Mount Runcible

Mount Runcible is a peak in Oz that appears in the Lurlinist creation myth as the place where the Fairy Queen Lurline rested after summoning the land of Oz from the desert, and where she later relieved herself to form the Gillikin River. It is also the site of Saint Aelphaba's legendary retreat behind a waterfall, and its name is invoked in the context of the origin stories of the Animals.

Mythological Origins

In the Lurlinist creation narrative, as recounted by the student Tibbett during a summer of research for Doctor Dillamond, the Fairy Queen Lurline, weary from her aerial travels, called forth a font of water from the desert sands, and the land of Oz sprang up in all its febrile variety. She drank herself into a stupor and went for a long rest on the top of Mount Runcible. When she awoke, she relieved herself copiously, and this became the Gillikin River, running around the vast tracts of the Great Gillikin Forest and skirting through the eastern edges of the Vinkus, and coming to a stop at Restwater. This myth, which Tibbett presented with a theatrical flourish, posits that the animals, terricolous and of a lower order, thought the raging stream was a flood sent to drown their fresh new world. In a panic, they flung themselves into the torrent and attempted to swim through Lurline's urine. Those who became intimidated and turned back remained animals, beasts of burden, slaughtered for flesh, hunted for fun. Those who swam on and made it to the farther shore were given the gifts of consciousness and language, thus becoming Animals.

Association with Saint Aelphaba

Mount Runcible is also the setting for the legend of Saint Aelphaba, the Munchkinlander mystic from whom Elphaba takes her name. According to the story, as retold by one of Sarima's sisters at Kiamo Ko, Saint Aelphaba, a woman of such beauty that local men pestered her for attention, went into the wilderness with her holy scriptures and a single bunch of grapes to preserve her sanctity. She came upon a huge waterfall coursing off a cliff, declared, "This is my cave," and walked right through the screen of pounding water into a cavern hollowed out behind it. There she sat, reading her holy book and pondering spiritual matters, eating a grape every now and then. When she had finished her grapes, she emerged from the cave to find that hundreds of years had passed. A village had been built on the banks of the stream, and the villagers, who had played in the cavern as children, initially shrank in horror. But Saint Aelphaba spoke the old speech, and they knew it must be she, and they built a chapel in her honor. She blessed the children and the elderly, heard confessions, healed the sick, and fed the hungry, then disappeared behind the waterfall again with another bunch of grapes, never to be seen again.

Narrative Significance

The mountain's dual role in both the creation of the Animals and the retreat of a saint underscores the novel's thematic concerns with origins, transformation, and the blurred lines between the sacred and the profane. The myth of Lurline's urination is a crude, bodily act of creation that simultaneously elevates and denigrates the Animals, while Saint Aelphaba's story presents a model of withdrawal and spiritual transcendence. Elphaba, who shares the saint's name and her green skin, is herself a figure who seeks refuge behind a waterfall of sorts—the Cloister of Saint Glinda—after the trauma of Fiyero's disappearance. The legend of Saint Aelphaba, who emerged from her cave to find the world changed, offers a parallel to Elphaba's own journey, though her own "emergence" from the mauntery leads not to sainthood but to a life as the Wicked Witch of the West. The mountain thus serves as a symbolic anchor for the novel's exploration of how stories of origin and transformation shape identity and destiny.