She is the most Swedish of girls, the nine-year-old Pippi who lives alone in Villa Villekulla with her monkey and her horse and whose mother is an angel in heaven and father is a king on Kurrekurreduttön in the South Sea.
Therefore, it caused a certain stir when journalist Martin Kristenson in 2007 in the magazine Kapten Stofil led evidence that Astrid Lindgren took great inspiration from the silent film era's biggest Hollywood star - Mary Pickford, who often played stubborn and independent girls.
The Scrubbers
Pickford's films were often shown in the hometown of Vimmerby and Astrid Lindgren often went to the cinema when she moved to Stockholm in 1926 and felt lonely in the big city.
She herself has said that she spent many evenings at the cinemas. So it's a lot from there she has got the influences, also to Master Detective Kalle Blomkvist, says Mats Rohdin, doctor of philosophy in film science and former manager of the Astrid Lindgren archive at the Royal Library.
The famous scene where Pippi Longstocking mops the floor with scrubbers on her feet is, for example, inspired by the Pickford film "Back to happiness" from 1921.
It's from there - and this with having the horse indoors, for example, comes from a film ("The Duchess as a laundress", ed. note) by the American director DW Griffith. His films were very popular in the 20s when Astrid was young, says Mats Rohdin.
From Hitchcock
Rohdin tells that Astrid Lindgren has been open about the fact that she, for example, borrowed influences from Alfred Hitchcock to Master Detective Blomkvist, but also the Emil character.
Given that she has reached such an internationally prominent position, one does not think that she is also a product of other artists. Art is made of art, as one usually says. She has picked both here and there.
But the international influences have been forgotten when Astrid Lindgren has become more and more of a symbol of what is Swedish.
Many tend to think that she is so Swedish just because one associates her so intimately with Vimmerby and her upbringing, says Rohdin.
The committee A cultural canon for Sweden has let two expert groups - one for the arts and one for society - agree on 100 works or phenomena that will be included in the Swedish cultural canon that the government and the Sweden Democrats have decided on.
The list was ready already before the summer, according to Dagens Nyheter.
In TT's summer series, a number of phenomena are highlighted that are not quite as "Swedish" as we think.
