The Wizard of Oz Book Ending Explained: Glinda's Three Commands

Spoilers for the whole of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, including the last chapter.

Baum’s ending is a sequence of errands. Each companion is delivered somewhere, one at a time, and the girl who did the most walking in the book leaves last and with the least ceremony. The scene at the ruby throne is the final doorway in the playable Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you reach it the way Dorothy does, on foot, from the Emerald City.

🏰 Why does Dorothy have to go to Glinda at all?

Because the Wizard leaves without her. He builds a hot-air balloon, names the Scarecrow ruler of the Emerald City in his place, and calls for Dorothy to climb in. She is a few steps away, carrying Toto back from the crowd, when the ropes snap and the balloon rises with only the Wizard in it.

A soldier then tells the group about Glinda, who rules the Quadlings in the South and might know a way home. The walk there takes five chapters. They get past fighting trees and a country of china people. The Lion kills a giant spider and is made King of Beasts by the forest animals. Dorothy uses her last command of the Golden Cap to have the Winged Monkeys fly them over a hill guarded by the Hammer-Heads.

👑 How does Glinda spend the Golden Cap?

On three flights, one per companion. Glinda asks for the Cap as her price for telling Dorothy the way home, which means she now owns three fresh commands of the Winged Monkeys. She says she will need them exactly three times, and then asks each friend what he plans to do once Dorothy has gone.

The Scarecrow wants to go back to rule the Emerald City, and the first command will carry him to its gates. The Tin Woodman wants to rule the Winkies in the West, and the second will fly him there. The Lion wants his forest, where the animals have just crowned him, and the third will take him home. Glinda tells the Woodman that he is brighter than the Scarecrow when properly polished.

“Am I really wonderful?” asked the Scarecrow. “You are unusual,” replied Glinda.

🐒 What happens to the Winged Monkeys?

They go free, once Glinda has used up the Cap’s three flights. The Monkeys had been bound to serve whoever wore the Cap three times over, and in this book alone they have carried out orders for the Wicked Witch of the West and for Dorothy before Glinda.

Then, having used up the powers of the Golden Cap, I shall give it to the King of the Monkeys, that he and his band may thereafter be free for evermore.

It is the only act in the ending that changes anything for someone outside Dorothy’s party. How the Monkeys came to be enslaved in the first place, and why the book never blames them for what they did under orders, is told in the essay on how dark the book really is.

👠 Why didn’t anyone say so earlier?

Because the people who handed them over did not know either. In Chapter II of the original 1900 text, a Munchkin tells Dorothy there is some charm connected with the shoes, but what it is they never knew. Glinda is the first person to explain that the Silver Shoes carry their wearer anywhere in three steps. When Dorothy hears what that would have meant, her friends answer one by one. Had she left at once, the Scarecrow would still be on his pole, the Woodman would have rusted in the forest, and the Lion would have stayed a coward.

If you had known their power you could have gone back to your Aunt Em the very first day you came to this country.

That exchange is the closest the book comes to a moral, and it comes from the characters, with no comment from the narrator. The 1939 film handles the same moment very differently, which is one of the changes covered in the book-versus-film comparison.

🌾 Where do the shoes go?

They fall off somewhere over the desert, and the book never sends anyone back for them. Dorothy picks up Toto, knocks her heels together three times and gives the shoes their order. Three steps later she rolls over in the grass of the Kansas prairie, and when she stands up she is in her stocking-feet.

The last chapter, Home Again, is a few lines long. Aunt Em runs out of the house, asks where in the world she came from, and Dorothy answers gravely that she came from the Land of Oz. Her last words are the book’s last words: “And oh, Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!” Nobody tells her it was a dream, because in Baum’s 1900 novel it was not one, and Kansas is exactly where she left it.