Blinkie was a Wicked Witch who lived in Jinxland.
Description[]
This evil creature is old and ugly. She is called "Blinkie" because she lost one eye and wears a black patch over it. She carries over her arm a black bag, which contains several packets of powder which she uses in her witchcraft.
Her house has eight sides, with a door and a window in each side. There is a stout post in the center, and a fireplace with a large kettle.
History[]
Famous Forty[]
Blinkie was the leader of all the other Jinxland witches, and therefore the most hated and feared. King Krewl used her witchcraft at times, but she always charged large sums of money or heaps of precious jewels for her services.
When Trot, Cap'n Bill, and Button-Bright arrived in Jinxland, the king was suspicious of them. Blinkie agreed that Cap'n Bill might be a powerful wizard, so she snuck into his room while he was sleeping and transformed him into a grasshopper (with a wooden leg).
She froze the heart of Gloria and was well-paid by King Krewl and his courtier Googly-Goo. But when King Krewl was deposed by the Scarecrow of Oz, Blinkie was quickly captured. The Scarecrow sprinkled a shrinking powder on her, and would not give her the antidote until she righted the wrongs she had committed. By the time the grasshopper was transformed back into Cap'n Bill and Gloria's heart was defrosted, Blinkie was no taller than the Scarecrow's knee. He gave her the antidote to the shrinking powder, which also contained a compound that deprived her of all her magic powers. Since she was then harmless, the Scarecrow sent her home. (The Scarecrow of Oz).
Post-canonical accounts[]
In the post-canonical The Amber Flute of Oz she awakens a gigantic Sand Serpent from the Deadly Desert to conquer Oz shortly after Dorothy left in the first book.
The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in Oz depicted a possible fate for her long after the events of The Scarecrow of Oz; she tries to take back her power by stealing the Magic Belt. She uses its power to deprive Glinda and Ozma of the Great Book of Records and Magic Picture and attempts once again to take over the Land of Oz, freeing the imps of Olite, Udent, and Ertinent (from Ozma and the Little Wizard) to help her. However, she is ultimately purged of all her evil and aggressivity by a Love Potion, whereupon she voluntarily returns the Belt to Dorothy. Grateful, Dorothy promises to ask Ozma to return her original magic powers to the reformed Blinkie and offers her the chance to become "one of her royal magic-makers".
Background[]
In the film that The Scarecrow of Oz novel was loosely based on, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, Blinkie does not appear and instead Mombi is the villain, albeit depicted with a costume reminiscent of the visual appearance of the Wicked Witch of the West. Blinkie is thus a composite characters of Baum's previous two Wicked Witches, although she is presented in the book continuity as a separate individual.
Because Jinxland (where Blinkie is initially found in Baum's works) is part of the Quadling Country, Blinkie is sometimes speculated to be the otherwise-unseen Wicked Witch of the South whose rule over the Quadlings was broken by Glinda long before the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — or, alternatively, that Witch's successor as Wicked Witch of the South. However, she does not have a designation beyond "Wicked Witch" in L. Frank Baum's canonical books.
In post-canonical works by other authors than Baum, other attempts have been made to give an identity to the Wicked Witch of the South, sometimes depicting her defeat by Glinda in ways inconsistent with Blinkie's status at the beginning of The Scarecrow of Oz (such as The Magic Book of Oz, where her name is Kragmagda, and the works of Rachel Cosgrove, where her name is Singra). On the other hand, Lupan Evezan's The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in Oz explicitly refers to Blinkie as the Wicked Witch of the South, albeit in exile.