Flying Monkeys

The Flying Monkeys are a hybrid species of winged primates created by Elphaba through experimental surgery and sorcery at Kiamo Ko, where they serve as her familiars, messengers, and enforcers. They embody the intersection of her scientific training under Doctor Dillamond, her desperate need for allies in her isolated mountain fortress, and the moral ambiguity that increasingly defines her later years. The most prominent among them is Chistery, a snow monkey who becomes Elphaba's closest nonhuman companion and who, like his kin, exists in a liminal state between animal and Animal, tool and subject.

Creation and Scientific Method

Elphaba developed the Flying Monkeys by stitching the wings of white-crested male rocs into the back muscles of snow monkeys, a procedure she perfected over years of "botched and hideous failures" that often required mercy killing. She drew on Fiyero's old life-science schoolbooks from Doctor Nikidik's course and on the Grimmerie, which provided spells to "convince the axial nerves to think skyward instead of treeward." The surgery was a practical application of Doctor Dillamond's theories about the biological continuity between species—the same theories that had once promised to undermine the Wizard's Banns on Animal Mobility. Elphaba never succeeded in breeding a winged baby monkey, but the existing population took to flying better than they had to language.

Chistery: The First and Most Capable

Chistery, a baby snow monkey Elphaba rescued from Killyjoy on a small island in a mountain tarn, became the patriarch of the castle menagerie. He learned to speak in words of one syllable—"Spit," "Spared," "Spored," "Spite"—but plateaued there, never grasping clear meaning. Elphaba's desperate attempts to teach him to say "spirit" became a private ritual of hope and failure. Despite his linguistic limits, Chistery served as Elphaba's hands: he held surgical instruments during operations, carried messages, escorted Nanny down stairs, and once dumped the little dog Toto into the fishwell on Elphaba's orders. He was devoted to Nanny in her old age, leaning his head on her shoulder as she hobbled about.

Role in Elphaba's Household

The Flying Monkeys functioned as Elphaba's air force and labor corps. They carried out kidnappings—most notably snatching Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion from the mountainside and depositing them in Kiamo Ko's courtyard—and served as escorts for guests, however unwilling. They were also the only creatures Elphaba trusted to handle the Grimmerie's pages. When the Wizard's soldiers under Commander Cherrystone kidnapped Sarima and her family, the sisters tried to tie messages to the crows' feet, but the crows refused to be liberated; the monkeys, by contrast, remained loyal. Elphaba's relationship with them was pragmatic rather than sentimental: she called them "the hobbled together, the disenfranchised, and the abused," a category that included herself.

Thematic Significance

The Flying Monkeys are Elphaba's most concrete legacy of scientific ambition and moral compromise. They represent her attempt to bridge the gap between her youthful Animal-rights activism and her later isolation, but they also mark her descent into the very instrumentalization of life she had once fought against. Like the Lion cub she had defended in Doctor Nikidik's lecture hall, the monkeys are creatures remade by human will, their bodies altered to serve purposes not their own. Elphaba's failure to teach them language—her inability to make them fully Animals rather than animals—mirrors her own failed quest for connection and meaning. In the end, they are the only family she has left, and they outlive her, scattered and purposeless after her death.