Snusmumriken – Snufkin
The suggestive Swedish name Snusmumriken is based on an outdated colloquial Swedish term for an old, boring man, a snusmumrik. This meaning has little to do with the character in the books, who is a philosophical wanderer and Moomintroll’s best friend. However, the two words the name is made up of, snus and mumrik, may be considered separately. The Swedish dialectal word mumrik is a derogatory term for a rude or stupid man, but Jansson uses it as a noun indicating Snufkin’s species, i.e. en mumrik, ‘a mumrik’, and mumrikar, ‘mumriks’. The –en suffix marks the definite article of the name Snusmumriken, as with many others of Jansson’s invented names. The prefix snus– has two possible meanings, either the noun snus, indicating ‘snuff’, ‘powdered tobacco for inhaling through the nostrils’, or the verb snusa, indicating ‘to sniff or snuff’. As the two meanings are the same for both Swedish snus and English snuff, the prefix has been easily translated into the initial part of the name Snufkin. Meanwhile, the –kin suffix of the English variant stems from Middle Dutch -kijn and Middle Low German –kīn, and is used to form diminutives such as bumpkin.
In English, the entire name Snufkin denotes the character’s name as well as his species. When the character is introduced to the reader, he is referred to only as ‘a snufkin’, i.e. an anonymous member of the species (Jansson 1967: 43). However, the next time he is mentioned the name Snufkin is capitalised and has lost the indefinite article, indicating that it has become his personal name (Jansson 1967: 43). This change from species to personal name is not as quick in the original Swedish text. There Snufkin is continuously referred to as en mumrik (‘a snufkin’), until he explicitly introduces himself as Snusmumriken. In Swedish a distinction made between mumriks as a species and Snusmumriken, which is the name the character. However, in the English version there is no distinction between the character Snufkin and his species of snufkins, aside from the capitalisation of the name, and as such the character does not require a proper introduction in the English translation.
The Finnish variant, Nuuskamuikkunen, is a translation that has been created with the presumption that the prefix snus– in Snusmumriken refers to the noun snus, not the verb snusa. Nuuska is, without ambiguity, the Finnish word for the noun ‘snuff’. However, the root of the second part of the name, muikkunen, is less obvious. Finnish muikku, meaning the freshwater fish ‘vendace’, is a possible source of the name, as Snufkin is known to be an avid fisher. Additionally, muikku(-nen) is phonetically similar to mumrik(-en), although the words are not similar in their possible meanings. What is notable is that, like mumrik, the word muikkunen acts as the name for the species in the Finnish translations. There can be several creatures called muikkunen, but the name Nuuskamuikkunen only belongs to one character.
- Multilingual Moomins: Examining the Translation of Tove Jansson’s Nonsense Character Names from Swedish to English and Finnish by Janine A E Strandberg
