"There is no law against old women climbing trees." — Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002), aged seventy, up a tree
"I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that." — Pippi Longstocking
During the spring of 1976, one of Sweden's most revered children's author found herself with a tax bill demanding 102 percent of her income. An average citizen would have been expected to write an op-ed piece or hire lawyers. Astrid Lindgren simply wrote a fairy tale, "Pomperipossa in Monismania," the story of a writer who finds herself in a bizarre country where the government taxes her to insanity and then got it published in the evening paper. The fairy tale lit up a debate, and come the autumn, the Social Democrats had lost power after ruling for forty-four years*. The story became a weapon more effective than any tract in the hands of an IEE, the storyteller, lampooner, and humanist – with EII qualities giving her some melancholy elements.
The Ne base is most visible in how the famous works actually came into being: they were often played before they were written. Pippi Longstocking (intermediate ILE/IEE) began as improvised oral serial for her daughter Karin, who was ill with pneumonia and demanded a story about a name she made up on the spot. And consider what Pippi is: a thought-experiment — what if a child were sovereign? The imaginative premise "incarnates," as Britannica exactly says, "every child's dream of freedom and power." Around her grew a character-cornucopia few authors have matched: Emil the well-meaning mischief-engine (her own favorite, the closest to a "pure" IEE among her creations, in a Delta-style rural setting), Karlsson the flying trickster — a genuinely selfish (and more SEE than IEE) imaginary-turned-real friend, Ronia in her forest... The generativity never stopped and the play-instinct didn't age, either: at eighty she was photographed up a tree, explaining to the press that there is no law against that.
The comedy consistently targets the closure-tyrants, like another IEE, Moliere, liked to. Pippi's most famous scenes are demolitions of pompous authority — the schoolteacher's "pluttification" tables, the policemen who come to take her to a children's home and end up played with like puppies, the fine ladies at coffee — and across the whole oeuvre the figures of rule-enforcement end up as the clowns. Lindgren's world is saturated with ethics but contains no obedience-morality whatsoever — no moral lesson ever vindicates a rule. That code — power justified solely by the defense of the weak — is the creative ethical function operating inside the comedy, and in the second half of her life it walked out of the books and into Swedish law. The campaigns are a functional portrait in themselves: for children (the 1978 "Never Violence!" speech, which produced the world's first ban on corporal punishment within a year), for animals (which lead to the so-called "Lex Lindgren", an animal welfare law), for refugees — fight for the defenseless, fought with the satire and the parable.
Her heroes were attacked as "anarchistic" — Professor and critic John Landquist's famous 1946 assault on Pippi as "harmful to children," the pedagogues (especially German ones) alarmed for decades that the books taught disorder and disrespect... Her reply to this, that her rascals have a good heart, is typologically telling. The critics prosecuted on the Ti/rule axis: the children violate order, ergo the books are dangerous. She answered on the Fi axis: the conduct is anarchic, but the inner disposition toward persons is good. As we saw, her three great anarchists span the irrational-extravert spectrum (Ne to Se) — the child's "dream of freedom and power" cast as a typology of freedom — and the fact that each character sustains a coherent, distinct personality architecture is itself the Fi-creative people-insight.
Both the occasional moralism and melancholy streak in her other works point to an EII accent. Lonely and neglected children recur through the whole shelf: Karlsson exists because a small boy feels left out; Mio, My Son opens with an unloved foster child on a park bench; and The Brothers Lionheart walks two children through death itself. She knew the material from inside: the teenage years she described as a gray "state without tone or vitality"; the scandal-pregnancy at eighteen (in concordance with her type image, she took a job with the local hometown newspaper after finishing school, but refused to marry the chief editor who got her pregnant) — the small town scandalized, the girl gone alone to Stockholm — and the son surrendered for four years to foster care in Copenhagen.
She died at ninety-four, having maintained her personality until the end, mourned by a country that had long since stopped distinguishing her from its conscience — the anti-authoritarian who became the one authority no Swedish government dared cross. The type's two faces are both reflected here: the laughing one that invented a sovereign child, a flying trickster, and a robber's daughter, and toppled a cabinet with a tale; and the graver one underneath, that knew the lonely child on the bench personally, and spent a lifetime writing her way back for every child still sitting there. The mingling was the magic — and there is, as she would be the first to point out, no law against that either!
*Note that Lindgren was generally supportive of Swedish Social Democrats, despite her support for the opposition in 1976
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