Glinda as a "respectable sorceress”

As I wrote yesterday, in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) L. Frank Baum started describing Glinda the Good as a “Sorceress” instead of a “Good Witch.” In later books he referred to her as “the Royal Sorceress” or “the Good Sorceress.” But Glinda wasn’t his first sorceress.

The first in Baum’s oeuvre was Maetta, a Glinda-like character in A New Wonderland, completed in the mid-1890s and finally published in early 1900. Three years later that book was republished as The Magical Monarch of Mo. The second sorceress was Gayelette, who created the Golden Cap that enslaved the Winged Monkeys at some unspecified time before the Wizard’s arrival in Oz.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz mentions sorceresses elsewhere as well. The Good Witch of the North says, “In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians.” The Munchkins keep calling Dorothy a sorceress because she’s killed the Witch of the East and taken her shoes, and because she wears white: “only witches and sorceresses wear white.”

Those statements suggest that “witch” and “sorceress” are similar, overlapping categories. But then there’s this remark early in The Marvelous Land of Oz:

Mombi was not exactly a Witch, because the Good Witch who ruled that part of the Land of Oz had forbidden any other Witch to exist in her dominions. So [she], however much she might aspire to working magic, realized it was unlawful to be more than a Sorceress, or at most a Wizardess.

That implies that a Wizardess was somehow superior to a Sorceress, and both inferior to a Witch.

However, later in that same book Glinda herself suggests that a major difference between a Sorceress and a Witch involves the type of magic each does:

“Really,” said the Sorceress, “that is beyond my magic. I never deal in transformations, for they are not honest, and no respectable sorceress likes to make things appear to be what they are not. Only unscrupulous witches use the art…”

That said, in Rinkitink in Oz (1916), Glinda disenchants a character without discussing such scruples. So it’s not that she can’t do transformations as a sorceress; with Mombi available to reverse her own spell, Glinda chooses not to.

Baum often has characters discuss different types of magic, as in Ozma’s remark to Dorothy in his last book, Glinda of Oz (published 1920):

“I am a more powerful fairy than any other inhabitant of Oz, I am not as powerful as Glinda the Sorceress, who has studied many arts of magic that I know nothing of. Even the little Wizard of Oz can do some things I am unable to accomplish, while I can accomplish things unknown to the Wizard. This is to explain that I’m not all-powerful, by any means. My magic is simply fairy magic, and not sorcery or wizardry.”

That novel also introduces a “krumbic witch,” who esoteric spells baffle even Glinda, and offers our second view of a “yookoohoo,” a magician who specializes in transformations.

Baum was not a consistent writer, and he never laid out all his different forms of magic and which type of magician was more powerful than another. If he had done so, he might well have contradicted that system a few books later when he had a better idea.

But one thing Baum was consistent about was that Glinda is the most powerful magician in Oz. That might imply that a Sorceress is more powerful than a Witch, but perhaps that particular Sorceress is simply more powerful than any Witch. In any event, if Glinda wants to call herself a Sorceress, not many people would dare to object.

Baum and The Inland Printer

In the 1890s L. Frank Baum and his family moved to Chicago. He supported them as a freelance journalist and traveling salesman before parlaying his (brief and unsuccessful) experience as a shopkeeper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, into a job editing The Show Window.

In 1900 a Chicago-based trade magazine called The Inland Printer described Baum’s magazine in a squib that might have been supplied by the editor himself:

The Show Window, edited by L. Frank Baum, Chicago, is growing in interest from month to month. It is the official organ of the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, and contains an amount of information in this line to be had through no other source. Its half-tone illustrations of window display are worth more than the price of the publication. No storekeeper can afford to be without such a magazine. Its suggestions for Easter window decorations in the special Easter number are a treat to even the uninitiated.

By then Baum also had a second career as a children’s author. The Inland Printer noted that as well a few issues later:

The author of “Father Goose,” Mr. L. Frank Baum, has followed up his success with a remarkable juvenile entitled “A New Wonderland,” which is shortly to be issued by R. H. Russell, of New York. The reader is introduced to a marvelous and hitherto undiscovered country, peopled with the quaintest and merriest characters ever conceived to delight childish hearts. Frank Ver Beck has made many colored pictures for the new book, which bids fair to attain a popularity seldom accorded a juvenile publication.

That book is better known now under its reissue title, The Magical Monarch of Mo.

The Inland Printer didn’t take note of Baum’s other fantasy for children published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, that year’s volume did feature illustrations from W. W. Denslow, including the spooky “What’s the Use?” and three bookplates for the Wilkins family (two reproduced here via Google Books, and thus at less than optimum crispness).

So we know Baum was almost certainly reading The Inland Printer, and probably contributing to it. Which gives more significance to another item from the 1900 volume, a response to a reader’s proofreading inquiry on whether “climb up” was incorrect.

The Inland Printer’s editors said the word “up” was unnecessary and noted other common phrases that were equally redundant. The column added:

No dictionary except one even mentions the phrase “climb down,” and that one, the Funk & Wagnalls Standard, says that it is a United States colloquialism.

Thus, when Baum had Dorothy Gale pass on a lesson from her teacher not to say “climb down,” he was echoing advice he’d probably read a few years before.

TOMORROW: But did that usage bother Baum?