Elsa Beskow (née Maartman) (11 February 1874, Stockholm – 30 June 1953) was a Swedish author and illustrator of children's books. Among her better known books are Tale of the Little Little Old Woman and Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender.

Her parents were businessman Bernt Maartman (1841–1889), whose family came from Bergen, Norway, and Augusta Fahlstedt (1850–1915). Beskow studied Art Education at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (then called Tekniska skolan, or the Technical school) in Stockholm.

She married former minister and social worker, doctor of theology Natanael Beskow in 1897. Elsa Beskow met her future husband at Djursholms samskola while serving was a teacher where he served as head master. From 1900 they lived in Villa Ekeliden in Djursholm which had initially been built for the author Viktor Rydberg. They had six sons, including the artist Bo Beskow (1906–1989) and geologist Gunnar Beskow (1901–1991).

In 1894 Beskow started to contribute to the children's magazine Jultomten. Overall, she would publish some forty books with her own text and images. Beskow frequently combined reality with elements from the fairy tale world. Children meet elves or goblins, and farm animals talk with people. Central themes were the relationships between children and adults and children's independent initiative.

"Mors lilla Olle" is a Swedish children's song by Alice Tegnér. The song is about the boy Olle, who meets a bear in the forest. He is not frightened, believing the bear to be a dog, and feeds the bear all of his precious blueberries. When Olle's mother sees him and the bear she screams loudly, and the bear flees. Olle then asks his mother if the "dog" couldn't come back again.

In the song, Olle is approximately 4–5 years of age, and therefore does not understand what a bear is. The lyrics was inspired by an actual event. In September 1850, a toddler named Jon Ersson and his older siblings picked lingonberries a couple of hundred meters from their home in Morbäcksätern outside the village Särna in Dalarna. Jon, at that time just one year and seven months old, met a female brown bear with two cubs and fed the cubs lingonberry twigs. They got tired and the cubs and Jon all lay to rest next to the female bear. Jon's eldest sister then fetched their mother and she scared off the bears. A Norwegian newspaper wrote an article about this incident in April 1851 and the author Wilhelm von Braun (1813–1860) wrote a poem about it, Stark i sin oskuld ("Strong in his innocence") which starts with the line "Small boy in a mountain forest went, rosy cheeks and angelic look...".