Animal Fairy Tales

Animal Fairy Tales is a collection of short stories written by L. Frank Baum, the creator of the Land of Oz. The stories, animal tales comparable to Aesop's Fables or the Just-So Stories and Jungle Book of Rudyard Kipling, first received magazine publication in 1905. For several decades in the twentieth century, the collection was a "lost" book by Baum; it resurfaced when the International Wizard of Oz Club published the stories in one volume in 1969.^[1]

The nine stories in the collection were printed in nine consecutive monthly issues of The Delineator, a popular women's magazine of the time, from January to September 1905. The tales were part of the magazine's regular feature, "Stories and Pastimes for Children." They were illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull.^[2] (The Delineator had printed Baum's story "A Kidnapped Santa Claus" in December 1904, with illustrations by Frederick Richardson, who had begun illustrating Baum's serialized novel, Queen Zixi of Ix, the previous month in St. Nicholas.)

It is clear that Baum favored book publication for the stories. When his health declined in 1918, Baum worked ahead to prepare books for future publication in the event of his death. He readied three manuscripts, so that his publisher Reilly & Britton could issue annual Baum books through 1921. Two of those books were the last two in his Oz series, The Magic of Oz and Glinda of Oz, which were duly published in 1919 and 1920. The third book was the Animal Fairy Tales.^[3] It is unclear why Reilly & Britton did not publish the book, in 1921 or later.

The contents of the collection are:

• "Prologue" (originally published January 1905)
• "The Story of Jaglon" (January 1905)
• "The Stuffed Alligator" (February 1905)
• "The Discontented Gopher" (March 1905)
• "The Forest Oracle" (April 1905)
• "The Enchanted Buffalo" (May 1905)
• "The Pea-Green Poodle" (June 1905)
• "The Jolly Giraffe of Jomb" (July 1905)
• "The Troubles of Pop Wombat" (August 1905)
• "The Transformation of Bayal the Porcupine" (September 1905).

All of the stories were likely composed in 1903 and 1904; they resemble other animal tales that Baum wrote in the same era, some of which appeared in his American Fairy Tales (1901) and The Twinkle Tales (1906), and as episodes in his novels.^[4] Baum's animal tales are composed in his own highly imaginative vein, colored with his interest in Theosophy, and different from the more naturalistic tales of contemporaries like Albert Bigelow Paine. In "The Story of Jaglon," for example, an orphaned tiger is raised by "Tiger Fairies." (In 1953, Oz author Jack Snow's expansion of this story, titled Jaglon and the Tiger Fairies, was published with illustrations by Dale Ulrey. This was the first in a series of expanded versions of all nine stories planned by Reilly & Lee; but the other eight never appeared.)

Among the nine stories, "The Enchanted Buffalo" is the most frequently anthologized.^[5]

(Baum wrote another story that he intended for the collection; titled "The Tiger's Eye," it is an extraordinarily grim and harsh story about evil magic enchanting animals and men. The story was not printed until 1962.)

Another edition of Animal Fairy Tales, which includes the original illustrations by Charles Bull, appeared in 1992.^[6]

References