Ronja, the Robber's Daughter

The things you find on Netflix sometimes. As I was browsing through it last week, I discovered that they had made a live action series adaptation of Astrid Lindgren's Ronja, The Robber's Daughter. Or Ronia, or Ronya, it depends of the translation and/or adaptations. I haven't read much Swedish literature, but I did read some of Lindgren's works, including Ronja. Not when I was a child, but when I was a teenager, the year a Swedish foreign student (my "Swedish sister" as I call her) lived with us. She had bought us a few classic novels from her country, translated into French, including this one. I enjoyed it enough and it was an easy read, but I had found it a bit kid friendly for my tastes. I had already started reading horror classics, as well as "proper" literature, so the kind of fairy tale medieval fantasy Lindgren had written didn't really connect with me as much as it would have had say, six or seven years earlier. 

And this is what I wanted to get at. I started watching the TV series with Wolfie. I wasn't sure it was proper for him, but he insisted that he wanted to watch it too. I had started watching in original Swedish, with subtitles, but I had to switch to the English dubbing. And then... then I didn't want Wolfie to watch it, because it turned out dark and scary. It has monsters, some level of violence I haven't seen very often in a children story and a very eerie atmosphere. I don't know how faithful the series is, maybe it was the translation I read that had been sanitized, but I know I did not expect it to be like this. Like what I had been wanting to read years ago, ironically enough. We watched until the end of the first episode. I will watch the rest by myself. Thankfully, Wolfie does not want to watch more. Oh, and one day I will revisit the novel, but in a different translation.