Jon Blund’s Marvelous Dreams and Sweet Sleep
In: Traum und Träumen in Kinder- und JugendmedienSearch for other papers by JoAnn Conrad in
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European literary and folk tradition has several sleep-delivering characters that have been collectively subsumed under the ›Sandman‹ catetory. This article argues that while Andersen’s literary character Ole Lukoie, Hoffmann’s gothic horror character the Sandman, and the Swedish Jon Blund are all part of the historical legacy of 19th-century Romanticism wherein dreams, the unconscious, and fairy tales were linked to the emergent construct of the Child, the Swedish iterations of Jon Blund differ significantly from various other Sandman characters and are a unique consolidation of many different influences. The polysemous and protean Jon Blund character represents several ideological shifts over time: from embodying Romantic notions of childhood, to discursively promoting progress and new technologies, to acting as an agent of consumerism. In all these, the importance of the visual – of illustration, and the changes in representations of Jon Blund – is key to understanding the transmission, reception, and naturalization of these messages.