of a living mythology – one that drifts across time, borders and generations.

There is a world beyond our own, where imagination and reality meet, and where, for 80 years, Tove Jansson’s Moomins illustrations have offered readers a way to recognise themselves.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of The Moomins, the Finnish/Swedish trolls that have delighted generations of children, becoming a cultural phenomenon in their own right. While posterity will likely remember her as the inventor of Moomins, Tove Jansson was in fact a strikingly multi-talented creative force.

In 1989, the science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin published The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. In it, she notes that many stories depend heavily on a hero with a sword or weapon as a central object, while bags seem boring and insignificant.

Tove Jansson published her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, 80 years ago, in 1945. The story follows a family of hippo-like creatures called “Moomintrolls”, who become refugees after a flood washes away their home. Written at the end of the second world war, when millions were…

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the first Moomin tale, The Moomins and the Great Flood. In the book, Moomintroll and his friends embark on a journey to find their home after a great flood devastates Moominvalley, meeting odd creatures and new friends along their journey.

Tove Jansson’s beloved creations have their hibernation interrupted by snowball juggling and jolly ukulele tunes in this sweet adaptation

Paradise exhibition focuses on public works for factory walls, hospitals and nurseries – long before Moominmania took hold

Handwritten notes about characters’ traits and voices to be published in 80th-anniversary edition of The Moomins and the Great Flood

Mossy marshes, sunny beaches and summer cabins surrounded by flowers recall the childhood idyll of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, set in the Gulf of Finland

Eerie and uplifting, the first Moomins video game for over a decade sends anti-authoritarian Snufkin on a mission to restore the nature of Moominvalley