Also, back then in 1925 infant mortality was probably ~10x worse [0], which adds to how we (today) might underestimate the prevalence of parent-child traumas.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?location...
Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are great books, the rest about traumatized kids/orphans not so much as kid books.
One of parents being dead was way more commom situation then it is today.
and
"Long-term cohort studies tracking historical Swedish registry data from the early-to-mid 1900s indicate that approximately 2.3% to 3.6% of children experienced the death of a biological parent before reaching adulthood (under 15 to 18 years of age)"
so less than 4% of the kids experienced parental death, absolute majority was born into regular complete families, my point was like half of the Lindgren characters are missing parent for whatever reason, not one in 20 books main characters, she was clearly projecting something unhealthy unrealistic into her books, if she was following reality it would be rare in her books and not that many if not majority of her characters are from incomplete families
Second 4% is actually a lot. In a class of 20 kids, one will have dead parent. That makes it something all kids growing during the era are aware of.
To me it suggest it should be expected for some writers to write about this group.
> if she would reflect the reality and didn't have some orphan/death fetish
The aggressive hostility toward writing about non-majority is super weird.
The farmer class could actually be like this, before we banned it, even though she tries to write about it in a comical way, but it was always a low class thing to punish ones children and to read stories where it happens is basically intolerable at least to me.
Astrid Lindgren probably knew this though. She isn't some idiot who puts this in as comic relief, it's comic but there's a serious and intolerable feel to it too. She knows she's portraying something bad and she intends for us readers to sit with the dissonance-- the low class going-to-punish-his-children aspect, the family's love for Emil, that book in which his mother writes down what he does, that Emil is well-meaning, that everything goes well in the end and that the adult Emil becomes a nämndeman, etc.
Astrid Lindgren is one of the scariest Swedish authors because of her deliberate careful and nuanced use of moral dissonance. She's scarier than Willem Fredrik Hermans.