The Christmas book could not afford the forest.
When Åhlén & Åkerlund launched the annual Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls) and hired John Bauer to fill it, the printer’s palette for those first years (1907-1910) was stingy: black and yellow. Bauer’s originals were often watercolor, mossed and dim, a climate rather than a cartoon. Children received a compromise object, a gift-book that still had to behave at the press. The trolls, in the paintings, look as if they had grown out of wet ground. In the cheapest reproductions they look like night and amber. Both versions taught a country what “troll” was allowed to occupy on a page.
Bauer was born in Jönköping, 4 June 1882, and learned the Småland woods as a workplace: sketchbook, trunks, the particular way light comes down through spruce. He studied in Stockholm (Tekniska skolan, Althin’s, then the Royal Academy). With his wife, the artist Ester Ellqvist, he traveled in Germany and Italy, a route less automatic than Paris for a Swedish painter of that moment. The Italian looking, the symbolist appetite for still figures in charged air, comes back in the fairy-tale work as patience. His humans do not hustle. His trees have more time than a plot.
He did not illustrate every year of the annual without a break. He is in the early volumes, then 1912-1915. The gap matters only as a reminder that this was a job with a publisher, not a mystical residency in a forest that employed him.
Folklore Is Larger Than a Style
Nordic troll traditions do not sit still for a single illustrator. Trolls may be huge or small, farm-adjacent or mountain-born, dangerous, dim, rich, stone-bound, almost people. No watercolor series can be the dictionary.
Bauer’s trolls are a local climate. They tend to be heavy, rounded, lichen-adjacent. Noses and backs share a geology with boulders. Hair behaves like undergrowth. They are not the official trolls of every parish tale. They are Bauer’s trolls, which is a more honest sentence than “he captured the soul of the folk.”
What he captured, if the word is allowed, is a spatial idea: the forest as a built thing. Trunks act as columns. A clearing is a room that may not want you. Moss is a carpet you would ruin. Human figures, often pale and small, occupy the leftover light. A princess’s hair can read as a lamp not because she is the subject of the universe, but because the universe is so dark that any lamp becomes news.
That scale is the opposite of a theatrical Rackham tangle, and of Kay Nielsen’s decorative flat. Bauer is closer to geology wearing a face. The comparison belongs in the golden-age illustration family without making him a Swedish Rackham. He is doing a different weather.
A Picture the Museums Can Point At
Nationalmuseum in Stockholm holds Prinsessan och trollen (1913), a watercolor about twenty-five centimeters square, bought in 1914. The museum’s own note ties it to a Bland tomtar och troll tale in which trolls steal a child from a cradle and leave their own. Bianca Maria walks into the trees at midsummer. Bauer liked, the museum says, to walk the Småland woods with a sketchbook and watch sun come through the canopy. The princess in the painting is that sun given a dress.
The Tuvstarr pictures of the same year (the princess who loses her heart to a forest tarn, the moose Skutt) escaped the book and became nursery walls. That is how illustration alters folklore’s afterlife. It does not repeal the oral tale. It rents the later reader a body and a posture: a girl looking down into still water as if the forest had a pupil.
Jönköpings läns museum keeps the deep archive: more than a thousand sheets, including the ugly, useful sketches where Bauer tries which moment of a story deserves a plate. You can watch him shop for a composition. The finished hush is downstream of that shopping.
The Lake, Named Once
In November 1918 the steamer Per Brahe went down on Lake Vättern. John Bauer, Ester, and their small son Bengt drowned. Sources disagree about the exact calendar day; the year and the water are not in doubt. The wreck has been used, often, as a romantic lamp to hold up to the paintings. The paintings do not need it. They already know how to make a forest look as if it had been looking back for a long time.
Name the deaths because they happened. Then put the lamp down.
What the Annual Did
A yearly book is a climate you can re-enter. New stories, familiar dimness. Children who never saw a Småland night still inherited a pressure of trunks and a particular troll silhouette. Later Swedish visual culture, and later fantasy painters far from Jönköping, could use that silhouette without citing the invoice.
The folklore remains uncaptured. Walk into an actual tale and the troll may not match the watercolor at all. That mismatch is healthy. Bauer did not replace the old country. He gave the gift-book country a memory so persuasive that empty woods, on a page, now look understaffed.
A two-color annual on a Christmas table, a watercolor in a Stockholm drawer, a girl still looking into a tarn: none of them is the official troll. They are how a printed forest learned to remember you.