Reading Rinkitink in Oz Aloud to My Son

Rinkitink in Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

Rinkitink in Oz, like The Scarecrow of Oz opens outside of Oz and mostly takes place there, too. The protagonist is Prince Inga of Pingaree; his peaceful island nation is sacked by raiders from the islands of Regos and Coregos, and his parents kidnapped. Along with King Rinkitink of Rinkitink and the king's talking goat Bilbil, Inga has to travel to Regos and Coregos to liberate his people, and then go to the Nome Kingdom to find his parents. Near the end, though, Dorothy and the Wizard come to help him, and the character briefly visit Oz.

Originally published: 1916
Acquired and read aloud: April 2022

I didn't know the circumstances of this book's creation when I was a child. Baum wrote what was initially called King Rinkitink around 1905, after he had written just two Oz books, and a few non-Oz fantasies, including The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. He never published King Rinkitink, though, and thus when he didn't have time to write a new Oz book in 1916, he pulled King Rinkitink out of a drawer, edited some of the continuity to make it fit what had happened in the Oz books (particularly the deposition of the Nome King in Tik-Tok of Oz), and totally replaced the ending so that Dorothy showed up to save the day. (He must have been thinking of somehow incorporating Rinkitink into the Oz mythos for some time, though, since the countries from it all appear on the map in the Tik-Tok endpapers, published in 1914.)

Something I never noticed until reading it aloud to a three-year-old is that it's very different tonally from most other Oz books. The dangers in Oz books are often very abstract, things that it's hard to be scared of. But in Rinkitink, the raiders from Regos and Coregos go around destroying buildings and whole societies; Inga's parents are constantly being threatened with destruction. It's more of a boy's adventure story than the gentle fantasies of most Oz novels. My son reacted very strongly to this, often crying out "no!" and hiding under the sheets as I read and telling me it was very scary. Though when I asked if I should stop reading it, he said, "No, I like being scared." But still he continued to react strongly, and it was enough that my wife suggested that maybe I shouldn't be reading him the Oz books until he is older. But my memory is that Rinkitink is very much an outlier in this way, and if we got through it, things ought to return to normal.

I asked my son what he thought of it when we were done, and he said, "I liked the good parts and didn't like the bad parts." Well, fair enough. The "bad parts," on probing, were any time anything was destroyed, or anyone was threatened with destruction. The good parts were all the rest of it.

I don't really remember what I thought of the book as a kid, but I enjoyed it as an adult. Baum has a tendency to undercut his protagonists, but here, even though Inga is aided by some Magic Pearls (given to his ancestors by a mermaid queen, presumably the same one we met in The Sea Fairies), he shows himself to be brave, resourceful, and clever, reasoning his own way out of many of the tricky situations he ends up in. Dorothy saving him in the ending is a little frustrating, but before that, Inga has managed to escape death at the hands of the Nome King many times, and I didn't find it too bad. What did bother me is that the King of Regos and Queen of Coregos die off-page through the total happenstance of their boat hitting a storm! No comeuppance for Inga there.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript to King Rinkitink no longer exists, so we don't know how Inga would have saved his parents without Dorothy's intervention. The International Wizard of Oz Club ran a competition in 2017 for fans to come up with an alternative ending without Oz elements, and published the winner as a new edition called King Rinkitink; I'll have to check it out at some point.

If King Rinkitink had been published when originally intended, it would have been the first appearance of the Nome King (aside from a minor cameo in Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), but by the time Rinkitink in Oz came out, the Nomes had been the antagonists in three Oz novels: Ozma, Emerald City, and Tik-Tok. In Tik-Tok, the original Nome King, Ruggedo né Roquat, is deposed, and he is replaced by his own chief steward, Kaliko. As a result, Baum seemingly just went through the Rinkitink manuscript and replaced the name. Some people argue that this results in a discontinuity: Kaliko is a nicer ruler in Tik-Tok than Ruggedo had been, but in Rinkitink, he enchants Inga's parents and will not let them go. I think people who argue this, though, are overlooking that Kaliko is not "nicer" in the sense that he is a "good person" overall. Rather, Kaliko is "nicer" in two ways: one, he is less cruel toward the Nomes themselves and thus a more popular ruler, and two, he is more deferential to people from Oz because they have more power than the Nomes and have defeated them on many occasions. Kaliko has no reason to be nice to Inga, and indeed, being nice to Inga would require him to break his word to Regos and Coregos, and we know from Ozma of Oz the extent to which Nomes will go to keep their deals. But as soon as Dorothy and the Wizard show up, Kaliko is highly deferential. It's all politics! As always, I enjoyed getting to use my very snobby-but-deferential Kaliko voice, especially with Kaliko being king. I had him always saying quite terrible things to Inga and Rinkitink, but sounding very apologetic in doing so.

Note that the Wizard considers Bilbil very unusual because he's a talking animal even though he's never been to Oz... but he meets Bilbil in the Nome Kingdom, which lies underneath the Land of Ev, and in Ozma of Oz the ordinary American chicken Billina becomes capable of speech when she arrives in Ev. 

The other thing that occurred to me on this read is that people from Pingaree age normally. This would be quite sad if you think about it: Inga may be good friends with Dorothy now because they are seemingly the same age, but in another couple decades, Dorothy will still be about ten while Inga will be an adult, and by the present day, Dorothy will still be about ten... but Inga will be dead! Dorothy may live forever, but she can never be friends with someone from outside Oz. I am given to understand, though, that Inga does return in Sherwood Smith's Trouble under Oz (2006), so I am curious to see how she handles this issue. Only forty-two more books until we find out!