My relationship to Ronja the Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lindgren is an odd one for a Swede. I grew up in a massively Lindgren-friendly household and still treasure her stories about among others Pippi Longstocking, Madicken and the Bullerby children (Lasse is my favourite Lindgren character). However, my mum wasn't a big fan of Lindgren's two last books, The Brothers Lionheart and Ronja the Robber's Daughter, and nothing I learnt about them as a child made me want to seek them out myself. Eventually, I did watch the classic film adaptations, but they didn't hook me.
Recently, with new adaptations in the works which I was interested to see, I thought I'd finally acquaint myself with both these books by way of listening to Lindgren's own old recordings of them for Swedish Radio. Though they're not, in my entirely biased opinion, on a par with the Lindgren favourites I grew up with, I'm glad I've cured my ignorance, at least to some degree. I'd argue that The Brothers Lionheart is the better written of the two, and yet Ronja is the one I can most easily picture children getting into.
For one thing, Ronja is unambiguous. Most of Lindgren's fantastical tales can be read in more than one way: you can either take the protagonists' adventures at face value, or interpret them as mere imaginings, albeit beautiful ones, which Lindgren's often sorely tried boys and girls use as coping mechanisms. I tend to stubbornly stick to the face-value reading, except in the rare cases when "real life" offers a happier ending than the fantastic adventures. Even so, it's hard to for instance read the last lines of the story "The Land of Twilight" without tearing up.
Ronja the Robber's Daughter, on the other hand, is more straightforward, which I imagine children would find comforting. Ronja is the daughter of a robber whose home is in a magical forest. This is made crystal clear. She's not making it up. Also, her months of living in the woods with her best friend Birk must read as blissful wish-fulfilment for anyone who has ever dreamed of living close to nature (not me).
But it's one thing to acknowledge that children appreciate a story, and another to appreciate a story as a child. Which finally leads me to the Netflix TV series based on Ronja the Robber's Daughter (only half of which is available so far). For me, the jaded adult, this is the ideal adaptation. The book treated its child protagonists with respect, but the grown-ups were little more than caricatures, and the tiresome old tropes of sensible child vs foolish adult and sensible woman vs foolish man riled me as far back as in the old film.
In the Netflix series, the adults are taken more seriously. Mattis, Ronja's father, is given a proper motive to resent a rival band of robbers and its chieftain Borka in particular. What's more, his relationship with Ronja's mother Lovis is a proper, loving one – she doesn't treat him like a silly child, which is a relief. We also get an added subplot about the nearby villagers who suffer from the robbers' exploits, and the bounty hunters (female, which makes sense in this universe) employed to put an end to the nuisance. I was at times more interested in them than in the central story, which is, I suppose, not entirely a good thing.
The question the Netflix Ronja highlights is: what makes a good adaptation? Should you try to tinker with the source material's weaker aspects so they work better, with the risk of losing focus? Or should you faithfully zoom in on what worked in the original and let neglected parts of the plot remain neglected? To be clear, I thought Ronja was very well cast in the Netflix adaptation, and Birk was good too, though as the parts were played by young teenagers, their relationship became a little more proto-romantic than the novel's surrogate-sibling love. But the adults do steal some of the limelight, which real Ronja appreciaters may feel is a shame.
For my part, I've enjoyed the Netflix series so far and am looking forward to the release of the rest of the episodes. True fans could possibly see things differently, though. An equivalent version of The Brothers Lionheart would be one where the grown-ups that were mere ciphers in the book – bad guys and heroic rebels alike – are properly fleshed out, but you momentarily lose track of what's happening to the brothers themselves. Mind you, I would love to see an adaptation like that.
