Jinjur is really rather a cipher in the original books. In The Land of Oz, we first see her as General of the Army of Revolt -- consisting of 400 beautifully uniformed girls with knitting needles, which is, as Mombi points out, actually a fairly dangerous proposition. She then turns up very briefly in the next book, assuring the recently installed Princess Ozma that she's happily married (though the man with the nine cows does not appear onstage). And then she reappears about nine books later, no husband in evidence, running a caramel farm in the Ozian countryside at a Convenient Location for that book's main characters to stop by and ask for sanctuary (having been awkwardly transformed by an evil giantess).
So when I got a Yuletide match that asked for a Jinjur story, I had to figure out what sort of background might lead a retired general to go into caramel farming. I decided that (a) Jinjur's parents must have been farmers (very common in Oz), but (b) they must have been growing something very different from caramels. Ergo: pickle farmers. (The story also gave me a chance to poke at some of the stickier continuity issues The Land of Oz raises -- it is, in effect, the equivalent in the Oz series to the The Magician's Nephew in the Narnia canon. There is a longer story in the back of my mind, one that proved too complicated to finish for Yuletide, that draws on both this Jinjur story and "Solitary Sorceress" to really explain the Army of Revolt's origins. But that's likely to simmer for a long while yet before I get round to actually writing it.)
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Wizard of Oz (Baum et al); Narbonic
Date: 2010-10-16 09:34 pm (UTC)So when I got a Yuletide match that asked for a Jinjur story, I had to figure out what sort of background might lead a retired general to go into caramel farming. I decided that (a) Jinjur's parents must have been farmers (very common in Oz), but (b) they must have been growing something very different from caramels. Ergo: pickle farmers. (The story also gave me a chance to poke at some of the stickier continuity issues The Land of Oz raises -- it is, in effect, the equivalent in the Oz series to the The Magician's Nephew in the Narnia canon. There is a longer story in the back of my mind, one that proved too complicated to finish for Yuletide, that draws on both this Jinjur story and "Solitary Sorceress" to really explain the Army of Revolt's origins. But that's likely to simmer for a long while yet before I get round to actually writing it.)