Glenda The Good Witch In The Wizard Of OZ

In the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, Glenda is the Good Witch of the North, not the South as in the book. She is played in the film by Billie Burke. Glenda performs the functions of not only the novel’s Good Witch of the North and Good Witch of the South, but also the novel’s Queen of Field Mice, by being the one who welcomes Dorothy to Oz, sends her “off to see the Wizard,” and orchestrates her rescue from the deadly poppy field in addition to revealing the secret to going back home.

Combining L. Frank Baum’s original good witches of the North and of the South in the character of Glenda seems to be an attempt to make Baum’s original story more compact, as befits an MGM film musical. A single good witch and a single wicked witch allows for more cohesive and cogent storytelling in a family-entertainment movie that is just over 100 minutes long.

Two good witches would have been superfluous at best, and would not have contributed to the drama and to Dorothy’s personal journey and character growth specifically in any meaningful way, which is what the filmmakers were interested in primarily to begin with. Whereas in an epic novel like Baum’s original, in which Oz is not a dream representing Dorothy’s unsolved inner conflicts but rather an actual country in which Dorothy is trapped for an extended period of real time, having two good witches is dramatically effective.

It must be stressed, however, that even in Baum’s original Oz book series, Glenda practically becomes the only “good witch” in Oz of any consequence. The older-looking Good Witch of the North makes her only speaking appearance towards the beginning of Baum’s first book, re-appearing only as one of the numerous guests at Ozma’s birthday celebrations in the fifth book, after which she is never even mentioned again until much later books written by Ruth Plumly Thompson after Baum’s death. From the 7th book, The Patchwork Girl of Oz onwards, Baum goes so far as to say that “Glenda and the Wizard” are the “only” ones authorized to practice magic in Oz by Queen Ozma, almost leading the readers to believe that he forgot about the Good Witch of the North altogether, if he didn’t deliberately write her character out of his series.

Thus, it might be said that Glenda evolved into the virtually all-knowing and single prominent “good” sorceress in founder L. Frank Baum’s version of Oz, long before she was portrayed that way in the 1939 MGM film; although Baum’s exceedingly refined and no-nonsense type Glenda was the farthest cry from the quirky and bubbly Glenda embodied by Billie Burke in the movie musical.

What’s most interesting about the MGM movie incarnation of the “Good Witch” is that she knew but withheld the truth about the Magic Shoes from Dorothy at the beginning, in order to facilitate her psychological and emotional maturity, suggesting that Billie Burke’s Glenda is not nearly as bubble-brained as she appears to be at first glance, and that her ditzy persona conceals her true depth and adult wisdom.

She is the primary Oz character not to have a counterpart in the sepia-tones of Kansas, suggesting that she might represent the untapped powers of beauty and wisdom in young Dorothy.

In the original novel, of course, the unnamed Good Witch of the North genuinely believed that the Wizard of Oz was the only entity powerful enough to send Dorothy back home to Kansas, while Glenda the Good Witch (later “Sorceress”) of the South does not claim to be in the know of everything until the sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, by which point in time she creates “The Great Book of Records,” which chronicles everything that takes place inside as well as outside Oz.