Episode 1: The Wonderful Wizard of Pegana

Neither yellow, nor brick, but at least a road.

Welcome everyone to the first proper installment of Something About Dragons. I’m your host, James Hedrick. Now, that we’ve dispensed with the podcast backstory and worldbuilding, let’s dig into:

a) one of the most successful stories in the history of popular culture, and

b) a largely forgotten text written by an obscure Irish lord with a penchant for developing chess variations.

I bet you’ll never guess which of these books probably had more influence on Tolkien than any other single story not called Beowulf. Let’s talk about The Wizard of Oz and Time and the Gods.

First, a quick summary. You all know The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Couple of reminders: in the book, Dorothy is much younger than in the movie – probably 6 or 7 in the first novel. Second, the shoes are silver in the book, not ruby. You remember the Munchkins, Glenda, the Winkies, and the Flying Monkeys (they’re being controlled by a magical widget and become good in the end)? Got it? Good. On we go.

Originally, I intended to talk more about the contributions of W.W. Winslow but went a different way with the script. Winslow was the original illustrator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, largely responsible for its visual look, and was generally influential on children’s illustrations and early animation. A good example is Winslow’s depiction of the Cowardly Lion vs. the 1939 movie version played by Bert Lahr. The adaptation is obviously relying heavily on Winslow’s illustrations for the movie. Anyway, he owned half of the copyright to the first book and the subsequent Broadway play. However, he was an alcoholic at a time when that was seen as a moral failure and not a medical issue and ended up dying young. Hugely important to early 20th century illustration and animation and integral to Oz. We shouldn’t forget him.

Also, before we really dive into Oz, let’s address the metaphorical elephant in the room, when it comes to analysis of L. Frank Baum and W.W. Winslow’s masterpiece: Is The Wizard of Oz an allegory?

There is literally an entire Wikipedia Page titled “Political Interpretations of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Is it an allegory for “free silver” or the Gilded Age or monetary policy, or whatever?

No. It’s really not. A guy named Henry Littlefield wrote a political interpretation of The Wizard of Oz in 1964, calling it a "Parable of Populism", kicking off a wave of allegorical interpretations. The official Wizard of Oz website has a whole thing about it. At its heart, Oz is a simple and straightforward portal/quest fantasy, with simple, easily distinguished side-characters, which lends itself to any number of tortured allegorical interpretations. But, the book was explicitly written as a “modernized fairy tale, in which wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” That’s from the April 1900 introduction to the book by L. Frank Baum. If allegory requires intention by the author and not just possible applicability to real life situations, I don’t think you have it in Wizard of Oz. I think you can see plenty of influences and possible interpretations, but it’s more absorbing the milieu, than, say, the specific critiques you might find in something like Gulliver’s Travels. NOT an allegory.

Ok, on to discussion and analysis. The Wizard of Oz represents an early 20th century continuation of a stream of fantastic literature, namely the Victorian Children’s novel (think Alice in Wonderland, Rudyard Kipling, Mother Goose, Grimm’s Fairy tales – Baum cleaned up the Grimm’s long before Walt got his grubby hands on their stories – etc.). But its importance to the fantasy genre has been less literary and more commodification and adaptation. 

First, let’s make clear what a phenomenon Oz was. The most commonly cited statistic I could find was 3 million copies sold by the time the books left copyright in 1956. Other sources cite sales as high as 4.2 million copies. Seeing as the original publisher (George M. Hill) went bankrupt less than 2 years after the book was originally published, this confusion is perhaps understandable. No matter the exact number though, the book itself was a phenomenon. Think turn of the century, late Victorian Harry Potter. Sans transphobia.

And like Harry Potter, Oz got adaptations, spinoffs, and sequels. There was a 1902 traveling musical stage show, a silent film in both 1910 and 1925, before the famous Judy Garland version in 1939. Baum himself produced 14 Oz books (including the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz), while subsequent authors (particularly Ruth Plumly Thompson) continued beating the dead horse and produced the (more or less) official Famous FORTY Oz books. Post-copyright, other authors have produced Oz stories more or less tied to the original, including 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful with James Franco in the title role. It was…fine.

In other words, Baum thinks Kiss’s merchandising efforts are cute. He thinks the MCU is “decent for a bunch of amateurs”. Baum puts Robert Jordan to shame with milking a series, is what I’m saying. I strongly recommend you not state too deeply into the Oz commodification abyss. It will stare back.

In the Prologue, I mentioned that a 1900 start date was relatively arbitrary – and it is – but Oz also really shows the early potential for commodification and adaptation of fantasy properties, even, and perhaps especially, when those properties are targeted to children. Though the traveling musical adaptations were aimed at adults – they were vaudeville-style productions with a lot of topical humor that didn’t exactly age well – we don’t know the name “Oz” today because of that. It’s because the Oz books are beloved children’s stories. The Oz books have been passed down, parent to child, sibling to sibling. In my case, aunt to nephew. Every human being is contractually obligated to have seen the Judy Garland movie at least twice.

But even more than the expansion through adaption, you see Baum fleshing out his secondary world with the Oz sequels. Expanding the depth of the mythology that rewards readers’ ongoing engagement with the material. There’s the through-line of Dorothy in many of the books, but also the Winkie Kingdom and the Tin Woodsman, [Spoiler Alert] Scarecrow as the ruler of the Emerald City, etc.

You definitely saw some really interesting fantastical literary capitalism in the 19th century. For example, Lewis Carroll mentions that there were umbrellas sold in England with figures from Alice in Wonderland carved into them in his letters to the inspiration for the character of Alice and offers to buy her one. But Oz establishes a pattern for how to capitalize on a popular setting and characters and expand them, both into other media, and how the author can deepen their world and expand on the characters, adding depth and growing with their audience. Alice in Wonderland had 1 sequel. Oz had 13 by the original author and 39 in the “official” cannon. This is a glimpse into the development of the genre and publishing at the turn of the 19th century and also the future of the genre and entertainment as a whole. Not to mention the separation of author and creation. We’re entering the great age of IP.

Is this a good or bad thing? Hard to say. You still see this kind of thing today. One of my favorite (relatively) recent examples is the alternate history Emberverse Series by S.M. Stirling. A known property. Familiar characters. It’s not hard to see the appeal of going to that same well over and over. And, as I believe Stirling said in an interview, “I have a mortgage.” But, you’ll find plenty fantasy fans today who wish that some authors would keep their series tighter, even when the incentives of the market are clear and not a new thing. Isacc Asimov used to tell the story of how his publishers basically dragged him into a meeting in the early 80’s and said, essentially, “here’s a big advance. In return, we want a book. And by book, we mean science fiction book. And by science fiction book, we mean Foundation book. Capiche?”

This influence of the financial on the artistic is not new to speculative fiction. It’s always been here, and Oz is an early instance where we see this IP expansion really take off (Tarzan is another), prefiguring our endless modern genre series. 

So, Oz is as influential for commodification of the property and the expansion of a secondary world and characters as it is for any literary influence. What else can we see in Oz?

Well, both within the first book and the subsequent sequels, Oz is often depicted as a fairly utopian place, particularly compared to, say, bleak gray Kansas. In The Emerald City of Oz, Dorothy actually brings Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to live in Oz permanently. Cyclones, earthquakes, and the constant disappearance of their niece having taken quite a toll on their health, apparently.

Anyway, Oz’s natural state as a secondary world appears to be stasis and more or less utopia for everyone within their particular kingdom (the Winkies, the Munchkins, etc.). But Oz is beset by threats from the periphery – adventure has to come from somewhere – which is a fairly staple trope of later doorstopper fantasy, and even sword and sorcery material. You see it in Eddings, in Dragonlance, in a Song of Ice and Fire.

It doesn’t take an advanced literary degree to see the colonial/western echoes here. The – and please hear the air quotes here – “civilized”/peaceful core threatened by the barbaric or degenerate or foreign invasion is so common a trope that we’ll basically come across it in about half the works we read from the next century. At times, this trope bleeds into some pretty racist stuff, even from much later in the century. Just as an example, The Elenium offers examples of some very questionable comments about the mixed heritage of the Zemochs and some pretty racist depictions of the Rendors using lazy Arabic stereotypes.

Anyway, Oz avoids the worst of this tendency, at least in the early books. I’ll admit I haven’t done a close re-read of all 14 of Baum’s books, much less the forty-odd in the official canon, so I might be forgetting something and there’s always the baseline early 20th century racism to contend with. This includes the stereotypical “savage” African depictions of the Tottenhotts in The Patchwork Girl of Oz and Rinkitink in Oz where they are referred to as a "lower form of man."

This is not OK, Frank.

Oz is obviously not solely or largely responsible for the core-periphery issues at play in a lot of 20th century fantasy or the extensive racism, for that matter. It's more a cultural milieu. Particularly in American fantasy, this core-periphery dynamic is almost certainly based on the whole Manifest Destiny, American frontier aesthetic.

This is not to say that this dynamic is solely an American issue. Gondor and Mordor come to mind, although Tolkien sets that conflict up as more state-vs.-state, though the Easterlings do serve as something of an invading barbarian threat, mostly in the background. I think American authors are more steeped in the cultural depictions of the frontier, as something that’s not that far away, either geographically or temporally, particularly in the early 20th century. Baum would have been 20 years old when the Great Sioux War began in 1876. Custer was killed the same year. The Wounded Knee massacre was in 1890, just 10 years before Oz was published. The Apache Wars went through the 1920s. Baum also wrote a couple of editorials on Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee in 1890 and 1891 that do him no favors. They are available here, if you’re interested. They aren’t pretty though.

Suffice it to say, that the idea of the frontier/racism was still a going concern in the early 20th century for Americans and American fantasy writers. It pervades Baum’s work on Oz, as well as later authors, either through direct influence or bubbling up from the same cultural depictions of cowboys and Indians throughout the century. We’ll have more to say on this topic as we read more. Colonialism and racism are major issues throughout fantasy literature in the 1900’s, and only barely start to be reckoned with in the waning years of the 20th century.

So, the thematic takeaways from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are: commodification, the expansion of the secondary world – establishing the world of Oz as a character in and of itself, and the – and again, hear the air quotes – “threat” of the barbaric periphery to the civilized core of square-jawed, sword-wielding, knightly European stand-ins who totally only use violence on the enemies of their static, peaceful world that is obviously not a stratified, authoritarian nightmare. Anyway, yeah, this’ll come up again.

On to Lord Dunsany and Time and the Gods. So, let’s contrast our blatantly commercial children’s cash-grab with the lush prose and narrative-less writings of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, an Anglo-Irish noble who lived in a literal castle built in the [bleep]-ing 1180s. He also, as all biographical writings on him are required to mention, designed a chess variant called “Dunsany’s Chess” where one side is apparently all pawns. Which is in no way relevant but is fascinating. Dunsany served in the Boer War and World War I. He was injured in the Irish Easter Uprising, basically knew every literary figure in the British Isles and beyond. Just imagine your standard late Victorian era military noble and, though it’s a disservice to Dunsany broadly, that’ll get you most of the way there.

So, what is Dunsany’s Time and the Gods? Well, it’s hard to imagine a book in the fantasy genre less like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Time and the Gods is a piece of mythopoeia, a narrative genre where the author creates a fictionalized mythology. Call it “artificial mythology,” though the word mythopoeia had not been applied to such works at the time that Dunsany was writing. Time and the Gods is actually Dunsany’s second book, after The Gods of Pegana (which was self-published, part of the reason I chose Time and the Gods). The books are companions, published back-to-back in 1905 & 1906. Both books – and I picked Time and the Gods because my favorite individual stories are in there – include 30+ short stories that read like myths and legends of the gods (and occasional heroes) of the invented world of Pegana. Honestly, it reads more like some ancient Greek text rather than a piece of modern literature. I got echoes of Hesiod’s Work and Days.

Which is why I think Dunsany is important. It is primarily through his work that fantasy develops its worldbuilding and that hieratic tone you know so well from fantasy prologues and all that other material. Dunsany has many other influential works. We’ll read one – The King of Elfland’s Daughter – as well as story collections like The Sword of Welleran, which we’ll skip – but if you’ve ever watched the prologue from Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That deep, world-shaking tone. Everything is weighted down with portent. Prophecies! Fate! Meddlesome gods! Cate Blanchett! The tone of doom!

It’s like Dunsany wrote down all the good expository, explanatory, worldbuilding stuff then went “who needs a narrative?” packed it up and went home to invent chess variations and become the Irish pistol shooting champion.

Dunsany was also a highly influential writer. It’s not too much to say that his catalogue – directly or indirectly – influenced almost every other single author on this list. Tolkien essentially wrote The Silmarillion as more or less an homage to Dunsany’s works. It was the first thing Tolkien wrote, in fact, though the Silmarillion was published posthumously by his son Christopher in 1977. Neil Gaiman described Dunsany’s writing as “words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible and who has still not yet become sober.” An excellent description. Ursula Le Guin said of Dunsany, “the most imitated, and most inimitable, writer of fantasy is probably Lord Dunsany… Dunsany mined a narrow vein, but it was all pure ore, and all his own.”

Though, to be fair, Le Guin also went on to say, in the same essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, “I have never seen any imitation Dunsany that consisted of anything beyond a lot of elaborate made-up names, some vague descriptions of gorgeous cities and unmentionable dooms, and a great many sentences beginning with ‘And’. Dunsany is indeed the First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy.” She was a fantastic writer. And, you know, not wrong.

More recently, I think modern writers like George RR Martin have taken specifics from Dunsany. I’ve often thought that the characterization of Tyrion in a Song of Fire and Ice might have been inspired by the character of Sarnidac from the story in Time and the Gods, “The Relenting of Sarnidac”.

Similarly, Dunsany and his elaborate pantheon of gods massively influenced Lovecraft, who casts a pretty broad shadow – for better and much worse – across early 20th century speculative fiction. In The Gods of Pegana, the story “Of Skarl the Drummer” tells of how Mana-Yood-Sushai “made the gods and Skarl” and then fell asleep and how Skarl drums eternally for if he were to “cease for an instant” Mana-Yood-Sushai will awake and basically murder them all. Lovecraft basically filed the serial numbers off of Dunsany, threw in some cosmic horror – again echoing Dunsany’s tendency to attempt to describe the indescribable.

Though, and I think this is why Lovecraft enjoys so much more long-term popular fandom, Lovecraft tended to focus on humans encountering the cosmic divine, while Dunsany wrote about the cosmic horrors/gods, mostly about them screwing with humans. For a good example of how Dunsany’s cosmic entities acted, read “The Jest of the Gods,” where said gods spend their whole time screwing with a king, rather than inadvertently driving New England academics mad with terror.

And while folks like Lovecraft built massive pantheons, few can even come close Dunsany. Dunsany writes mostly about gods. Lots, AND LOTS, of gods. Creator gods, gods of the sea, of life, the Lord of All Forgetting (Sirami). Personifications of cosmic forces like Time, interacting with the gods. And you can see in a lot of modern fantasy stories, where folks like Neil Gaiman are mining Dunsany for inspiration for stuff like Sandman or American Gods. The details of the pantheon aren’t important, but the construction of such a deep, layered, and detailed pantheon had many followers, from Tolkien’s pantheon in the Silmarillion to the various D&D pantheons such as Forgotten Realms to Zalazny’s “Lord of Light”. This is where gods and their relationship with their worshipers – religion, basically – get smuggled into fantasy. While it’s comparatively absent in Oz (though Lewis brings it back into YA in Narnia).

Also, and I think this is important, these gods suck. They are meddlesome and they suck. They are far more Greek/Hindu-influenced than the Catholic Church expy of some fantasy (like Eddings) or Robert Jordan’s distant “Creator” god. Basically, if a fantasy book contains gods, or some kind of pantheon, it’s in dialogue with Dunsany. The author is either embracing the capricious, human-like nature of Dunsanian gods (similar to the Norse and Greek pantheons) or rejecting that approach and including a more medievalist, bureaucratic “church” to position the divine further in the background. Nature-worshipping druids are a later addition.

You also get a few of the fun divine tropes of fantasy through Dunsany. The old “Gods need worship to survive” – something that’s at least implied in almost every modern urban fantasy, from Gaiman to Dresden – is present in Dunsany. From “A Legend of the Dawn,” “And men…shall pray to the gods no more, who, having no worship, shall be no more the gods.”

You also get things like the diffusion of power through the pantheon as you get more and more generations of gods. Their power gets more specific and diffuse from Mana-Yood-Sushai on down. Something mirrored in Tolkien’s Silmarillion in Eru and the Valar and the Maiar, down to elves and men.

The gods are susceptible to Fate and other cosmic forces as well, such as Time, originally described as the gods’ “swarthy servant” and “the slave of the gods”, who, eventually, destroys the gods’ favorite city. I’m tempted to read a bit of racial commentary into Dunsany’s depiction of Time as a character. Two of the stories – “Time and the Gods” and “In the Land of Time” – might be Dunsany’s version of the Haitian Revolution, though I have nothing to go on really. Probably less than Littlefield did with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

So, what is the influence of Dunsany on the development of fantasy literature as a genre? Well, if The Wonderful Wizard of Oz foreshadowed the commodification potential of the genre and the appeal of (and potential profit inherent in) elaborate secondary worlds, then Dunsany – particularly in Gods of Pegana and in Time and the Gods – really establishes the language and tone of adult fantasy, particularly all the EPIC stuff, along with many of the tropes of religion and the divine found in fantasy. Worlds about to end. Dark gods coming. He pulls in parallels to Norse and Greek mythology (and other traditions, those are just the ones I’m more familiar with), baking that into the genre along with the pseudo- Catholicism in other, more straightforwardly medievalist works. 

Now, if you want to get into Dunsany, and I recommend that you do, I can’t in good conscience recommend reading ALL his stuff, unless you are an obsessive. The writing is beautiful and lyrical in places, almost more poetry than prose, and you should read it with a meter in your head, but it’s self-consciously pseudo-archaic as well. Which can get tiresome. I’d recommend reading a few stories from Time and the Gods, see if you like his work, and then plunge in. Specifically, I like “Time and the Gods”, “The South Wind,” the description of the gods stripping everything away from Ord the Prophet is wonderfully striking. “In the Land of Time,” where Time, capital T, from the first story, hurls hours and years at an army, ages them, and defeats them. “The Relenting of Sarnidac” which I already mentioned is good. “For the Honour of the Gods” (that’s Honour, with a “U”, cause he’s Irish) has some interesting fantastical colonialism as the characters search for the Three Isles where the gods answer prayers.

Dunsany basically bludgeons you. Over and over again with names, descriptions, etc. It can be a lot. So, read a few, see what you think. It’s not even really necessary to go in order, though some “characters” (and I use the term loosely) like Time do reoccur. Focus on the atmosphere and the prose, let the names sort of glide over and through you, and it can be a lot of fun.

So, Oz sets the stage for elaborate secondary worlds with repeated adventures, while Dunsany set the stage for the treatment of the divine and the tone of more adult, serious fantasy. Personally, I think the tone of something like Dune owes a lot to Dunsany, while the seemingly endless expansion of the books and the IP owes a lot to Oz.

Coming Soon, DUNE! On Ice!

I think that’s enough for now. For our next installment, we’re going to read and discuss Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows and William Hope Hodgson’s A House on the Borderlands. This is a similar pairing to this episode, with a more children’s-oriented story and a more adult, weird fiction-type story. Remember, this is before the genre of “fantasy” had been codified and there’s a lot of oddball kinda stuff around this time that will influence later writers.