(This is part of my foray into the Dolmenwood Inspirational Media. For more, go HERE.)
I hope many of you have taken the chance to read Mio, My Son. I’m writing not so much a “review” or even a formal analysis as I’m writing my impressions, my ideas as they relate to the novel. I’m interested in the ways Mio, My Son inspires Dolmenwood, but I’m also interested in the book as part of the larger fabric of fantasy literature. What threads does it weave and carry forward through the tapestry? What can we take with us into our own writing and gaming? I’ll be writing about the book for an audience familiar with it. I do not hesitate to mention important plot details (so be warned). If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so. It’s a short text, but utterly lovely and memorable. Like a fairy tale.
The threads of trauma and neglect, of emotional abuse and loneliness, weave their way throughout Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, My Son. I can’t help thinking about the final page, the italicized lines: “He is in Farawayland, I tell you.” The insistence that all is well with Mio—not Andy, the boy on the bench in the park, the boy with foster parents who care little for him, who certainly do not give him any love—no, he is Mio, the King’s son, who lives in Farawayland. That one line—“I tell you”—is a desperate line, an urgent line. The narrator—who is Andy—needs us to believe that Mio is in Farawayland. He needs to believe it himself.
Because our main character Andy is a boy without true parents, who is dominated and unloved by “Aunt” Hulda and “Uncle” Olaf, who has only one friend—Ben, a good friend—but who lives a sad, second-hand life. Farawayland must be real and Andy must be Mio, or else the sorrow is too much to bear.
This is why the Sorrowbird must sing even amidst the King’s beautiful Garden of Roses. This is why the Sorrowbird continues its song even after the happy ending and Mio’s victory over Sir Kato: “I don’t know what he could have been singing about, now that all the captured children had come home. But I thought Sorrowbird would probably always have something to sing about.”
Sorrowbird always has something to sing about because sorrow will always be part of life.
He is in Farawayland, I tell you.
But somehow, we doubt. It would be wonderful if he was, but sorrow cannot be banished so easily.
The book’s mixture of joy and sorrow, happiness and pain, reunion and loss, are what make it deeper than it first appears. At first, it feels too perfect, too wish-fulfillment (though goodness knows, Andy deserves to have his wishes granted). Andy/Mio gets whisked away from all his problems by a genie in a bottle and reunited with his father, the King of Farawayland. Farawayland is perfect. His father loves him unconditionally. He makes a true friend in Pompoo (who reminds him so very much of Ben). He has a magical white horse named Miramis (who reminds him of the real horse, Charlie). Everywhere he goes and everything he does is beautiful and life-giving. The bread is literally called the Bread That Satisfies Hunger. The water is literally the Water That Quenches Thirst. There is no want in Farawayland. Only abundance.
But there is Sorrowbird singing in the trees. And soon we learn that all is not quite well in Farawayland. Nonno’s brothers have been taken, Totty’s sister has been taken, the Weaver’s daughter has been taken. Sir Kato has taken them. Evil, horrible Sir Kato. He is the blight upon Mio’s newfound life, upon the King’s realm. Even in a magical paradise, evil waits upon the borders, in the Outer Lands. Even in Farawayland, there is sorrow.
There is a distinct “fairy tale” style to Lindgren’s prose. Sentences are short, simple, and direct. Even the emotional register is straightforward. Mio was sad and neglected in his old life, but he is happy and fulfilled in his new. Miramis is perfect, Pompoo is perfect, the King is perfect.
But always along the edges of things, in certain moments, we are reminded that this perfect life is not without strangeness, mystery, and, of course, sorrow. Mio doesn’t know why the Sorrowbird’s song hurts him at first—and the pain goes away once his father comes and reaffirms his love for Mio—but we know why. We know that Andy is an emotionally abused little boy without true family and only one friend. A boy who feels the taunts of bullies and the ugliness of life. Even though Mio has joy upon coming to Farawayland, even he can’t help but remember the pain of what came before. So Sorrowbird must sing.
There are also elements of the uncanny—an eerie, otherwordliness—that creep into the story despite the cheerily idyllic life Mio now leads. That uncanniness is what Dolmenwood, the game, does so well.
My first real sense of “Dolmenwood” came in the chapter about the Well That Whispers at Night. When Mio meets Totty and his siblings, they are sitting beside a “fairy-tale” cottage and a stone well. Totty is cheerful, and his family is just as kind as all the other friends Mio meets in his father’s kingdom. But the Well is not for water. This comment from Totty immediately makes the Well mysterious. The uncanny is now introduced to what had been, just a few lines earlier, an idyllic scene.
“‘It’s the Well That Whispers at Night,’” says Totty.
A Well that Whispers. No water rests at the bottom but something else instead. Not even a someone else. It’s not a man or fairy or creature that whispers from the depths of the Well; it is the Well itself that whispers. The whispers send up their own whisperings.
I found myself shuddering a little at this moment, and yet it wasn’t meant to be scary or sinister. Still, there was something strange… that uncanniness creeping along the edges.
And the Well does whisper. Mio and the others lie down beside it and listen, and just as evening comes (for it must be evening before the Well begins to speak), they hear the whispers.
Tales are told from these whispers. Fairy tales.
I’m reminded by my British Literature students, as we study literature like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and read a few Grimm’s tales, that fairy tales—not the modern Disney kind—are often strange and unsettling, even as they have heroic heroes and happy endings. They are weird.
So it is when the Well begins to tell its fairy tales, they are not frightening or bad—they are the very best tales, the most beautiful Mio has ever heard—but still. The moment is uncanny. There is magic here, and it feels unsettling. Why the Well whispers is never explained. How it came to be is never told. We only know that it whispers, and that one of its tales might be about Mio himself…
“‘Once upon a time there was a king’s son riding in the moonlight. He rode through the Forest of Moonbeams…’”
As soon as Mio hears this story, he can’t stop thinking about it, and this story is what sends him off, away from his father and his idyllic life. It’s almost as if the Well had put a spell upon him, as if the story both foretold his fate AND compelled him to make it true. After this whispering at the Well, Mio longs to find the Forest of Moonbeams, and from there his quest will begin.
So many of these seemingly simply things—Wells, Forests, Birds, Moonlight, Swords, Caves—are imbued with the uncanny, with an vitality that makes them special. Capitalizing them as proper nouns helps, but so do the details Lindgren includes. The description of the Dead Forest is one such instance: “We went on through the night and at last we came to a forest where there wasn’t a breath of wind and no little green leaves rustled because there wasn’t a single leaf left to rustle. There were only dead, black trunks of trees with gnarled, dead, black branches.”
The repetition here is simple but effective: “rustled,” “rustle,” “leaves,” “leaf” “dead, black trunks,” “dead, black branches.” The image is clear. It’s the “dead forest”: trees upon trees, but all of them dead. It’s a thick, tangled forest that Mio and Pompoo get lost in, but it’s the opposite of the verdant, leafy woods we’re familiar with. It’s unnatural. There might be a dead tree here and there in a woods or in our neighborhoods, but an entire forest made of “dead, black” trees is nearly impossible. The wrongness of it invites that uncanny feeling again.
I’m reminded of Tolkien’s point about how fairy-stories contain both magical elements as well as natural ones: “Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and beside dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted” (“On Fairy-Stories,” 9).
Lindgren takes those natural elements and elevates them to the magical, but not by making the trees talk or the stones glow with fairy magic. Instead, she strips them to their very essence. The Forest of Moonbeams is just that: a forest filled with moonbeams. The Deepest Cave in the Blackest Mountain is exactly what its name implies. But what does Deepest really mean? What is the Blackest of Black Mountain? When Mio goes into the caves, when he loses Pompoo in the darkness, when he travels through impossibly winding paths toward the heart of the mountain, we can feel this intensity, the primacy and power of darkness. These primal elements are made manifest, and that primacy is what gives the story power.
I think about my own gaming and how I might be able to bring this primal and yet uncanny feeling to the worlds in which I play. Calling something the Deepest Cave can do something, but I’m not sure it can do everything that Lindgren does in her book.
Still, I am curious to see how inviting the Well that Whispers or the sword that cuts through stone into my Dolmenwood game might also invite more of the uncanny into the game world. A creepy whispering well (and maybe that well tells my players a story in which they are the main characters, and that story compels them to make things come true…), or a stretch of forest that is Dead like the Dead Forest (I’m thinking of the Nag-Lord’s realm), or a magic item that is the Sword That Cuts Through Stone, or a bird that always sings sorrowfully and the players want to find out why… These are all possible hooks and world-building elements that can give the Dolmenwood game a distinctly fairy-tale flavor. It doesn’t take quirky or whimsical elements to do it either. It’s as simple as Moonbeams, Darkness, Water, and Bread.
Even as the last page of the book takes us back to Andy on that lonely park bench, we too hope desperately that he might be in Farawayland. In his imagination—in every reader’s imagination— he can be Mio who fights Sir Kato, Mio who rescues the children, Mio who plays and laughs with his father the King in the Garden of Roses. This is the great work of fairy tale: the building of otherworlds. In these worlds, there are wells that whisper and horses that fly, friends who gather and bread that satisfies, quests to undertake and parents who love us.
Next month in my Year of Dolmenwood…
I’ll be reading “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti.
Please join me in reading this strange and bewitching poem for March 2026. I just finished teaching it in my British Literature class, so I’m primed and ready to look more closely at the connections between the poem and the Dolmenwood RPG.
As part of my students’ work with the poem, I challenged them (for a bit of fun) to pretend they were co-writing a new song with Kate Bush. She wanted to do an adaptation of “Goblin Market,” so their assignment was to condense and transform the poem into a “Kate Bush version.” For inspiration, we watched many of her best videos (including “Wuthering Heights” of course), and my students knocked it out of the park. You better believe there was quite the chorus of “Come buy, come buy!” as they performed their songs (no interpretive dances, alas).
