The Runaway Shadows

"The Runaway Shadows, or A Trick of Jack Frost" is a twentieth-century fairy tale, a fantasy short story written by L. Frank Baum, famous as the creator of the Land of Oz. The story is one of a small cluster of Baum narratives that involve his fantasy land the Forest of Burzee and its exotic denizens. Arguably, Burzee constitutes Baum's second most important fantasy realm after Oz itself, being employed in his novels The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) and Queen Zixi of Ix (1905) and several of his short stories, and is referenced in The Road to Oz (1909).

"The Runaway Shadows" was first published on 5 June 1901, in some of the newspapers that had published Baum's American Fairy Tales in the spring of the same year. The story was projected as part of that collection, but was omitted when the book was published in October 1901.[1][2]

The story was reprinted in the April 1962 issue of The Baum Bugle. It also appeared in a 1980 edition of Baum's short fiction released by the International Wizard of Oz Club.[3]

  1. ^ Michael O'Neal Riley, Oz and Beyond: the Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, Lawrence, KS, University Press of Kansas, 1997; p. 72.
  2. ^ L. Frank Baum, American Fairy Tale, with an Introduction by Martin Gardner, New York, Dover, 1978; Introduction, p. xiii.
  3. ^ L. Frank Baum, The Runaway Shadows and Other Stories, with an Introduction by C. Warren Hollister, Escanaba, MI, International Wizard of Oz Club, 1980.