Witches

Witches occupy a distinctive place in the magical economy of the Land of Spells: they are not remote figures of legend but active tradespeople who make, display, and sell practical enchantments. Their spells can correct bodies, grow flowers, animate broomsticks, and restore a person to a physically natural condition. At the same time, the wider story places their magic beside unpaid household labor and medical care, so that wonder never wholly replaces ordinary responsibility.

Identity and Setting

Witches appear among the spell-making inhabitants of the Land of Spells, a large marketplace crowded with curious shops and stalls. Some shops contain tall wizards, while others hold green-eyed witches who make spells as quickly as they can. The marketplace also includes pixies, gnomes, goblins, and elves, all calling out their wares in high voices. This setting defines the Witches as part of an organized magical trade rather than as solitary outsiders: their power is produced, packaged, advertised, and exchanged in public.

Their work is presented through concrete materials and visible processes. One witch knits stockings from the green smoke rising from her fire, turning an apparently insubstantial substance into something useful. Another applies pink ointment to an elf's broomstick and instructs the rider to say, “Whizz away!” The broomstick then flies into the air with the elf clinging tightly to it. Such scenes make witchcraft resemble a craft profession, with ingredients, techniques, demonstrations, customers, and instructions.

Spells and Practical Magic

The Witches sell enchantments for sharply different purposes. A pixie advertises a spell to make a crooked nose straight, while a gnome offers a spell to grow blue daffodils. These examples place bodily alteration and horticultural transformation in the same commercial field. Magic is therefore neither restricted to one domain nor treated as an abstract mystery; it is a collection of services capable of changing appearance, plant life, and everyday objects.

The most important witch encountered by Jo, Silky, and Moon-Face is a kindly green-eyed practitioner whom they visit because Jo has been turned upside down. She immediately understands the problem and offers a specific remedy: rubbing a Walking-Spell onto the soles of his feet. The spell will make his feet want to walk, forcing him to stand the right way up in order to use them. Her explanation gives the enchantment a functional logic. It is not merely a miracle performed upon Jo but a treatment directed at the bodily mechanism that has been disrupted.

The scene also contrasts the witch's calm competence with the danger of careless or insulting dealings elsewhere in the marketplace. Moon-Face's rudeness makes another spell-seller threaten to turn him into a bouncing ball, a black beetle, or something similar. The Witches' world thus contains both benevolent expertise and volatile magical power. A spell may heal, entertain, or beautify, but it can also become a threat when handled in anger.

Relations with the Children's World

The children's encounters with Witches begin in a spirit of curiosity and consumption. Jo watches a broomstick spell being demonstrated and later keeps a small, heavy pink jar among his pocket rubbish because he has bought whizz-away ointment for the fun of putting it on his mother's broomstick. The jar is found alongside string, bits of paper, a pencil, and marbles. This juxtaposition places a magical commodity inside the ordinary clutter of childhood, making the Land of Spells portable and tempting while also showing how easily wonder can be detached from its original instructions and consequences.

The story repeatedly sets magical possibility against the children's duties at home. Mother assigns Jo and Dick to dig potatoes after tea and asks Bessie and Fanny to finish her ironing while she takes mended clothes to Mrs. Harris. The children had hoped to take Dick to the Enchanted Wood, but they accept that everyone in a family must help when able. Only after promising to complete their jobs does Mother grant them a whole day's holiday. Their visit to magical friends therefore depends upon domestic labor, and the marketplace's spectacular spells exist alongside digging, ironing, cooking, and the management of family time.

This relationship between magic and household life becomes especially clear when Mother falls ill. She remains in bed while the doctor visits each day and advises the girls to keep her warm, give her what she likes to eat, and prevent her from worrying. The children are distressed because they love her and are unused to seeing her weak. Silky responds by proposing a practical magical service: Dame Washalot will wash the family's basket of clothes for nothing because washing is her greatest pleasure. The intervention does not erase care work; it transfers one burden to a magical helper so that the household can concentrate on the sick mother.

Medicine and Narrative Function

When the children later ask a goblin what medicine their mother needs, they cannot name a precise disease. They describe her as white and weak, lying in bed and worrying dreadfully about everything. A goblin recommends a bottle of Get-Well Medicine. Jo brings the large bottle home, pours two teaspoonfuls into a glass, and gives it to Mother. Its smell and taste are pleasant, recalling plums and plum tarts, which makes the magical remedy acceptable within the familiar rituals of medicine and food.

The medicine produces a clear progression of recovery. Mother feels better soon after taking it; by evening she is sitting up, knitting, and by the next morning she is eating a huge breakfast, laughing, and joking. Before the bottle is half-finished, she is up and about again, singing while washing and ironing. The cure therefore restores not only her bodily strength but also her place in the household's daily rhythm. The remaining medicine is put away in case someone else becomes ill, turning a miraculous cure into a stored domestic resource.

Witches and their neighboring spell-sellers consequently serve as a bridge between two systems of care. The doctor observes and advises, the children provide attention, Silky arranges help with the washing, and the Get-Well Medicine supplies the decisive transformation. The narrative does not present magic as an isolated spectacle: it enters the family through bottles, ointment, clothing, food, and bodily routines. Its most reassuring effects are measured by the return of ordinary life.

Significance

The Witches embody a form of magic that is simultaneously marvelous and practical. Their marketplace shows enchantment as specialized labor, while their spells reveal the material vulnerability of bodies, plants, tools, and homes. The Walking-Spell addresses Jo's altered posture through his feet; the broomstick ointment gives an everyday household object the power of flight; and the Get-Well Medicine converts illness into renewed domestic activity.

Their narrative significance lies in this tension between adventure and maintenance. The children may enter a world of green smoke, flying broomsticks, and body-changing spells, but they remain answerable to potatoes, ironing, washing, meals, and the care of an ill mother. Witches expand what can be done, yet the story preserves the value of the work that keeps a family functioning. Magic becomes most beneficial not when it produces spectacle for its own sake, but when skilled intervention returns people to one another and to the shared routines from which their adventures begin.