Animal Fairy Tales - Contents

Contents

The collection consists of:

• "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)

Of the stories, "The Enchanted Buffalo" is the most-frequently anthologized. The stories were probably written in 1903 and 1904; they resemble other animal tales that Baum wrote during the same period, some of which appeared in his American Fairy Tales (1901), The Twinkle Tales (1906) and as episodes in his novels. Baum's animal tales employ his highly-imaginative style (influenced by his interest in theosophy), and differ from the more-naturalistic tales of contemporaries such as 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 (entitled 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 were never published.

Baum wrote another story for the collection; entitled "The Tiger's Eye", it is a grim, harsh story about evil magic enchanting animals and men which was not printed until 1962. Another edition of Animal Fairy Tales, including the original illustrations by Charles Bull, appeared in 1992.