Land of Oz: Langwidere of Ev

some info on this princess of Ev (i was first introduced to her as Princess Mombi in Return to Oz. she creeped me out!)

Princess Langwidere is a fictional character created by L. Frank Baum, who appears in Ozma of Oz, the third book in the Oz series.[1] Her name is a pun on the words "languid" and "dear" or "languid air". As depicted in an illustration by John R. Neill, Langwidere's looks are styled on the Gibson girl standard of beauty which was popular at the time of this novel's publication.

Dorothy encounters the Princess in the land of Ev, which itself is separated from Oz by the Deadly Desert. After becoming stranded in Ev, Dorothy encounters Tik-Tok the machine man, who informs her that they must go to the royal palace of Ev to gain assistance in finding her way back home.

Along the way they have a run-in with a Wheeler, who informs them that the King of Ev recently committed suicide and the rest of the entire Royal Family of Ev is being held captive by the mysterious Nome King. The Wheeler explains that Princess Langwidere, the late king's niece, was the only living relative of the Royal Family "qualified" enough to assume rule of the kingdom — although this is highly debatable because, as the Princess herself later admits, she only spends 10 minutes of every day actually governing and tending to matters of state, and she would rather spend those 10 minutes admiring her beauty.

Princess Langwidere's most unusual feature is that she has 30 heads that are interchangeable on her neck — instead of changing her clothes every day, she simply changes her head. The heads, which inexplicably keep alive even when not being "worn," are kept in a bejeweled boudoir, and are described as all being very beautiful, running through all combinations of hair and eye colors (except for gray hair and red, tired eyes of course), skin tones, and even noses of different shapes to represent different ethnicities. Langwidere generally spends every waking moment of her life admiring whichever head she's currently wearing in a large mirrored hall, and "changing" heads whenever she wants to adopt a new look.

The theme of interchangeable or detachable heads appears to have been a recurring motif at this point in Baum's writing career. In his fifth Oz book, The Road to Oz, Dorothy and some companions encounter the weird bi-colored creatures called the Scoodlers, each of whom possesses a body with two fronts and no back: each Scoodler's head therefore has two faces, and their heads are detachable. Elsewhere in the same novel, two of Dorothy's companions separately become the victims of similar transformations: first Button-Bright's head is transformed into a fox's head, and then the Shaggy Man's head is transformed into a donkey's head. The latter image was presumably inspired by Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the 1985 movie Return to Oz, the character of Princess Mombi is largely based on Princess Langwidere. Langwidere is the principal villain of the 2006 stage musical Enchanted.