Baum Vs. Tolkien

Giants of Fantasy

Baum vs. Tolkien. Two giants of Fantasy…. Recently re-reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) I was struck by two similarities in monsters in L. Frank Baum and J. R. R. Tolkien. In that first Oz book, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion form a fellowship and go on a quest to find a way to get Dorothy back to Kansas. In the later part of that search, after the death of the Wicked Witch of West, after the failure of Oz to get Dorothy home, they go South to a land that is blocked by terrors. (They have no ring to throw in a volcano but are seeking Glinda, Good Witch of the South.)

The first of these monsters is the fighting trees. Ent-like, they have hands and faces and legs and block the travelers. The tin Woodsman has an axe, which proves a good weapon. Unlike Gimli, he doesn’t “lower his ax” but uses it to free his companions.

The Fighting Trees vs The Ents

The Scarecrow, who was in the lead, finally discovered a big tree with such wide-spreading branches that there was room for the party to pass underneath. So he walked forward to the tree, but just as he came under the first branches they bent down and twined around him, and the next minute he was raised from the ground and flung headlong among his fellow travelers.

Once they defeat the first tree-men, the rest of the forest lies still:

The other trees of the forest did nothing to keep them back, so they made up their minds that only the first row of trees could bend down their branches, and that probably these were the policemen of the forest, and given this wonderful power in order to keep strangers out of it.

How ent-like that these “policemen” or herders are in charge. Are they more like Old Man Willow or Treebeard?

We got to see this hostile herbage in the film version (though they moved it to earlier in the story) but the next monster never made it in. The Cowardly Lion, now the recipient of Oz’s courage drink, is a brave soul. He meets a forest full of frightened animals who live under the terror of a giant spider.

Two Giant Spiders

“We are all threatened,” answered the tiger, “by a fierce enemy which has lately come into this forest. It is a most tremendous monster, like a great spider, with a body as big as an elephant and legs as long as a tree trunk. It has eight of these long legs, and as the monster crawls through the forest he seizes an animal with a leg and drags it to his mouth, where he eats it as a spider does a fly. Not one of us is safe while this fierce creature is alive, and we had called a meeting to decide how to take care of ourselves when you came among us.”

The spider has feasted on all the other lions. The Cowardly Lion promises to kill the monster if the forest animals will be his subjects.

Spider-Killing Technique

The great spider was lying asleep when the Lion found him, and it looked so ugly that its foe turned up his nose in disgust. Its legs were quite as long as the tiger had said, and its body covered with coarse black hair. It had a great mouth, with a row of sharp teeth a foot long; but its head was joined to the pudgy body by a neck as slender as a wasp’s waist. This gave the Lion a hint of the best way to attack the creature, and as he knew it was easier to fight it asleep than awake, he gave a great spring and landed directly upon the monster’s back. Then, with one blow of his heavy paw, all armed with sharp claws, he knocked the spider’s head from its body. Jumping down, he watched it until the long legs stopped wiggling, when he knew it was quite dead.

Now why didn’t Frodo try that with Shelob? I guess hobbits aren’t as up on spider physiology as lions.

This begs the question for me: did Tolkien read the Oz books as a child (he was 3 when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published), or perhaps to his children when they were young? Being English, he might not have had the same access to Baum that an American would, but Baum was a world-wide phenomenon. Tolkien might have seen the movie in 1939 but since the giant spider isn’t in the film that seems less important.

Conclusion?

I could argue that the fighting trees came from Shakespeare’s MacBeth and the giant spider from Lord Dunsany’s “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” (1910). For that matter, giant spider stories in Weird Tales begin in the 1920. Tolkien was surrounded by many inspirations, largely medieval or older, but popular culture can’t be ruled out completely. I don’t believe he ever referred to Baum or Oz, though it is hard to imagine he wasn’t aware of them when he published The Hobbit (1937), a book supposedly for children. 1937 produced the 31st Oz book, Handy Mandy in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Baum had died in 1919, with Thompson taking over in 1922. Baum vs. Tolkien. Can we ever know?