Bamse i Trollskogen

This morning Ethan made it through a whole Bamse saga! As he develops, his span of attention is getting longer and longer, and today he listened attentively to the storyteller throughout the whole saga, about 40 minutes, with exception for a few short spells of ‘pick-me-up-and-walk-me-around-cries’.


After the Bamse saga was done, we listened to music for a while, and then he fell asleep. Life is easy when you are 1/6 of a year!

Bamse – Världens starkaste björn ("The world's strongest bear") is a Swedish cartoon created by Rune Andréasson. The highly popular children's cartoon first emerged as a series of television short films as well as a weekly half page Sunday strip in 1966, before being published periodically in its own comic magazine since 1973.

Andréasson did all the artwork himself until 1975 and wrote all comics until 1990. Francisco Tora did all the illustrations from 1976 until he was joined by Bo Michanek in 1983. In the early 1990s several new illustrators were hired, including Claes Reimerthi and Tony Cronstam. Andréasson continued to do the magazine cover illustrations until 1992. The series somewhat changed direction when Bamse had children, specifically triplets, in 1982. In 1986 he had a fourth child, Lille Skutt having one at the same time.

Family life is now in focus, and here also the basic values shine through, like that of gender equality. In 1989 Skalman noticed that Bamse's fourth child Brumma was intellectually handicapped, which again brought up the subject of equality.

The children did develop in real-time within the magazine, but seem to have been fixed in age since around 1990. They are now around seven years old, in a narratively advantageous eternal state as first-graders.