INTRODUCTION
When one has been watching for many years the apparent efforts of story-book-makers and others to standardize the minds of our children, to come upon ‘Children of the Moor’ is like finding a spring of water in a thirsty land. It is surprising that a book which has run through nine large editions in Sweden, and has been published in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Holland, and England waited all these years for a children’s librarian to go to Stockholm to discover it for American children.
The author, Laura (Runsten) Fitinghoff, grew up in a large and wealthy parsonage in Ångermanland, Sweden. She was one of five children in a home ‘where music and spiritual nourishment were given the children just as naturally as milk and bread were given other children,’ writes her daughter. In the parsonage were entertained such distinguished people as Jenny Lind, King Charles XV, and King Oscar II, but the poor of the great parish, too, were welcome guests. During famine years, when groups of starving people wandered over Sweden, none were turned away empty-handed from Pastor Runsten’s door; and the scenes of one particularly sad famine year so impressed a gifted daughter of the house that the beautiful and moving story of ‘Children of the Moor’ was written.
We are so accustomed to prosperity in America, and so tenderly careful to protect our children from hardship, that there is danger of our leaving out of their training the lessons which can be learned only from suffering. How can a child be stirred to pity and sympathy and unselfish giving who is not allowed even to hear that there are sad and hungry people in the world? Child readers of ‘Children of the Moor’ will be deeply interested in the strange and eventful wanderings of the brave children of this story; they will rejoice in the happiness that finally comes to the brothers and sisters, and their mental outlook will be wider, and their sympathies deeper for traveling, in imagination, with these story-book companions.
We owe Miss Andrews a debt of gratitude for bringing the book to America and for her beautiful translation of it.
Clara Whitehill Hunt
Brooklyn, 1927