Fairy Tale Spotlight: Is Oz Real?

I often make references to the realities of old fairy tales and try to find their basis in ancient lore. I look at fairies and attempt to determine their origins as real and solid creatures who existed in our past. So most of the research material are taken from European fairy tales or the Bible.

L. Frank Baum's Oz is often considered a truly American fairy tail. It isn't the first, but it was the one that got the most popular. In many ways, it surpassed even the European tales. This was mainly because Oz, in reality, belonged to us. They were our tales, and we were to cherish them as a personal matter.

Especially after the 1939 film, Oz became a great source of imagination for both children and adults. And if you were to read the books, it wouldn't stop there. There is a lot to genuinely love about the Oz stories. Even to this day, the books are adapted to movies and children's cartoons. It probably will go on forever.

But Oz is not ancient. It only came into existence in the year of 1900. Before that year, nobody--and I mean NOBODY--knew anything about Oz. So how can Oz be based on anything real if it so obviously came after all the stories that were the cornerstones of the worldwide fairy lore? Heck, it was even written after the Grimm stories, which can technically still be considered modern in the grand scheme of things.

My personal opinion on the realities of Oz is that the actual country of Oz does not exist in the same way that it is depicted in the books. But there is a lot mentioned in his books that seem to ring true. Fairies are represented very well, in fact. They seem to exist on a slightly elevated mental plane than the human characters do. They do things based on their nature, which is correct.

His understanding of good and evil is also very well delivered. I am reminded of his villain Ugu the Shoemaker who committed evil acts purely because he believed anyone else would have done do if given the power he had. And that latter example makes sense when you consider what opportunists fairy people tend to be.

Good characters such as Glinda act appropriately like angels. They serve the other faeries and the humans for their own protection. The princess Ozma, being a young fairy girl, exhibits the childlike whimsy of a pixie while still being somewhat sociopathic in the way she deals with ruling her nation. Everything is very well created and told.

If Baum suffers on any one thing, he sometimes go a little overboard on how magic works. He makes it a little bit overpowered to the point that, if anyone uses it, it tends to just cause chaos. At least he follows through with it! But some aspects of the way he does magic is still relevant to how real magic works, so I think his heart was in the right place.

All in all, I think Oz is not a real place, but the concept of it is surprisingly plausible as a fairy world. It is conceivable that a number of the fairy characters found in Oz could have real life counterparts. Baum was a student of Grimm and Andersen, so he likely wanted to make his own worlds in a way that made sense to him. And if we can take anything front this, L. Frank Baum really did give America its very own beloved fairy tale... and God bless him for it.

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