A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering A Wizard of Earthsea, first published by Parnassus Press in 1968. My edition is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Graphia Imprint, 2012, and this installment of the reread covers the entire novel.
Every generation has its wizards.
At least since Tolkien’s Gandalf made the character-type approachable, if distant; an aid, ally, and possible friend, rather than a mystery, threat, or oaf—the subject of Christian damnation and Disneyan animation. True that’s not many generations of wizard-havers, but upon rereading Le Guin’s first major fantasy novel, and her first work ostensibly for children, I cannot help but feel a bit let down that my generation grew up with the middlebrow juggernaut of the Harry Potter series and the lowbrow action of Faerûn’s Elminster, instead of with Le Guin’s excerpts of the mythic Deed of Ged. (Just a bit, mind you.)
A Wizard of Earthsea is as magisterial as, though in an entirely different manner to, the previous books in this reread. The tone of Le Guin’s writing is simpler and sparser than in The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, the political intrigue largely absent, but A Wizard of Earthsea for all its scant 200 pages still clings to the heart, impresses with its beauty, and reveals an incredible depth to the storyworld that calls out for exploration. And like the science fiction novels we’ve covered previously, Wizard ends with more questions asked than answered. For heaven’s sake, Earthsea is an archipelago of dozens of nation-states bound together culturally by geographical circumstances, shared myth and history, and a vague infrastructure of college-trained mages. Not to mention dragons, Old Powers, and lands beyond death. There’s so much to explore, and yet we only get glimpses—at least in this book (four more novels and a story collection follow).
In the midst of these fantastic set-dressings, Le Guin’s focus remains tightly on character, on the boy (then man) named Ged who struggles against great powers (dragons, witches, evil flagstones) but none greater than the evil within himself, the truth of his own mortality and eventual death. Wizard isn’t interested in Ged as the all-powerful archmage we are told from the beginning he will one day become; it’s a fact of the story—not taken for granted like Harry Potter’s specialness because, well, he’s the protagonist—but a detail about the future stated and set aside in order to focus on the story at hand. Le Guin instead brings us into the adolescence of a great wizard yet to be, telling the unsung song of how his childish folly, his desire for power for personal gain, forced him to confront the darkness in himself.
That said, I’m not sure I would’ve appreciated this so-called YA novel at 11 the same way I did Harry Potter, which had the benefit of a character roughly my age and with whom I and many others quite literally grew up. But Harry Potter didn’t challenge or call me to some deeper understanding of self; it became a part of me easily without seeking to change me—a comfortable and familiar sweater, something shared by millions of others, each of us nodding in acknowledgment of the other sweater-wearers as though our choice of interest made us unique. Of course, reading Wizard by the millions wouldn’t have made us any more unique than reading Harry Potter did, but it might’ve taught us more. What Le Guin gave us was a song only for us, a song unknown even in Earthsea, a secret shared between Ged and me and you: the Song of the Shadow.
Magic and Power
There are thousands of fantasy novels, many with magic and magic-users populating their worlds, and a great many derive their understanding of what magic is—or could be—from a few sources, Dungeons & Dragons principal among them. Let me pause, however, to say that I do not necessarily find this a fault of fantasy worldbuilding: A great many novels beyond those published with the TSR and Wizards of the Coast imprints are clearly based on a D&D-inspired understanding of fantasy, which itself drew heavily on Tolkien. One of the greatest fantasy series, to me, hews incredibly closely to the D&D formulae, Elizabeth Moon’s The Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy (which is also not a little inspired by Earthsea).
A problem for some readers, however, is that magic in much of fantasy is taken for granted. Even in Tolkien, magic is not so much a thing understood by the reader (or the Hobbits or Men or Elves or Dwarves we come into contact with), as a thing that acts when and where it is needed. This is one of Tolkien’s key plotting strategies: big moments of magic or extra-natural catharsis (the Eagles!). We don’t even know what exactly wizards do except, apparently, know things and make fireworks (a lot more interesting, at least, than that stupid Tyrion Lannister slogan). In Harry Potter, magic may be omnipresent, but its limits, its possibilities, its bases are just as unfathomable as whatever the hell Gandalf does. Sure, “It’s leviOsa, not levioSA!” and you’ve got to wave the wand a certain way. But aside from the occasional rule and magic being semi-hereditary and some people being (naturally or not?) better than others at it, we know next to nothing about it. Harry Potter is encyclopedic in its elaboration of the storyworld, of what magic looks like, but it’s all surface; dig in and it crumbles. A Wizard of Earthsea introduced to the annals of magic in fantasy something quite a bit different.
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In the late 1960s, fantasy as a capital-F genre was not yet fully born but in the process of becoming. Tolkien had come into widespread popularity in the U.S. thanks to Ace Books’s bootleg printing of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by a big kerfuffle from Tolkien and a legitimate printing by Ballantine (all of this despite Tolkien’s dislike of the “degenerate” form of the mass-market paperback). What we call fantasy in retrospect had been around for decades (or centuries or millennia, depending on what genre historian you ask and their school of thought), but Tolkien sparked a desire for secondary-world tales like his, leading to a number of efforts to reduplicate his success. Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series (not as exciting as it sounds, but much cooler!), shepherded by editor Lin Carter, created something of a canon for fantasy throughout the late Sixties and early Seventies by reprinting novels and story collections from the last hundred years, with occasional new works. Ballantine then struck gold with Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara in 1977 and that, coupled with the D&D boom of the Eighties, helped cement the genre as we know it today.
A Wizard of Earthsea came in to all of this as it was happening and provided or enhanced a few staple traits of the genre: the wizard “school,” the magic of names, the questing wizard, rings of power, transmogrification, and wizardly familiars, to a name a few. It is a short powerhouse of a novel that sees Ged grow from boy to powerful wizard in under a hundred pages, and in the next hundred he defeats a dragon (with a conversation based on something he remembered from a history book!), ventures into and out of the land of the dead, journeys across the breadth of his known world twice, fends off a timeless evil (trapped in a castle flagstone) that has manipulated his path since childhood, and confronts his gebbeth-self. It is over in a breath, but it’s the satisfying breath of mountain air or salty sea-wind; it replenishes.
As a short fantasy novel intended for young adults, it might be easy to dismiss Wizard as having little to say about the grand ideas that define Le Guin’s science fiction. This is an unfortunate reduplication of genre self-consciousness that often plays out in SFF circles: “Literary” fiction looks down on genre, but within genre SF looks down on fantasy; within genre, SF is the terrain of ideas and seriousness, fantasy the realm of magic, entertainment, and childishness. But Wizard is surprisingly in tune with a great deal of what is said about power in The Dispossessed, even if it “fails” to imagine wizards as anything but men and relies on the trope of the evil temptress-sorceress to spur the male hero’s development. Like The Lord of the Rings, Wizard contends that power is a constant threat always to be guarded against, ready to corrupt through folly and arrogance and bend to the will of darker, older forces. But whereas Tolkien rarely shows us the possible ramifications of power’s corruption (here I’m thinking of Samwise’s vision while carrying the ring for Frodo, turned into an awesome musical number by Rankin and Bass), preferring to let his Christological conception of good versus evil speak for itself, Le Guin inhabits a much less binarily divergent world. Hers is instead capable of recognizing—and indeed of requiring—overlap between good and evil: Western fantasy written by a Taoist.
Power, in Wizard, is largely a function of magic, but magic is not a force to be used however one desires. It has a cost, it adheres to a sort of arcane physics, each act implying an equally powerful reaction, as well as a moral one; each act done out of greed, for example, furthering the ends of evil. Despite this strong sense of moral compass at work in magic, Le Guin’s Earthsea is not a universally moralizing storyworld as Tolkien’s is. People (or dragons or Old Powers) are not “evil” in the sense that they serve some grand design working toward the end of the world orchestrated by some hidden, all-powerful evil. Rather, evil is evil because it is judged by someone to be of harm to others. It is Odonianism of a kind masquerading in the language of another genre.
Ged’s shadow-self is evil only in the sense that he misunderstands and fears it, unleashing it into the world through the follies of arrogance and pride so tied up in the masculinity of a young boy trying to impress those who challenge him. The shadow is a threat to his life and as a gebbeth, whether killing others or potentially taking his powers to harm others, becomes a threat to more than himself. It is evil because it does harm, not because it is a malevolent monstrosity from a realm beyond death. And what’s more, it is a necessary evil that Ged must recognize as a part of himself, as a thing always to be struggled with—all the more so because he is a mage of significant prowess. Only by coming to terms with this, with the evil (i.e. the ability to do harm to others) in him, does he complete his quest.
Moreover, Wizard shares with The Dispossessed a concern about knowledge and the power that knowledge brings with it. Magic in Earthsea is a kind of knowledge, an arcane knowing beyond the ken of most people, and yet knowledge is also always incomplete. Even the Master Namer—the mage who learns and writes the true names of all beings and things and places—even his work is never done. So vast is the world that it cannot be fully known, yet there are ways of knowing and of gaining power through that knowing all the same. And that knowledge can be a temptation, as the dragon Yemaud and the Old Power of Terrenon demonstrate as they try to bind Ged to their will. Knowledge is power, and that power may be used to better or to harm. The mage may kill and control, but he may also bring a ship safely home and heal wounds.
The Unsung Song
If there’s one thing us lovers of fantasy appreciate, it’s maps and settings. And Earthsea delivers! Le Guin brings us an archipelago of disparate kingdoms and peoples bound together by a semblance of shared culture and languages—Hardic—set against those of people dwelling at the edges of the archipelago, the Oskillians and Kargs. Yet this world, somewhat akin technologically to our Bronze Age, is such that kingdoms remain small, folks travel little, fauna remains local (otaks on Roke, harrekki in the East Reach), and knowledge (in the forms of gossip, tales, and epic songs) circulates through traders and itinerant sorcerers. Earthsea is expertly shaped to the particularities of sea-going archipelagic life and reminds me of nowhere so intensely as the Aegean peoples of Homer’s Iliad—hardy, stubborn, geographically distinct yet bound by shared histories, myths, and enemies to the east (only this time they’re warmongering white-people led by god-brothers, perhaps inspired by Romulus and Remus of Roman myth). Earthsea is a physically known world to its inhabitants, but one steeped in mysteries. As Ged’s best friend Vetch puts it, a ship never arrives from a land whose name is unknown, but dragons and Old Powers and other mysteries (the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, anyone?) nonetheless lie scattered throughout the islands.
Of great importance to the people of Earthsea is song. I’m a sucker for song in fantasy, a bard stan to the end, and it’s an honest shame that Le Guin—a talented poet!—never tries her hand at some of the oral epic poetry that circulates the isles. As in ancient Greece (and among the Indo-European cultures generally, as well as many others besides), stories of Earthsea’s heroes and history are transmitted orally through sung, semi-formulaic poetry. From the beginning we are told by our distant narrator that the present tale about a wizard of Earthsea (and there’s a whole other thing: a wizard, not the wizard!) is about the eponymous subject of the Deed of Ged, but it’s not until the novel’s end that we discovered this is a tale not recorded in the Deed, and even though Vetch promised to weave it into song, no song telling of Ged’s trial against the shadow, himself, is known. Truly, even Vetch does not know what happened between Ged and his shadow—that is for Ged and for us.
It’s an important tale, this Song of the Shadow, so why does it remain unsung in Earthsea, left out of the Deed of Ged? That’s an easy question to ask and inversely difficult to answer, because frankly I don’t know. I like to think it’s because Le Guin keeps the story for us, to teach us, because to know is to have power over. Just as we know Ged’s true name and thus have power over him, so are we able to know the darkest secrets of his life, the folly and greed and ambition that brought him face to face with that which we all fear. To have this story is to have power, for through this self-recognition and shadow-trial Ged gains the fullness of being that allows his power to culminate in him being among the greatest wizards in Earthsea’s history. It is a knowledge we have to use wisely.
But I don’t know. It’s not a wholly satisfactory answer. Maybe it’s because stories of heroes are meant to be about great people without flaws, about warriors and mages at the peak of their power. Great deeds are not deeds of atonement, but of imposition and triumph thereover. Is Ged’s story in Wizard a triumph? Would the people in the meadhall understand the epic meaning of Ged’s confrontation with his shadow-self? But this answer isn’t very helpful either, since anyone who’s pushed through Homeric or Sanskrit or Anglo-Saxon or Biblical verse knows that heroes are usually not ideal beings; like the gods, they’re often assholes. Powerful, yes, but not aspirational.
I’m sure there are many more possible answers, but I’d like to hear your responses: What does this song going unsung in Earthsea mean? Beyond that, what does A Wizard of Earthsea mean to you? When did you first read it and, if you’ve reread it, how has it changed for you?
A Wizard of Earthsea leaves me wanting more, not because I am unsatisfied but because it awakens in me a hunger for more of Earthsea. No doubt, I have not said enough in these hundreds of words to capture all my responses to rereading Wizard, and I’m sure you have thoughts and challenges prompted by what few responses I’ve been able to put down in these dark times. At the very least, I console myself by remembering that I can return to Wizard whenever I want and seek new knowing in its depths. And I can venture to still further shores in the Earthsea books to come.
Please join me in three weeks, April 29, for The Tombs of Atuan, a book I treasure even more dearly than Wizard and am excited to read again after so many years. In the meantime, may the winds carry your ship to gentler seas!
Sean Guynes is a critic, writer, and editor currently working on a book about how the Korean War changed American science fiction, and co-writing a book on whiteness for the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. For politics, publishing, and SFF content, follow him on Twitter @saguynes.
I had been meaning to finally read some Ursula K. Le Guin for years. I had started and put down within a few pages Left Hand of Darkness years ago – long enough ago that I don’t remember why, only that I did. When my family decided to take one last road trip to see extended family in the US Mountain West before all the hubbub broke out, I needed things to help keep me awake driving and settled on audiobooks, which I’ve only recently come to enjoy.
Looking through my local library’s collection of downloadable audiobooks, I saw A Wizard of Earthsea and decided it was time to try Le Guin again; the short run time helped.
I am so thrilled I did. It was glorious to listen to and I immediately started downloading the rest of the series, so I am very much looking forward to this re-read series.
As for your question: why is the Song of Shadow left out, not sung as part of the Deed of Ged?
My headcanon is that both Ged and Vetch realized that if they explained how he defeated the shadow, some foolhardy young wizard would learn of it, and then intentionally follow in Ged’s footsteps thinking he could summon up this dark form and now easily defeat it. But I suspect that Ged’s defeat of the shadow was not simply a case of turning to face his hunter and become the hunter, but also a result of his immense power, of his learned humility because of that immense power, along with a hearty dose of luck. Something that others couldn’t hope to reproduce. And since the shadows are so dangerous, even for the archmage of the time, it was decided to leave that knowledge and power untapped. We have the tale, but it was never crafted into the songs that followed.
Regarding the song unsung: Maybe Le Guin omitted an explicit poetic song to give other people hope: it can be done. But everybody is different, will encounter other obstacles, needs to fight different shadows. So it is impossible. Better to leave it to your own imagination and let everybody find their own path?
I always figured that Vetch’s song didn’t catch on because the theme of accepting one’s shadow self didn’t appeal to listeners who wanted clearer, less subtle victories. May e it was construed as reflecting badly on a man who became a major hero admired by huge swatches of the Archipelago.
Let Guin was the daughter of Anthropologists, specializing in Native American cultures, and it shows in her world building. While the bronze age Greece meme is clear, the system of magic,and elements of the cultures have a non-western feel. Earthsea is not a thinely disguised medieval Europe, not that there’s anything wrong with world’s that are, it’s just nice to see one that’s not.
I just love the Tombs of Atuan basically it’s a companion piece to Wizard being about a girl growing into her power and wisdom.
WOE came after Tolkien for me in my teens (early sixties). I was dubious at first because the novel was so short, but I loved the Pauline Ellison illustrations for the Bantam paperbacks. I was deeply affected by the novel and rushed to get the next two in the trilogy (which I loved as well). More poetic than Tolkien (for me) and less “epic” as you point out. The story seemed to be more modern to me. The impact of rereading led me to Jung, looking for that “shadow-self” idea. I’ve been reading the trilogy over and over for years. I recommend it constantly as a bookseller for people who want more Harry Potter-type novels. I’ve never had anyone complain about the recommendation.
Nearing my seventies now, I find myself going back to the authors who moved me and made me think. Your essay brought WOE to life again for me. Now where is that one volume book club edition? I need to start rereading.
@@@@@#3: Interesting remark about the lack of Eurocentrism in the books of Earthsea. Indeed, taoism is very present in them. Including the notion of not doing vs doing, and that of self-aggrandizement diminishing one’s soul, and the need of not-doing and diminishing in order to spiritually grow. Also, Le Guin expressed repeatedly that the peoples of the Archipelago were not white. IIRC, their complexion was said to resemble more that of Polinesians (or something to the same effect). Also IIRC, in the far future, the peoples were suppossed to have mixed and humans were all distinctively non-white, in a similar vein to the peoples of the Archipelago.
One of the many things I have always loved about Earthsea is the low body count, meaning, very few of the problems faced by the characters are solved by violence. The is the bloody Karg raid at the beginning of Wizard, during which Ged is a child and deploys magic for concealment and misdirection rather than direct violence. After that, the only actual human death I can recall directly attributable to Ged is Mannan in Tombs, which is unintentional and affects both Ged and Tenar deeply. As someone philosophically opposed to violence in almost all circumstances, this is absolutely refreshing compared to the swordplay (or energy-weapon battles) that dominate so much of SFF.
S
I read the first three books of Earthsea when I was in-between installment of the Harry Potter series. Wizard was a very different look at a school of magic, a sort of older mythical fantasy compared with the modern fantasy of the Potter books. Points to Le Guin for going in a different direction from stock medieval fantasy. Her later Earthsea books are something of a mixed bag, but i will always hold the original trilogy in high regard.
Le Guin included a nice tip of the hat to Tolkien, appropriately in her language. “Earthsea” in the Old Speech is “Tolkinien”.
Thanks for this great reread series!
I first read the first three Earthsea books when I was about 10-12 in the mid-90’s. The books were totally engrossing, totally amazing to me. I didn’t realize until much later what an impact they have had on my thinking and life.
To me, the Song of the Shadow being unsung reflects a truth that is some things we must do alone, or are best done alone. Some things are so deeply personal, they are beyond words… not Ursula’s words, but words to convey your experience to another. Some things can only be experienced, and not shared.
Speak for yourself. I don’t see how anybody could consider, for example, Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet or N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy as “childish” or mere entertainment. Or Lord of the Rings, come to that.
I disovered the Earthsea trilogy in college (late 70s/early 80s), after Tolkein & Narnia, about the same time I first read Stephen Donaldson. I was pleasantly suprised in th 90s when Tehanu came out, and the rest of the Earthsea books, as I had wanted to know more of Tenar’s story.
I agree with princessroxana that the story of the awakening, of the shadow and the quest to name and control it are very personal. My story is that Vetch did write a song, but it isn’t well known as it’s not nearly as exciting as the story of a wizard who restores the ring of Erreth Abke or returns from death. And yet I think Ged’s power comes from knowing himself so well, both the full and the empty parts of himself, being able to recognize that in others.
I think this story is not part of the Deed of Ged because it’s not flashy enough. It’s an indictment of the people who retell and consume the epic tales (who are power-makers and trendsetters in this society) that they’re only interested in tales of outward power.
My headcanon is that Ged’s defeat of the dragon IS part of early sections of the Deed of Ged, but shorn of all context.
(Also, I just realized – why is it the deed of Ged? Why isn’t it the Deed of Sparrowhawk?)
I demarcate Fantasy as pre-Shannara and post-Shannara.
The Earthsea trilogy, and the Riddlle-Master trilogy by Patricia McKillip are some of the most thoughtful explorations of this space as I’ve ever read. They both highlight characters discovering their place in, and the need to care for, a larger world made more fragile by their power.
As you point out, this contrasts with the myriad personified evils that happened from Shannara onward. The threat to Middle-Earth isn’t personified by Sauron’s ambition. That’s background detail. Sauron’s lure is temptation, the threat is made real by falling in love with Middle-Earth, which is why the Scouring of the Shire is such a gut-punch.
I grew up in the 1980s, and thought that Fantasy was a genre that men simply were incapable of writing. They wanted personified evil and great striving and women as back-talking tokens who became submissive when the Protagonist had Protagonist-grade problems, and were as self-reflective as an anvil.
It took finding Loyd Alexander’s Prydain books — also Homeric pre-Shannara fantasy — to find fantasy written by a man that stood up.
@11
Don’t have a copy of the book handy, but I seem to recall that, once an Earthsear was dead, their true name could be known and used by anyone, although it was a secret while they were alive. Sparrowhawk was a usename and any number of people, past, present and future, could have borne it, but there was and only would be one Ged. A story of his life would have to identify him unambiguously.
I think that songs and sagas are public items, in the days before Romanticism, while Ged’s struggle with his shadow is a private affair. Maybe that is why it was not sung, because the rest of us have no call or claim upon it, no right to sing it.
Very nice. A callback to my reading this in the early 70’s, one of my favorite books. I even wrote a theme song for the (never made high-quality) adaptation:
Let me tell y’all a story ’bout a man named Ged
A poor Gontishman barely kept his otak fed
Then one day he was workin’ on a spell
And up from the ground came a critter out of hell.
Shadow-spawn. Darkness Dude.
Well, next thing you know old Ged is on the run
Serret says “let’s Rock” but Old Powers aren’t fun
At this point I note that the rhyme scheme’s kinda strained
But don’t y’all have a cow, thus is equilibrium maintained.
I will make one quibble: your notation of the development of fantasy references “the D&D boom of the Eighties.”
I was in college in the 70’s and even in 1976 D&D was a BIG deal on college campuses…
@9. tehanuw — Just wanted to say that sentence you commented on is not me speaking, it’s a distillation of a general sentiment regarding genre that is held, sadly, by a great many (then and now). So I can’t really be said to speak for myself there ;-)
@@@@@15. Dr. Thanatos — I hear you re: D&D circulating on campuses in the late 1970s, but I don’t think D&D made a widespread cultural impact until the 1980s, in the same way that Tolkien (though published and certainly read in the 1950s) didn’t make his impact until the 1960s.
I was very interested to learn Le Guin was the daughter of Theodora Kroeber who I knew from her children’s book Ishi Last of his Tribe which my second grade teacher read to our class. As a result we were all Yahi Indians for the next couple of grades.
I was very interested to learn Le Guin was the daughter of Theodora Kroeber who I knew from her children’s book Ishi Last of his Tribe Wich my second grade teacher read to our class. As a result we were all Yahi Indians for the next couple of grades.
I guess Le Guin is mimicking a popular trope when it comes to telling the life story of some near-mythic figure – the author claims to have an exclusive. Sure Sparrowhawk/Ged was a great dude, but once upon a time he stumbled and fell. This kind of context makes the story seem more realistic – the irony being that the reader knows nothing about Ged.
We don’t even know what exactly wizards do except, apparently, know things and make fireworks.
True, that. It never really occurred to me until I saw the film – the first and the best of the three – remember how Sarumen makes Gandalf spin around like the hand on a clock? Ridiculous, but kind of great – because Jackson must have suddenly wondered; well how exactly do wizards fight one another in Middle-Earth? He had to show them doing something.
I cannot help but feel a bit let down that my generation grew up with the middlebrow juggernaut of the Harry Potter series and the lowbrow action of Faerûn’s Elminster.
Up until now I’d have put this down to bias on my part. I’m in my mid-fifties, so took stuff like The Wizard of Earthsea for granted. That said, I wonder how much the shift from Ged to Harry Potter reflects a broader shift in values? Anti-heroes were the big thing in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. The mc was genuinely flawed – not just a potential hero with a few minor life issues to sort out. Think of John Wayne in ‘The Searchers’ or Kane the Mystic Swordsman. Or pretty much any character played by Kirk Douglas. These characters had something about them that made them genuinely unpleasant. And they didn’t change much, if at all. The subsequent shift from anti-hero back to outright hero meant a tonal shift from cautionary to celebratory – so whereas Ged’s story is about the dangers of excessive pride, Harry Potter’s is about an ordinary kid who has to embrace his specialness.
@20 — And leads to Harry being an ultimately (for me) rather unlikable charracter.
I read the first two books and enjoyed them, but it’s kind of hard to know what you’re supposed to take away from the Harry Potter books. You’ve got an mc who’s a sort of a black hole, plus a lot of stuff happening that never seems to cohere into anything like a plot.
@15 Dr. Thanatos: Your Song of Ged is inspired. :) It’s more the rhythm than the rhyme that gets out of whack, but as you suggest I will continue to not possess any bovines.
Read these on release. Had no idea they were for young readers at the time. But they are a large part of the reason I thought that Wizards in Middle School was idiotic and not something I wanted to waste time on.
And I didn’t.
@5
my Penguin edition has a blond, white Ged on the cover. I kept saying, but the book says he’s brown!
The first three books blew me away, though I like the later ones better, because they interrogate undisputed ideas in the original trilogy, like notions about gender, the nature of the afterlife and its relation to life, and what happens to the hero after the world is saved and “he is done with doing”. Le Guin writes the best dragons going; one can see and hear them, and feel the heat, whenever they turn up. I also love the notion of evil as an intrinsic danger in every person; your definition is accurate.
As always, the names and language are perfect. Ged and Tenar, Vetch and Tehanu, and the rest could only have had those names.
one of Le Guin’s most effective seductions, as always, is the quality of the writing: great in itself, it is also perfectly suited to the story. She’s such a pleasure to read: writing like both the best velvet to the touch and very good bread to the taste, rich and real and nourishing.
Finally, I love the unlikeliness of the heroes. Ged is a nobody who becomes a great mage and then a goat herder, and the solutions in the later books come from a middle-aged housewife, a scarred and abandoned child and a foreign “barbarian” princess. Not to mention jokers in the pack like Irian.
I don’t remember wondering why the song isn’t in the Deed – clearly I should reread. Now I’d like to think that Vetch wrote it, but without Ged’s name attached – maybe it’s the playground-game song for the Earthsea equivalent of blind man’s buff. When you catch someone they say your name back to you, and you have to say their name in return to pass the blindfold to them.
I discovered this book about five years ago, and wished that I’d read it when I was a kid. I loved it even as an adult, but it was so much more challenging and enriching than so much of what I read as a kid. (Then again, maybe a lot of its themes would have gone over my head in my youth, so who knows.)
Good write-up!
—And
@9: While I can’t speak to reactions on the first 2, there’s plenty of sneering literary criticism in response to Tolkien – a poll in the UK to find the most popular book of the 20th century, duly won by LOTR, resulted in outrage among the literary establishment at the low taste of the populace. Interestingly, the original books had enthusiastic publicity quotes from the likes of Auden, so that judgement was not universally shared at the time they were issued.
@7: if Hardic always follows the same rules in combining Old Speech roots, then I think Earthsea is tolk + inien = tolkien (on the principle of suk + inien = sukien). Which is even better. Assuming tolk for rock could be extended to mean solid land in general
In one of her superb literary essays (I think it might be ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’ but I’m not certain and I haven’t got my copy to hand) Le Guin talks with great respect about the power of Tolkien’s literary vision and how it sucked in some later writers like a black hole. She confesses to being grateful not to have read him until her own literary voice had established itself.
In a list of my most-loved fantasy, this book (and the full Earthsea series) would rank far below Harry Potter. But I always found it a pleasant read, its language managing to be both semi-sparse and beautiful,* offering many delightful glimpses of a vast and unusual setting that I would have liked to read more about. Setting is the most important element of a story for me, and this book delivers it. Plot is less important, but I got sufficiently invested in this one to get the mental “Nooo, don’t do it” on every reread before the hero does the big bad thing. And for all that he did the thing, I found Sparrowhawk fairly sympathetic, especially in his adoption of the otak (or vice versa). And I liked the concept of common-use names and secret names, and the custom of one or both names being those of plants, animals, etc.
*I tend to demand lush prose from my reading materials, the purpler and more detailed the better.
@11 “(Also, I just realized – why is it the deed of Ged? Why isn’t it the Deed of Sparrowhawk?)”
Because, if I recall correctly, by the time he is Archmage, or possibly after, his true name is known. He’s a dragonfriend and like unto the most powerful of dragons, whose true names are known and who have no fear of others having power over them.
Or simply it’s that the Deed is composed after he’s passed, when it no longer matters.
“the original books had enthusiastic publicity quotes from the likes of Auden”
And C. S. Lewis, I would assume.
Would Harry Potter even exist without WoE?