Earthsea: A Sharpening of Scale
A quick revisit of the Ursula Le Guin novels A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore and Tehanu
This is the first of four pieces I intend to write for my Substack in 2024. Note: this essay contains spoilers for the abovementioned novels.
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
The first of the Earthsea books was read to me by my dad as a kid, rubbing shoulders in this sacred evening activity with other well-known fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. My dad hates Harry Potter and probably relished the moment when I was old enough to continue the series on my own. This was not a prescient act of trans allyship but a reaction to what he believed to be bad writing and a plundering of fantasy tropes in lieu of original worldbuilding. Le Guin, more so even than Tolkein, was considered to be in another league.
A Wizard of Earthsea is a bildungsroman, an appealing genre for a child. All the boxes for high fantasy are ticked: dragons, magic, necromancy, ancient powers. Unlike other fantasy novels, perhaps, it has an existential core. Ged, the protagonist, is given his name when he reaches manhood by Ogion, one of his first teachers. It is his true name, succeeding his childhood name, Duny, and subsequently kept hidden from most others, to whom he gives his use-name, Sparrowhawk. The assumption of a true name as a mark of the adoption of an adult gender identity feels very trans indeed, but the system also signals the relationship between knowledge and power in Earthsea. To know a thing, which in Le Guin’s world is captured in the conceit of knowing a thing’s true name, is to have the ability to exercise power over it. When Ged confronts a dragon terrorising the Ninety Isles and speaks its name aloud it is as if he held the huge being on a fine, thin leash, tightening it on his throat. These are Foucauldian islands.
A Wizard of Earthsea is also a story of humility. Before I reread the book last year, one of the novel’s images that had remained with me from childhood was of Ged outside the Great House of Roke, fasting and thinking while his pet otak played in the river, wondering how he might learn the Master Doorkeeper’s true name to enter the House. I love this image: to me it represents reverence for learning and a recognition that learning is done best when it is done slowly, with an awareness of the limits that bound personal knowledge. Ged is again and again tempted by power, and so is humbled again and again. His understanding of the shadow, the thing that is loosed into the world because of his arrogance and which follows him across land and sea, is settled only when he realises his relationship to it. The shadow is Ged; it is the hidden and unpleasant parts of him, including his future death, which he must meet and embrace to become whole. The first of the Earthsea novels is, therefore, a Taoist paean to life.
The Tombs of Atuan (1970)
This is the the shortest of the four books. It follows the enlightenment of Arha, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, one of the Kargad Lands. It is the only Earthsea novel set among the ‘enemy,’ so to speak, as the Kargish peoples worship gods of the dark and do not understand magic in the way wizards of the Inner Lands do. The Tombs of Atuan contributes to Earthsea’s overarching narrative by revealing how Ged and Arha (whose true name is Tenar) reunite the two halves of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, so that a king might rule again in Havnor. Its greater achievement, however, is its exploration of institutional power.
Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed (1974) is set partly on an anarchic world; through its protagonist, Shevek, the reader learns that this world has not eliminated power but simply diffused it across the web of social convention. Where The Dispossessed explores the subtlety of power, complicating the split between the anarchist planet Annares and the capitalist planet Urras, The Tombs of Atuan shows how power waxes and wanes among institutions. It reveals the hollowness of Arha’s nominal power as the One Priestess, guardian of the old gods that live under the tombs, as she realises the pervasiveness of unfaith and the influence wielded by the lackeys of Kargad’s Godkings. As the Kargish empire has advanced, the politico-religious infrastructure allowing worship of Arha’s gods, the Nameless Ones, has fallen away.
The mythic and fundamental in A Wizard of Earthsea gives way to the realistic and mundane in this novel. Instead of conversations with dragons, there are struggles between Arha and the scheming Kossil, High Priestess of the Godkings, over the posting of guards and how to punish unbelievers. This makes The Tombs of Atuan the first narrowing of scale within the Earthsea books.
The Farthest Shore (1972)
I can understand why the Studio Ghibli adaptation of the Earthsea stories borrowed heavily from the plot of this book: on its surface, it is an audience-friendly tale of good striking out on a journey to defeat evil. The premise of the novel is that all is not well in Earthsea; reports reach Ged, now Archmage, that men in the west are forgetting how to use magic, and the sickness is spreading east. The trope of inexorable spiritual corruption is a common one in fantasy: I think of the spread of the Nothing in The Neverending Story, or the growing stormclouds reaching towards Minas Tirith from Mordor. Again, Le Guin borrows from Taoist theology, with these signs of ill portending an unnatural disruption to the universal Equilibrium of light and dark. It is up to Ged and his protégé, Arren, to find the source of this disruption and restore harmony to Earthsea.
This is partly a return to the grand scale of A Wizard of Earthsea, but the reader sees Ged, now forty or fifty, from the outside, through Arren’s eyes. In the first novel, Ged’s masters are remote and unquestionable, or questioned only in the folly of Ged’s young years. In Arren’s company, Ged admits to feeling tired and stupid, and sometimes seems to Arren frail and old. Here the reassuring sense of fable which pervades A Wizard of Earthsea is lost, and the reader encounters a young person’s comprehension of the fallibility of their elders. The story takes a meandering path as it tracks the two questers south and west. There is time enough to spend with the villagers of Lorbanery, sullen and silent in the large, soft rain of April, sitting outside their inn and arguing over why there is no colour left in their dyes, or power in sorcery, obscurely pointing the way. I appreciated the implicit queerness of Arren, who is called a girlish lad by the villagers, swimming like a golden seal in the ocean of the South Reach. Ursula Le Guin’s father was an anthropologist, and I wonder whether the history of Polynesian seafarers inspired her depiction of Ged’s and Arren’s hosts the Children of the Open Sea, at ease in their life on the open water.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties and very depressed, I would picture myself in a black robe, walking up the steep slope of a mountain. I imagined a demon at the top of the mountain, in the likeness of Baphomet, waiting to be slain. The trick, I told myself, listening to Boards of Canada’s Buckie High, or Grimes’ demo version of REALiTi, was to kill the demon again and again, and fall off the peak over and over, to start the journey anew. Only through perennial resistance would I find the courage to continue living. The final act of The Farthest Shore, where Ged and Arren meet the immortalist Cob in the Dry Land, is a metaphor cut from the same cloth. The lessons of A Wizard of Earthsea are repeated: Cob, in trying to assuage his fear of death by seeking eternal life, is revealed as pitiable and weak. Ged stops up the open door between the lands of the dead and living and Arren carries his exhausted body upwards through the Mountains of Pain. Arren accepts his fate and is rewarded by making it back to Selidor alive, where the dragon Kalessin will carry him and his master on to the white towers of Havnor. The Equilibium is mended: death keeps its place among life.
Tehanu (1990)
Content note: This section discusses misogyny and sexual abuse, including child sexual abuse.
I am even more glad I did not read this when I was younger. It is a very adult book. It revisits Tenar, once Arha, now known as Goha, the White Lady of Gont, just as the breach sought in The Farthest Shore is being closed. After escaping from Atuan and bringing the Ring of Erreth-Akbe to Havnor with Ged, Tenar has lived the life of a farmer’s wife on Gont, Ged’s home-isle. She is witness to the death of Ogion, Ged’s old master, and adopts a child, Therru, who has been raped, beaten and burned by her own family. Ged, having passed through the Dry Land with Arren and left him in Havnor to be crowned King Lebannen, is delivered to Tenar on Gont by the dragon Kalessin.
The happy ending of The Farthest Shore is upended here. Ged is near-unrecognisable: he spent his power healing the breach Cob opened, and left his wizard’s staff on Selidor. He cuts a sorry figure in Ogion’s old house, looking for a place to hide from Lebannen’s men, ashamed of his loss and even resentful of Arren’s saving him from death, which shocks Tenar. You might read this and be reminded of Bilbo’s ears twitching in terror at the approach of the Sackville-Bagginses, but the comparison would be an odd one. Ged, in his prime, is more like Galadriel or Elrond. If I had witnessed his panic as a child it would have horrified me. I would have averted my eyes, too, at Tenar’s realisation that now that Ged is not a wizard, he need no longer remain celibate: Tenar learns from witchwoman Moss that in order to reserve their strength for sorcery, mages cast spells on themselves to remove sexual desire.
Sex is a preoccupation of this book. The novel is a product of the second wave; most of it is spent inside Tenar’s head as she puzzles gender out. Even as she recognises wizards’ dismissal of sex and witch-magic she is ambivalent about that magic, reflecting that to be a witch is to have nothing to do with clear meaning. Through Tenar’s meditations and conversations with others the novel reinforces a classic Freudian distinction between men and women. Moss tells Tenar that while a wizard’s power is great and tall and grand like a fir tree, a witch’s is deeper than the roots of islands and goes back into the dark. Tenar remains dissatisfied, having lived long enough in the dark as a child in Atuan to mistrust it as a source of power.
This is the final sharpening of scale across the first four books of Earthsea. From the vastness of ocean journeys and universal imbalance the narrative eye zooms in on the chipped crockery of Ogion’s empty kitchen, on Ged doing dishes without being prompted but Tenar’s son, Spark, calling that women’s work, and on the hand of one of Therru’s abusers, despite Tenar’s best efforts, touching the child’s bare, flinching arm. Though Tenar can’t understand gender (and her refusal to accept a simple rationalisation for it is satisfying) she can see its effects and the pervasiveness of sexual violence, even in the broad daylight of Gont. Tehanu is thus a vessel for women’s grief and rage. After Therru’s abusers beat and kill a pregnant woman, Therru’s birth mother, Tenar’s friend Lark asks her, What are they afraid of us for?, and Tenar does not reply. But even if the book asks more questions than it answers it offers the desired conclusion to this kind of story. Therru has been taught by Ged and Tenar about dragons, and the raising of the first islands by Segoy: she calls Kalessin, the first dragon, who is Segoy after all and her brethren, to burn alive the misogynistic wizard Aspen, the last outpost of Cob’s evil. Earthsea is given final hope in the form of Therru, the dragon-child, Tehanu.