THE CURIOUS CASE OF KING KALIKO
by Phyllis Karr
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 22, no. 2 (Autumn 1978), pg. 8
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Karr, Phyllis. “The Curious Case of King Kaliko.” Baum Bugle 22, no. 2 (1978): 8.
MLA 9th ed.:
Karr, Phyllis. “The Curious Case of King Kaliko.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 22, no. 2, 1978, p. 8.
In my opinion, Kaliko is a prime example of how the Royal Historian took liberties to benefit his reading public. Indeed, Kaliko may be the greatest liberty he ever took.
The Kaliko of Tik-Tok of Oz (1914) and the “Little Wizard” story Tiktok and the Nome King (1913) is a decidedly sympathetic, rather altruistic Nome, who saves Betsy Bobbin (probably at some risk to himself should Ruggedo find out) and who undertakes on his own initiative the awesome task of secretly putting the Clockwork Man back together after the enraged Ruggedo has smashed him. Yet the Kaliko who appears in Rinkitink in Oz and in the books of Ruth Plumly Thompson is a sneaky, treacherous, and rather cruel type. The change in character is too marked to be convincing, though Baum makes valiant efforts to explain away the change.
It is possible that we have a case of power corrupting (as well as fattening). Kaliko is a good sort as long as he is merely Chief Steward, but the Nome crown, like a sort of curse, changes its wearer for the worse. But this explanation fails to satisfy me, and I would like to offer an alternate.
Rinkitink was not originally written as an Oz book. It was probably set down about 1905 (cf. F.J. Baum and R.P. MacFall, To Please a Child, p. 198). This was even before Ozma of Oz (1907) and long before Kaliko became King of the Nomes (in Tik-Tok, 1914). Baum made an Oz book out of it by changing the ending. By 1916, Dorothy and the Wizard were long settled in Oz, while in 1905 Ozma had not even set out on her expedition to rescue the Royal Family of Ev. Rather than attempt taking his readers back in time, Baum reworked the ending as if the adventure took place in chronological order following The Scarecrow of Oz. Perhaps his publishers insisted that it would sell better that way. What really happened in the original version we do not know, but probably Inga, Rinkitink, and Bilbil succeeded in rescuing the Prince’s parents with no outside assistance from Oz. (Dorothy and the Wizard had not yet returned to Oz, and to all appearances Ozma’s expedition to save the Evians was her first personal encounter with the Nome King—in 1905 she must still have been too busy settling into her own kingdom to pay much attention to the Nomes and Evians beyond the desert.)
Therefore, the Nome King who played his part in the adventure of Inga and Rinkitink was not Kaliko, but Ruggedo himself! Or Roquat, as Ruggedo’s name was in those days. The behavior of the Nome King towards the other characters in Rinkitink, so unexpected when we compare it with Kaliko’s behavior in Tik-Tok set only two years before Rinkitink was published, becomes perfectly predictable when we compare it with Roquat’s early behavior in Ozma, before the Ozians make him even worse by enraging him and winning his undying enmity. Even the physical appearance of the Nome King as depicted by John R. Neill in Rinkitink is that of the rotund Roquat/Ruggedo, not the gangly Kaliko; this is also true of the facial features. And Neill was following Baum’s general description.
Ruth Plumly Thompson based her Kaliko on the Nome King in Rinkitink, who, I maintain, is actually Ruggedo. Thus she perpetuated Baum’s one-time bow to expediency in storytelling into a possibly irreparable blackening of Kaliko’s good name.
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