Mombi

Also Known As: usually “old Mombi”; called the old Gillikin Witch in Ruth Plumly Thompson’s continuation; guardian of the boy Tippetarius, who was really Princess Ozma
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: She works transformation magic on herself and on others, shifting shape under pressure faster than most practitioners manage at leisure.
Role in Mythos: She is the witch who hid the rightful ruler of Oz by turning a princess into a farm boy, and the obstacle Glinda has to run down before Ozma can be restored.
Relation to Humans: Her Gillikin neighbours suspected her of illegal magic and kept their distance, treating her shyly but respectfully. The one person who lived with her was a foundling she worked in the fields and planned to convert into a garden ornament.

The pepper-box was old and its label had faded to almost nothing, but a crooked wizard had written two words across it in lead pencil, and old Mombi had traded hard for the privilege of reading them. She stood at the bend in the road at dusk with her basket set down in the dust, and she shook the powder over a scarecrow’s grinning pumpkin head the way a cook peppers a baked potato. Then she raised her left hand with the little finger pointed up and said, “Weaugh!”

That is the whole of her in one gesture. A woman who will test a stolen secret on the nearest available object, immediately, in the road, before she has even carried her groceries home.

She belongs to L. Frank Baum, who put her into *The Marvelous Land of Oz* in 1904, the second of the Oz books, and she is not folklore. Nobody told stories about Mombi before Baum wrote her; everything that circulates about her now runs back to that one novel and to the people who continued it. Her country is the Gillikin, the northern quadrant of Oz, and strictly speaking she is not a witch at all. The Good Witch who ruled that part of the land had forbidden any other Witch to exist in her dominions, so Mombi’s ambitions had to be filed under a lesser heading. A Sorceress. At most a Wizardess. It is a lovely bit of bureaucratic comedy, and it fools nobody in the book, least of all the neighbours, who treated her carefully and did not visit.

Her farm is small and specific. A round, dome-shaped house, which is how nearly all farmhouses in Oz are built. Pigs. Corn to be hoed and husked. A four-horned cow that was her especial pride. A great chest of keepsakes with purple trousers, a red shirt and a pink vest dotted with white lying at the bottom of it. And a boy called Tip, short for Tippetarius, brought to her young, set to carrying firewood, who hated her openly and took no trouble to hide it.

The powder worked. What she did with that discovery says more about her than any of the magic does: she danced, threw her stick in the air and caught it, hugged herself with both arms and tried a step of a jig, shouting that the thing was alive. Then she shut it in the cow stable and turned her attention to the boy who had been laughing at her from behind the hedge.

The kettle came down off its hook that night. Equal parts milk and vinegar, herbs and powders added by the packet, the recipe read off a sheet of yellow paper held close to the candle. An hour went by in that kitchen with nothing to hear but the pot working and the fire hissing, and the shadows the candle threw on the wall were quite enough on their own. The plan was a marble statue. She meant to plant a flower garden in the spring and stand the boy in the middle of it as an ornament, and she was cheerful about it. “I seldom make a mistake.” Tip did not wait for daybreak.

All of that is the small crime. The large one was twelve years old by then. The Wizard of Oz, having taken the throne from a king called Pastoria, had an infant daughter to dispose of, and he paid Mombi three visits about it. She took the baby and she took the fee, which was every conjuring trick the Wizard knew, some of them real and some of them, by her own account, frauds. Then she hid the girl by making her a boy, and kept him, and put him to work milking the cow.

Glinda came for that story with an immense white pearl in a golden casket, which she hung over her heart and explained would stay white only while the truth was being spoken. Mombi’s opening answer was that the Wizard had visited her to learn her recipe for tea biscuits. “Look up,” Glinda said. “What is the colour of my pearl?” It was black.

Cornered, she ran through shapes the way other people run through excuses. First she swapped faces with Jellia Jamb, a palace maid, and let Jinjur’s soldiers hand the girl over to Glinda in her place. When that unravelled she became a rose, and spent an entire night lying still in the Tin Woodman’s buttonhole against his tin chest, enjoying in advance the humiliation of a sorceress who could not find her. A tremble in her own red leaves gave her away. Then a shadow gliding along the wall of the tent toward a doorway that closed in her face. Then a black ant on ground that had been pitched flat and hard, with no crack anywhere to take her. Then, in a rush that tore the silk of the tent wide open, a griffin.

The griffin was a good choice and it very nearly worked, because a griffin can run. What it could not do was outlast the Saw-Horse, a thing made of wood with no lungs to empty. After an hour the breath began to go out of it. It reached the edge of the deadly desert and tried the sand, and the sand took its feet, and it went down panting and lay still. Glinda came up unhurried on a horse that was not tired, unwound a slender golden thread from her girdle and dropped it over the creature’s head, and the shape shuddered once and vanished, leaving an old woman glaring up out of the sand at a face she could not disturb.

She kept her side of the bargain in the end. Offered a choice between death and a draught that would empty her of every spell she had ever learned, she chose to talk, and then agreed to undo the enchantment herself, since Glinda would not touch transformation work and said so with visible disdain. So Mombi squatted on the floor of the tent, kindled a small fire of dried herbs pulled from her own bosom, threw a handful of powder into the blaze and filled the whole tent with a rich violet vapour sweet enough to make a wooden horse sneeze. She chanted something nobody present could follow, bent her lean body back and forth over the flame seven times, stood up and shouted a single word. The air cleared. The pink gossamer curtains of the couch trembled. The girl who rose off the cushions had been a boy for as long as anyone in that tent had known him.

Her powers are narrow and deep. Transformation is the whole of her art, and she is quick at it, quicker under threat than most practitioners are with time to prepare, and she can work it on another person as readily as on herself, which is the rarer trick and the one that made her worth hunting. She kept a magic mirror in her pocket for looking at trouble before it arrived. She could animate the inanimate, after a fashion.

Almost none of it was hers. The Powder of Life came from a crooked wizard in a mountain cave, in trade. The good tricks came from the Wizard of Oz as the price of a kidnapping. The recipes came off yellow paper. She is a collector rather than a maker, and against Glinda, who has the same arts with far more discipline behind them, she loses every single exchange. She lost the last one because a griffin has to breathe.

Two decades later Ruth Plumly Thompson brought her back in *The Lost King of Oz* (1925), magicless, working as a cook, hunting for the king she had enchanted into a shape she could no longer remember. Oz does not often execute anybody. It did this time. Dorothy proposed water, Ozma agreed, and Sir Hokus and the Scarecrow went off to carry out the sentence and came back holding a pair of buckled shoes, which was all that was left of her.

The Mombi most people picture is neither of those. Disney’s *Return to Oz* (1985) handed Jean Marsh a Princess Mombi welded together out of Baum’s witch and Princess Langwidere from *Ozma of Oz*: a beauty with a gallery of interchangeable heads kept in glass cases, taken from the people of Oz. Baum’s version has one head, keeps a four-horned cow, and is the more frightening of the two.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mombi in the Wizard of Oz books?

Mombi is a Gillikin sorceress from L. Frank Baum’s *The Marvelous Land of Oz* (1904), the second Oz novel. She is the guardian of a boy called Tip, and the villain of the book. She is not a character in the first Oz novel and does not appear in the 1939 film.

What did Mombi do to Ozma?

Mombi transformed the infant Princess Ozma into a boy and renamed her Tippetarius, called Tip. The Wizard of Oz had taken the throne from Ozma’s father, King Pastoria, and brought the baby to Mombi to be hidden; he paid her with every magic trick he knew. Mombi then raised Tip as a farm labourer for years without telling him who he was.

What shapes does Mombi turn into?

When Glinda corners her, Mombi swaps appearances with the palace maid Jellia Jamb, then becomes a rose, a shadow, a black ant, and finally a griffin. The griffin nearly escapes across the deadly desert but collapses from exhaustion, and Glinda destroys the transformation with a golden thread thrown over its head.

How does Mombi die?

Mombi does not die in Baum’s books. Glinda strips her of her magic and she disappears from Baum’s series. Ruth Plumly Thompson later revived her in *The Lost King of Oz* (1925), where Ozma sentences her to be doused with water; she melts, leaving only her buckled shoes.

Is the Mombi in Return to Oz the same character?

Not exactly. The 1985 Disney film *Return to Oz* combines Baum’s Mombi with Princess Langwidere from *Ozma of Oz* to create Princess Mombi, played by Jean Marsh, who collects and swaps interchangeable heads. Baum’s Mombi has no head collection and is an old Gillikin farm woman rather than a palace beauty.