The Tin Woodman of Oz

The Tin Woodman of Oz was published in 1918 and is one of the strangest books in the Oz sequence. The Tin Woodman, who was born human as the Munchkin woodcutter Nick Chopper, has been living alone in his tin castle since the events of the first book. He suddenly remembers Nimmie Amee, the Munchkin girl he was engaged to before the Wicked Witch of the East enchanted his axe to chop off his limbs one by one, forcing him to replace each with tin. He decides to find her and propose.

The journey takes the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Munchkin boy Woot the Wanderer through several countries and into one of the most genuinely uncomfortable scenes in children’s fiction, in which the Tin Woodman meets his own original head, kept on a shelf by the tinsmith Ku-Klip, and has a brief polite conversation with it. The novel also features Captain Fyter, a tin soldier whose history exactly parallels Nick Chopper’s. The horror-comedy of the embodied-identity material is unique in the canon. Worth reading for the strangeness alone.