Dorothy and Company arrive at a very odd village. It's inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic foxes. The fox-people are initially suspicious of the newcomers, but the power of the Love Magnet quickly turns that to friendship. Our heroes are conveyed to the throne room of King Renard IV, the ruler of the foxes, known to his friends as Dox.
King Dox knows Dorothy, at least by reputation. He knows she's a good friend of Ozma, and he begs Dorothy to cadge him an invitation to Ozma's upcoming birthday party. This isn't just social climbing by King Dox, it's an IMPORTANT PLOT POINT.
The fox king also points out something to Dorothy which should have been blindingly obvious already: she's not in Kansas any more. Turns out there aren't any towns of anthropomorphic fox-people in Kansas. Not even in Lawrence. To her credit, she knew something magical was going on, but was still bound to a Euclidean world-view. She's also completely un-worried about dear old Auntie Em and Uncle Henry. They're used to her mysterious disappearances by now.
Completely besotted by the Love Magnet, King Dox is even impressed by Button-Bright, and in a scene reminiscent of the Peter Sellers film Being There, he takes the boy's simple-minded answers as signs of great cleverness. To reward Button-Bright for being as clever as a fox, the King uses his own magic to give the lad a fox head. Naturally, Button-Bright is a bit upset by this at first, but when King Dox's three fox daughters exclaim how handsome he is, the boy adjusts with amazing speed.
"I think we ought to be going now," says the Shaggy Man, showing rare good sense for a shaggy proto-hippie. But the King prevails on them to spend the night, so that Mr. Baum can spend some time describing the clothing and domestic architecture of the fox-people.
After a pleasant visit (except for the involuntary fox-head transformation) the three travelers head out. As they leave the fox King gives them a warning: the next town along the road is inhabited by "big stupid beasts." Uh-oh.
But before they meet any big stupid beasts, they meet one of my favorite Oz characters: Polychrome, the Rainbow's daughter. She's a cloud fairy who normally lives on her father's rainbow, but carelessly stepped off and so is stuck on Earth until she can get home again. Needless to say she's unhappy, though she constantly dances around to keep warm.
Following her usual practice, Dorothy invites her to join the party of adventurers, so Polychrome literally dances along with them as they proceed. It's a shame none of the later Oz books weren't put on film after the success of the movie The Wizard of Oz -- one can only imagine the nifty dance numbers Hollywood choreographers could have created for Polychrome.
The Rainbow's Daughter also points up one of the things I always found very impressive about the Oz books: they don't rely much on pre-existing mythology. Polychrome isn't the daughter of Iris, the Greek goddess of the rainbow; nor does she live on Bifrost, the Norse rainbow bridge. She's one of the Daughters of the Rainbow, sky fairies invented by one L. Frank Baum his own self.
In fact, as far as I know Baum almost never uses existing legends in his tales. The fairies of Oz and environs have almost nothing to do with the Fair Folk of European legends, and as for Yookoohoos and Erbs, they're unique. The Nomes are pretty close to traditional Dwarfs, and there are occasional dragons, but that's about it.
And on the few occasions when Baum does employ stock legends, he Baum-ifies them. Probably the greatest example of this is his take on Santa Claus. Baum's Santa isn't Saint Nicholas, and he doesn't live at the North Pole. He hangs around in the Forest of Burzee and is helped in his toymaking by Rylls and Knooks. He's a completely Baumian creation who manages to have all the external apparatus of the Anglo-Dutch-American Christmas folklore figure.
Anyway. They reach the next town and discover that the "beasts" the foxes warned them about are donkeys. A farm girl like Dorothy and a hobo like the Shaggy Man aren't afraid of donkeys, and try to manage them in the customary fashion by hitting them with sticks. But these donkeys are frightfully civilized. Under the effect of the Love Magnet they become very friendly toward the visitors -- so friendly that King Kik-a-bray, the ruler of the donkeys, uses his own Magic Staff to bestow a handsome donkey head on the Shaggy Man.
Unsurprisingly the Shaggy Man isn't very happy about this, but the donkey king isn't any better at reversing his enchantments than the fox king. Happily, he does know of one way to do it: there's a pond in Oz called the Truth Pond which can restore anything to its proper form. All the Shaggy Man and Button-Bright need to do is go there and dunk their heads in.
The king also tries to get an invitation to Ozma's party, which Dorothy agrees to ask her friend about. If you ever hold an event and need to pad out the guest list, just invite Dorothy. By the time she arrives she'll have collected a group of half a dozen hangers-on and passed out invites to everyone she meets along the way. Kind of like asking Lindsay Lohan, only without the booze and drugs.
I do wonder if the conflict between the foxes and the donkeys is supposed to be commentary on current events by Mr. Baum. The war between the Japanese and Russians had recently ended thanks to the diplomatic efforts of Theodore Roosevelt, the most Dorothy-like of any American President (they've even got the same first name, just reversed). Two kingdoms, both convinced they are the superior civilization, in a conflict resolved (more or less) by a plucky American? It could be just coincidence. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Next time: things get noisy.
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