Seriously, how was The Grand High Witch's plan supposed to work in the long run?! Even if the kids didn't turn into mice until the next day after eating the candy laced with mouse potion, somebody would surely connect the dots and notice that the day before all the children in England mysteriously disappeared was also the day when candy stores all over the country were handing out free candy! Sure, nobody would be able to prove anything, but the police would certainly start investigating, at least some of the witches would be held for interrogation (they would have to leave their real names to be able to legally buy and run a bakery! Remember that in this world the witches didn't live independently in some alternate dimension, they had their regular lives and would therefore be easy to track down) and pretty soon it would be discovered that all of the mysterious candy-selling women happened to be bald, clawed and toeless... Even if they somehow all cast a memory wiping spell on the cops, people would still know who ran all the candy shops tied to the mass disappearance of their children, and no witch in England could ever remain unnoticed again.
Fridge Brilliance: It's likely that a number of the witches noticed all the flaws in this plan but decided not to bring them up, so they wouldn't get fried by her!
No one is going to believe that the children of the world disappeared because someone gave them magic candy. By the moment someone would connect the dots, months would've passed and even then it will be a pretty hard theory to prove or even to convince local authorities to believe. And let's say they did believe, then what? They arrest one of the witches that gave free candy and she would say: "You're crazy, it is normal candy!" And then the lab will show that it's normal candy- unless somehow the labs can spot magic?
Furthermore, keep in mind that the Grand High Witch has a small Deus ex Machina in the form of her perfect counterfeiting machine — while they may trace some of the disappeared children back to the briefly-open candy shops, the witches will be miles away with unquestionable documents and loads of freshly-printed money.
However, it was never stated that the witches planned to abandon the shops immediately after the children received the candy; that in itself may lead to investigation. The (semi-)pragmatic ones will recognise that more children will come (perhaps they were out of town when the shop opened, or need candy specially formulated for their diets, or just aren't old enough for it yet) and want to keep running the business (hey, selling untainted candy to adults must be a pretty good line of income and you can't always go back to the GHW for handouts).
The problem with that is that the magic potion is fiendishly complicated to make, and the GHW only gives them so much (enough for about five hundred doses, IIRC). This raises another issue: one kid could say to another kid "I'll give you my free chocolate for X", or some greedy or mean kids take or steal more than their fair share - what does an overdose of the potion do?
The novel actually does show what an overdose does — it shortens the time until transformation. A massive overdose, like the ones the witches had (approximately 6 doses per witch) sets off the transformation immediately. We don't have the exact time to calculate a ratio, but that means even one extra dose would significantly shorten the child's remaining time as a human. In the hypothetical scenario, that means the greedy children would transform early, possibly waking up as mice, possibly turning into mice in the bathtub. Which is Fridge Horror right there...
My guess is that the witches (or at least the smarter ones) only spike a certain number of sweets with Mouse Maker with most being untainted in case an adult came in or if children wanted more than one.
Also, it's not so much a problem for the younger witches who could procure the ingredients and manufacture more of the potion with relative ease. It was only the Ancient Ones who had to receive bottles directly from the GHW (presumably, she could keep sending them more over time if more children should appear in their districts).
Also, it's only targeted towards children. It doesn't stop parents having more babies or teenagers who will be having children in a few years' time. The witches' efforts will have been for naught.
GHW isn't exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier. She apparently failed to test her potion to figure out if the mouse-kids could talk or not, and if they would be inclined to fall for mouse traps. If she had, the boy and Bruno would have been caught and killed before they could find Grandmamma. The boy even lampshades this in the ending, pointing out that GHW didn't think a lot of her plan through. Plus, given the other witches' reactions to GHW saying they need to get rid of all the children, they're used to doing one child a week because it's Pragmatic Villainy; one kid going missing randomly is one thing, but a bunch of them is very suspicious. If a grownup had eaten the bar, as one witch brings up, they could figure out the situation and scream at someone to put away the shotgun while showing them the candy.
It seems to be almost a Running Gag that Dahl's antagonists are usually very, very stupid, usually due to their evil blinding them, The Grand High Witch clearly didn't think this through enough for the plan to actually work fully, so high on her own ego as the most powerful witch that she doesn't get that after the first batches turned children to mice would alert people. Which would probably result in at least a Broken Masquerade seeing as people's kids turning into mice would be unexplainable by normal means, especially as normal adults would be with their kids when they go to the shop.
It's strongly implied that the witches had no idea the children would still be able to talk as mice. And not in Helium Speech, either, as the book states outright that the main character sounds just the same as he ever did. Sadly, Fridge Horror ensues, since the formula must have been tested at some point. So if they don't know that a child remains vocal and intelligent after the transformation, they most likely didn't leave the child alive long enough to find out...
The witches have no hair on their heads, but do they have eyebrows and eyelashes? (And I guess the same question would be true for arm and body hair but those wouldn't give them away as weird-looking in the same way that not having eyebrows or eyelashes would.)
According to the illustrations, witches do have eyebrows. Of course, it's possible they just pencil them in, a fashion that's come and gone over the years.
Grandmamma just says they're always bald. Hair just doesn't grow on their head.
And even if they don't, eyebrows can easily be drawn on via makeup and fake eyelashes glued on.
If witches had no eyebrows and needed to pencil them in, the drawn-on eyebrows would've been on Grandmamma's list of signs to look for when recognising a witch - they'd be easier to notice than some of the other signs at least, like the light bluish tinge on the teeth from the blue spit. From that, we can infer that witches do have eyebrows and likely eyelashes as well.
At what age do children stop giving out "stink waves"? Is it during puberty, age 13, or age 18?
Given how the words child and teenager have firmly entrenched meanings in Britain, I would say that it starts to dissipate at thirteen.
Presumably puberty setting in has an effect on it. The sweat glands become more active during puberty, so maybe that has something to do with it?
It's doubtful that it has to do with sweat. If that was it, wouldn't witches also hate clean adults?
What the hell was the GHW’s plan if an adult saw the transformation?! Maybe a kid was sick the next day, or their teachers saw it? It wouldn’t take long for people to connect the dots that the day before was the day the candy stores opened, and then they’d start asking questions...
That's why the time delay is used. The potion won't turn the child into a mouse for twelve hours, so it would take a lot of digging for some people to work out that it was caused by getting chocolate from a specific shop.
What if a kid or 12 didn’t go and get candy?
The Grand High Witch, while an evil mastermind, is not a rational thinker. She thinks of children as greedy idiots who would of course eat free chocolate and set up their own downfall. But she possibly might come up with alternate plans if she saw that some children survived this wave of extermination.
What exactly is the long-time goal of the witches? I mean they seem to live within human society to some extent, but murdering all children (first in Britain, then everywhere) would, eventually, lead to the extinction of humanity. What will they do then? Or is that exactly what they want?
Total human extinction, probably, so witches can take over society.
It's really up to you to interpret. No goal beyond "wipe out all the children" is given. Fridge Logic suggests that they could never truly wipe out every child on Earth; there's just too few witches to many thousands of children per district and as pointed out elsewhere on this page, not all children would die from the Formula 86 plot. But the witches will still try their damnedest, or else the GHW will be most displeased.
Small thing in the grand scheme of things but can witches reproduce? Grandmamma states outright that they are a completely different species to humans, meaning they probably couldn’t procreate with human males. Are there male witches? Are witches functionally immortal unless they are directly killed? All of these might seem inconsequential, except that the Grand High Witch makes a point to fry at least one witch per yearly meeting, meaning that without a means of making more witches, the entire witch population of the world is going to be dwindled one by one (No wonder they were doing such a poor job of wiping out all the children). And say witches could have babies - how would they even take care of them if they hate children so much?
The narrator explicitly states that there are no male witches in the opening chapter of the novel. There's really no way to say if they are immortal or not based on the text, but you'll see that it doesn't matter. In the final chapter, Grandmamma also states that there is always a new GHW waiting to take over if her predecessor dies. From that we can infer that there must be a fresh supply of witches, in particular senior ones ready to be groomed into the role of GHW, certainly in Norway specifically. It's not an unfair assumption to then extrapolate that witches are generally capable of reproducing, because the alternative is, like you inferred, that they would gradually become extinct by the whims of their leader. She's cruel enough to murder any individuals she's displeased with, but no way would she want to actually genocide her own species and ruin their life mission. And how do they reproduce? Well, they have Bizarre Alien Biology (Grandmamma says they're more like demons) so we aren't really to know how from the text. If it has to be biological, two possible explanations are that their ova are capable of same-sex reproduction, or they could use parthenogenesis which permits asexual reproduction. Or there could be magic involved which nullifies the need for normal reproductive biology. As for raising their offspring? Maybe they get birthed in adult form (physically, if not in mind). Or else, hey, they only hate human children. And mainly for their smell. Witch babies/children would not repulse them.
In Dahl's other book The BFG, giants are all male and the titular Big Friendly Giant says that they just appear. It could be the same for the witches.
It's mentioned at the beginning of the book that there are witches in every country. If that's the case, how could witches function in a place like North Korea or Afghanistan (especially under the Taliban) where they would face notable restrictions on their basic movements, where mass surveillance might increase the chance of being caught and where the GHW couldn't contact them easily (or at least not be able to hold huge meetings)?
Because the witches are not suggested (at least in the novel) to have any level of mind-controlling powers, then they probably just have to fit into the constraints of the societies they inhabit and use their established advantages to level the playing field. In Afghanistan, if they're ugly enough, maybe some of them straight up try to pass as mennote Humorously, you may recall that many of the witches at the gathering in the 1990 adaptation were indeed blatantly portrayed by men, so damn straight they can be ugly enough!, and wear clothing in certain ways to conceal any curves they may have. These faux-man-witches could then assist the more beautiful (and/or those with such large feminine curves that they would be impossible to conceal) ones (who anyway, remember, would still nevertheless have to wear a full-body hijab in public) by masquerading as their husband or other male family member and thus allowing them to move more freely in public, supposedly "under his supervision". They work in pairs (or larger groups possibly) so as to operate in their districts, in much the same way individual witches operate in the societies of more free countries. Any nosy man who steps out of bounds and tries to uncover this secret is subjected to the same discreet execution they condemn the children to, and in a generally chaotic and war-torn society, he's not really gonna be noticed missing if he disappears. If it's too much of a stretch to consider witches in drag, then I guess they have to straight up bribe certain men to perform this role for them instead (remember they have a magic money machine, and also CIA operators literally laid the groundwork for the invasion in 2001 by buying loyalties with bags of cash and with the help of the Green Berets, similarly the US did this earlier for the Soviet invasion and also by means of arming the mujaheddin). Whether those men are with the Taliban or just ruthless individuals who don't care about the occasional death of a child in exchange for life-changing wealth, it doesn't really matter which. Also, keep in mind that as of 2024, only slightly over a quarter of the Afghan population lives in urban areas. As shown in movies such as Lone Survivor, much of the population still resides in rural regions such as mountains, deserts and plains. Here, the level of surveillance capability by the Taliban would be somewhat patchy, and (while it's hard to confirm) they still might not control all the territory in every province. As for North Korea, it's again hard to know much about that society, actually even more so. However, it can be surmised that the ruling Kim regime, the military (also controlled by the regime), or the Workers' Party of Korea (same again) enjoy more freedom of movement than any other citizens. We can discard the idea of witches infiltrating the dynasty, because the Kims would surely see that as an attempt by a foreign entity (that is, the worldwide witch movement led by the GHW in Norway) to undermine their Divine Rule. So they would have to infiltrate the military or lower levels of the WPK instead. Apply the same ideas of "either witches in drag or else working to corrupt key male members in these groups" as for Afghanistan, to North Korea. If it's not exclusively about money as the means to bribe, then perhaps they could also make a deal with certain players where, in exchange for helping to root out dissident members of society, they get more free movement and the consequential ability to (slowly) prune the child population. Also, female service in the military has been voluntary since 1948, but since 2015, it was made mandatory. If the witches can ascend to important ranks as females (rather than in drag), peaking at various flavours of general or admiral, they can likewise likely enjoy a good amount of free rein. Granted, there would be some issues given women face grave risks during North Korean service (and not just from combat), and also they wouldn't be able to expose their bare hands or feet, but again bribery could play a part there. Finally, as regards the GHW visiting these countries to convene with her underling witches there. She most likely has a private jet and her witch pilots may know entry routes to Afghanistan and North Korea which do not face customs and border patrols, or air force intervention (granted, the Afghan Air Force is basically non-existent since the takeover by the Taliban in 2021). Presume that, at that point, it is easier for these witches, established to have forced some freedom of movement for themselves by the previously mentioned underhanded tactics, to go to her at a meeting point than for her to find a way to get to them. She is a European Caucasian witch and she will stick out like a sore thumb to the authorities in the witches' districts (unless she poses as, say, the Russian Ambassador). However, they may be forced to meet with her one at a time, to avoid suspicion. Also, in the digital age, she can use secured online communication channels such as with the Signal messaging app to instruct witches that way. But they'd have to make the physical meetup happen before the advent of encrypted digital comms, for as long as they had the ability to do their evil work in these countries. Presume that she is not quite so willing to fry witches who operate under such difficult circumstances in these nations.
Even if they can blend in, what's stopping them from being arrested or executed for something unrelated to children or just being unlucky enough to caught up some other situation such as famine. Also even if the Grand High Witch has her own aircraft, won't it be picked by radar once it approaches?
Tying into the above, how witches function in more chaotic and less lawful country such as a failed state or a state facing civil war. Since they pretty much barred for leaving the country they operate in, does that mean that they basically have to stay put and deal with whatever's going on.
What would happened if a witch died from something mundane such as a car accident (assuming that such a thing is possible)? Wouldn't a coroner find it somewhat suspicious if they got a dead body with toeless feet and clawed hands?
First, witches probably can be killed by car accidents and the like, seeing how the witches of England and the GHW get chopped up and killed after turning into mice.
Secondly, this is a bit of a stretch, but there are more mundane reasons for someone to be bald and toeless and have clawed hands. Clawed hands can be dismissed as very long, poorly maintained nails; cancer treatment and/or alopecia areata can explain the baldness; and either injuries or certain conditions like diabetes can explain the lack of toes (my old piano teacher had/has diabetes and had to have her toes amputated - granted, not all of them, but still).
That doesn't quite account for the issues with their digits (or lack thereof in the case of toes). The claws were described as being more like those of a cat, and completely unlike fingernails, which probably would raise eyebrows to the point that further biological testing is attempted (because this is not a human corpse they're looking at). Likewise, the feet were noted as having completely square stumps; human feet don't have a rectangular shape which would permit that kind of stump even after amputation. On top of that, anybody in the district the witch lived in who knew her would be able to attest that she was somehow capable of walking perfectly and gracefully despite this (even though squeezing her feet into the shoes made her internally uncomfortable, but they keep up The Masquerade so well that they never break their poker faces), which is another red flag in the question of "was this individual ever an actual human?".
Thirdly, coroners in some parts of the world at least will be at least somewhat knowledgeable about witches - Grandmamma says that they're an open secret in Norway at least, though that's likely an exception rather than the norm.
After the narrator is turned into a mouse, the Grand High Witch immediately attempts to capture/kill him with a mousetrap and a piece of cheese as she would an ordinary mouse, however, since the narrator retains his human mind and intelligence, he doesn't fall for it and instead runs away as fast as he can. Wouldn't that have tipped the GHW off at least slightly that her plan wouldn't quite work if the transformed mice-children are smart enough to avoid mousetraps?
It's said that if a witch doesn't bump off at least one child a week, she gets "grumpy." What does that mean? Do they just stew in their rage until they get the chance or do they eventually go crazy.
How would witches blend in if they lived in a more tropical or warmer country. Wouldn't people look at them weird for wearing gloves and tiny heeled shoes in such an environment or would they have something planned.
It's a long shot but part of the witche's scheme involve praying on the naive nature of children and a lack of supervision. How would they be able to maintain a one child a week target in the current era where kids are generally more suspicious of strangers and less trusting. Tying into that, what if a witch was caught on camera, in the area where a child went missing or would they have some kind of spell to nullify this.
