THE ROYAL HISTORY OF THE LOST KING
by Ruth Berman
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 49, no. 2 (Autumn 2005), pgs. 25–30
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Berman, Ruth. “The Royal History of the Lost King.” Baum Bugle 49, no. 2 (2005): 25–30.
MLA 9th ed.:
Berman, Ruth. “The Royal History of the Lost King.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 49, no. 2, 2005, pp. 25–30.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with illuatrations that have not been reproduced here. However, typographical errors have been left in place to accurately reflect the printed version.)
In The Lost King of Oz (1925), Ruth Plumly Thompson set out to explore Oz history. Like her own piratical explorer, Samuel Salt, she had a delighted curiosity in exploring Oz byways, finding room for kings of her own, and creating new ones. Even before she became the Royal Historian of Oz, she had delighted in setting her fairy tales in little kingdoms, comically (and democratically) royal townlets of her own invention, in the stories she wrote for her children’s page in the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Pumperdink in Oz was the home of Kabumpo the Elegant Elephant (the title character three years before Lost King, in Kabumpo in Oz, and reappearing in Lost King in an important role). But Pumperdink had also been the setting for several of her Ledger writings, in “The Wizard and his Purple Beard,” “A Story about Dragons,” “Christmas with the Prince” and “The Laughing King, a Page Out of Pumperdink History.”
With the broad geography of Oz at her disposal, Thompson found room there for kingdoms like Pumperdink, and new ones, too, such as the jolly town of Kimbaloo in Lost King, with its button-and-bouquet based economy. Her little kingdoms were always jolly (one of her favorite words), with their odd, but comfortable lines of work for the inhabitants.
In the four Oz books that she wrote before Lost King, she had gone to several parts of Oz, as well as into the sky above (as in The Cowardly Lion of Oz) and the earth below (as in The Royal Book of Oz). With Lost King, she went into the past for her story’s base. Baum as the Royal Historian of Oz had given various descriptions of the history of Oz, and how it came to be a magic kingdom, and his descriptions conflicted slightly with one another. When Thompson set about some royal historiography of her own, she wanted to reconcile Baum’s versions.
The history Baum had left for her was vivid, but a little mixed in the details. In The Land of Oz (1904), he explained that before the Wizard’s time, Oz was ruled by Pastoria and should have been inherited by his daughter Ozma, except that the Wizard took the throne and turned the baby over to Mombi to raise. Baum was drawing in this book on the action of the 1902 play of The Wizard of Oz, in which Pastoria II had been deprived of his throne by the Wizard. The play simplified the book’s plot by omitting the Wicked Witches, and leaving the Wizard responsible for all the land’s problems, including the absence of a legitimate monarch: the Wizard had enticed the king into the balloon that brought him to Oz, cut the ropes, and so got rid of the king, who floated to Kansas and became a motorman, but was blown back by the same hurricane that carried Dorothy to Oz. The Wizard of the books did not take an active part in Pastoria’s dethronement, which in Land was blamed on Mombi and the other wicked witches.
Baum expanded slightly on the story of the previous kings in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), where Ozma said that both her grandfather, and her father, Pastoria, had been plagued by Mombi and other witches. None of the Oz books named Ozma’s grandfather. Considering that the king of the play is Pastoria II, Baum may have taken it for granted that his father was Pastoria I, but the name invented for him by the late Fred M. Meyer, Ozroar, was taken over for use by Oz fans. It was used by Robert R. Pattrick in his essay, “The Early History of Oz,” in Unexplored Territory in Oz, and by writers of various Oz pastiches. Rather oddly, given Pastoria’s name, Baum explained that all the rulers of Oz were named Oz (or Ozma, if a woman), a word in their old language meaning “great and good.” Perhaps Pastoria’s full name should be assumed to be Pastoria-Oz.
In The Tin Woodman (1918), Baum gave a somewhat different early history: Oz became a fairyland when Queen Lurline enchanted it, leaving one of her fairies to rule it, and in Glinda of Oz (1920), his last Oz book, he added that the fairy’s name was Ozma. The context seems to imply—but avoids stating directly—that this Ozma was the present Ozma, for the Su-Dic says that if Ozma is really Ozma, she is “one of that band of fairies who, under Queen Lurline, made all Oz a Fairyland. I have heard that Lurline left one of her own fairies to rule Oz, and gave the fairy the name Ozma.” Ozma cannot very well be one of the fairies who helped Lurline make Oz a fairyland unless she is herself the Ozma Lurline set to rule there. (The possibility that Lurline makes a habit of naming her followers Ozma and sending them off to take the throne of Oz whenever there is a danger of a vacancy seems unlikely.)
Thompson (as I pointed out in my essay on “Lurline’s Source,” Baum Bugle (Autumn 1982): 2-3), evidently decided to assume that Ozma was not, after all, the same person as that first Queen Ozma, but rather a descendant in Pastoria’s line of that first Ozma. This approach solved most of the problems raised by Baum’s different versions. However, the implication in Glinda, that Ozma could be the same person as the Ozma left by Queen Lurline to rule the new fairyland, left a potential discrepancy, and various solutions have been proposed. Jack Snow, in The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946), made Ozma Pastoria’s adopted daughter, a baby fairy given to the childless king by Lurline to be his heir. Ozma could not then very well have been one of Lurline’s helpers in making Oz a fairyland, unless she was a grown fairy who was turned into a baby afterwards (as in Hugh Pendexter’s pastiche, Oz and the Three Witches, Pen Press, 1977).
Robert R. Pattrick in his “Early History of Oz” pointed out that there didn’t seem to be enough time for Oz to develop as much magic as it already had in Ozma’s infancy if Ozma was the same person as the fairy left behind by Lurline when she enchanted Oz, and he suggested that there was a gap of centuries between the time when Lurline enchanted Oz, and the time of another visit, when she gave the baby Ozma to Pastoria to adopt. This explanation reconciles Baum’s, Thompson’s, and Snow’s versions fairly well—although it leaves some small discrepancies remaining. For example, Patrick Maund, in a set of annotations to Pattrick’s Unexplored Territory, points out that having Ozma old enough to remember her father and their visits to his hunting lodge in Morrow (Lost King) conflicts with the statement in Land that she was still a “tiny baby” when she was given into Mombi’s keeping. But perhaps “tiny” could be taken to include a stage of childhood with more than just an infant’s memory—a toddler, perhaps?
Since it was Mombi who had made trouble for Pastoria according to Baum, Thompson turned to Mombi for the role of antagonist in Lost King. The ending of Land had left Mombi powerless, deprived of her magic by Glinda’s spell. But like King Ruggedo in similar circumstances in other Oz books, Mombi had too much determination to be stopped by such a trifle as having no magic powers. She turned to kitchen chemistry to replace her lost witchcraft. As Hugh Pendexter III pointed out in his essay on “Magic in Thompson’s Oz” (Baum Bugle (Autumn 1978): 5), Mombi’s kitchen concoctions may not be magic by Oz standards, but they are spectacularly effective: “purple pepper that routs wild beasts, super gelatin that gels a small sea, baking powder that puts cats into orbit and that Snip later uses to raise Ozma’s palace.”
The Wicked Witches of the East and the West were supposed to be more powerful rulers, but Mombi, in spite of her subordination by the Good Witch of the North, and her defeat by Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, was Baum’s most striking wicked witch. She had a gleeful sense of humor in her callous abuse of others that made her more vivid than even the Witch of the West or Blinkie (in Scarecrow), and thus a fit antagonist for Glinda in Land. Thompson caught Mombi’s humor, and the reader can’t help sympathizing a little with the old schemer’s desire for revenge.
readers (children usually take a more casual view of punishing villains), Mombi’s execution at the end of Lost King is saddening. Michael Patrick Hearn, in his essay on “Ruth Plumly Thompson” (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 22: American Writers for Children 1900–1960, 1983), describes Mombi’s death as “perhaps the most unsettling incident” in Thompson’s Oz books. After all, Mombi has not actually harmed anyone in the course of the story (in spite of her evil intentions). In fact she has done a good deed—she has restored Ozma’s father. Her execution is the more startling because it is unusual in Oz justice. As the Tin Woodman said in Land, “It would be an awful thing to kill anyone—even old Mombi!” Among other villains, that perpetual recidivist King Ruggedo is perpetually spared by both Baum and Thompson—exiled or transformed, not killed. Most other villains are spared, too. The only other evil magician executed by Ozma is J. Glegg (Kabumpo) and it is not Ozma’s choice to explode him, but the choice of Glegg’s own magic box.
Mombi at some level may have represented Thompson’s ambivalent feelings about the women’s movement. Mombi, confined to the woman’s traditional sphere of the Kitchen, refuses to accept her fate-she “liberates” herself, and is destroyed for it. Even death does not take Mombi off the scene completely. She is the villain three books later, in The Giant Horse of Oz (1928), by proxy through her creature Quiberon, and her painted image is still able to cause a good deal of mischief in Neill’s Lucky Bucky in Oz (1942). But Mombi is scarcely an upholder of feminist ideals herself. What she wants is to restore King Pastoria, expecting to control the country at second hand by controlling him, as she had done when he reigned before. Pajuka, for all his gallant loyalty, is a goose indeed for accepting the patriarchal view that Pastoria restored by Mombi would make a better ruler than Ozma. Pajuka argues “carelessly” that Ozma “can go back and play with her dolls. She’s only a little girl anyway.” Snip the button boy does not quite approve of this view of the restoration, and obviously Thompson doesn’t, either.
Pajuka, one of the new characters introduced in Lost King, makes an amusing counterpart to Kabumpo. Both of these good-hearted fellows suffer from a notable character flaw—they’re snobs. They both judge Humpy the dummy by appearances and so are deceived, although in comically opposite ways. Pajuka sees a dummy king, and thinks Humpy is the king. Kabumpo sees a dummy king, and thinks Humpy is a dummy. Of course, both are wrong. Humpy is not a king and not stupid. He is an innocent, but he is only a “real” dummy when he mistakes his “reel” experiences for a reliable guide to life outside the theater. For instance, Humpy knows how to stretch out “two fingers of his right hand as he had seen kings in the movies do time and time again” to give the command for Mombi’s execution at once, and it is only Tara’s kindly wisdom that holds Humpy back from this rashness. Humpy, indeed, is a little like the Scarecrow (before the Wizard gaw him his brains), but the Scarecrow, ironically, is wiser from the start, because he knows he is not wise. Humpy at some moments is a “dummy” after all, because he thinks he is a theatrical sophisticate. The comedy of Pajuka, Kabumpo, and Humpy, all confusing appearance and reality, each in a different way, is one of the highlights of Lost King.
John R. Neill brought his usual skill and verve to the book’s illustrations. As Irene Fisher points out in her article on “The Art of John R. Neill” (Baum Bugle (Autumn 1964): 11), Neill during these years was experimenting with black backgrounds for many of his drawings, a technique that “gave his work a new richness and interest, enhanced by bold, crisp pen work.” In Lost King, several of the most effective examples of this use of black are in the chapter headings, with the characters in characteristic poses silhouetted against a triangle of darkness, sometimes straining against the limits of the border, like Snip in Chapter 15, or breaking out of them, like Mombi in Chapter 17. Neill was understandably pleased with them, and told the publisher that the chapter headings “look very well” (in a letter printed in “The Building of an Oz Book,” Baum Bugle (Autumn 1961): 6). In the same letter, he promised, “Of course I’ll be careful with the goose,” and he kept the promise.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice did not much care for history, as represented by the Mouse’s discussion of “Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria.” After all, she said, “what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”
Thompson seems to have had Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole somewhere at the back of her mind when she dropped Snip down the Blankenburg wells. In Chapter 14, he reflects, ”After this, I shall think nothing of falling out of a button tree, or down a flight of steps. Perhaps I’ll try a fall every day just to keep in practice.” Alice’s thought in Wonderland was, ”After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing f tumbling downstairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it even if I fell off the top of the house!” Another Carrollian reminiscence is in Dorothy’s encounter with the Back Woodsmen, where her difficulties in talking “back” and going forward are similar to Alice’s in Through the Looking Glass.
Alice would have enjoyed Royal History as Thompson brought it to life in the royal adventures of The Lost King of Oz. Thompson had already succeeded in combining Baum’s characters with characters of her own invention to take them into farther reaches of the geography of Baum’s Oz and the surrounding lands. The title pages of her books said that they were founded on and continuing the works of L. Frank Baum, the Royal Historian of Oz, but with The Lost King of Oz, she added the dimension of time to her portrayal, and became herself the new Royal Historian of Oz.
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