Lessons From Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin’s 'A Wizard of Earthsea' is a classic, no question. But does anyone still care? Writers and creators of fantasy, neglect this book at your peril
How did we forget A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)? Everyone agrees Ursula K. Le Guin’s rites-of-passage fantasy is a classic: profound, lyrical, exquisitely written, a masterclass in the evocation of magic and revered by uber-hip authors from Margaret Atwood to that guy who wrote Sandman. Yet as seminal masterworks go, there never seems to be much buzz about it these days, certainly not next to gargantuan fantasy franchises like Game of Thrones and whatever The Lord of the Rings is these days.
Though initially conceived as a one-off1, Wizard of Earthsea became the first in a six-book series that gradually expanded over the course of five decades to include The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990), Tales From Earthsea (2001) and The Other Wind (2001). The Earthsea Cycle, as it’s known, has sold over one million copies, scored copious awards and beguiled generations of readers.
Written on commission for children’s picture-book publishers Parnassus Press, Wizard of Earthsea was aimed at what would now be described as a YA readership. Yet Le Guin’s distant, dreamy prose and meditative storytelling might be a hard sell for today’s demographic, more accustomed to the Netflix-ready immediacy of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass (which sold 25 million copies alone) or Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse books. Classic though it is, the Earthsea Cycle doesn’t have a fraction of those modern fanbases.
When A Wizard of Earthsea came out in 1968, Tolkien and Robert E. Howard were driving the boom in fantasy fiction. The hippies were scrawling ‘Frodo Lives’ on their campus textbooks; the barbarians were brooding on the covers of their dime-store paperbacks. The following year, editor Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy series would begin excavating forgotten legends like Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell and Hope Mirrlees, building a canon of western fantasy literature worthy of serious, ‘Adult’ consideration.
But A Wizard of Earthsea was just a ‘kid’s book’.
Never mind that Le Guin won both a Hugo and a Nebula for Best Novel in 1970 for her gender-anarchist sci-fi The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which would go on to rank second only to Dune in a 1987 Locus poll of All-Time Best Novels.
‘“You’re a juvenile writer, aren’t you?”
Yeth, Mummy.
“I love your books – the real ones, I mean, I haven’t read the ones for children, of course!”
Of courthe not, Daddy.’
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves (1973 essay)
Like the Narnia books, the Earthsea Cycle got stuck in the kid-lit ghetto, the walls of which wouldn’t come down until 1997, thanks to a suspiciously similar coming-of-age fantasy about a scar-faced boy with an animal companion who attends a school for wizards and battles his malevolent shadow. Unlike world-famous imitators such as these – and let’s not forget George Lucas and Star Wars while we’re at it – the Earthsea Cycle never became a merch-friendly brand, nor achieved the unholy grail of becoming a franchise.
The Earthsea Cycle had a shot at movie greatness via one of cinema’s most brilliant anti-realists, British writer/producer/director Michael Powell (The Thief of Bagdad [1940], A Matter of Life and Death [1946], The Red Shoes [1948], The Tales of Hoffmann [1951]). By the early 1980s, Powell was well into his seventies and adored Wizard of Earthsea. He began a lasting correspondence with Le Guin, with whom he co-wrote a screenplay based on the first two books and had David Hockney on board as the movie’s designer. Unfortunately, their initial backer, Francis Ford Coppola got buried in debt after the bombing of One From the Heart (1982) while the tanking of Krull (1983) would have movie studios swerving big-budget fantasy for some years to come.
Powell never got his Earthsea project off the ground. Instead, we got Legend of Earthsea (2004), a beige miniseries with Danny Glover on the Sci-Fi Channel, and Tales From Earthsea (2006), a picturesque misfire from Studio Ghibli. Le Guin was unhappy with both of these, not least the films’ whitewashing her almost entirely non-white cast. Both versions also simplified the moral spectrum of her books, setting up a killable villain as a means of resolving the story’s conflict – the very thing the Earthsea books seek to subvert.
“In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, A First Response to ‘Gedo Senki,’ the Earthsea film made by Goro Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli.
However neglected or invisible the Earthsea Cycle may have become, Le Guin herself remains beloved and endlessly quotable. She passed in 2018 at the age of 88, but stands alongside Tolkien and Howard as one of the holy trinity of 20th century fantasy writers. Howard was the pulpster poet who forged sword and sorcery as it’s known today, as attuned to masculine wish-fulfilment as Ian Fleming or Lee Child. Tolkien was the cloistered artisan, with his own uncommon obsessions about language and mythmaking. How strange it is that The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) – as singular a work as Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59) – became a genre unto itself.
Unlike Howard and Tolkien, Le Guin didn’t create a subgenre; she worked very consciously within the epic mode laid out by Tolkien.
Like Howard, she was American, though a West Coast ‘60s liberal and staunchly middle-class. Like Tolkien, she was an academic in love with language, though her approach was contemporary rather than nostalgic. Unlike both her forebears, Le Guin was a modern novelist, that is, she sought emotional realism, moral complexity, ambiguity. Yes, she quietly influenced the cultural gamechangers of Rowling and Lucas, but her contribution to fantasy goes much deeper than that.
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Howard and Tolkien established the two key modes of secondary world fantasy: the swashbuckling heroic and the world-saving epic. But to treat their founding texts like doctrine produces only hollow imitation. The author is no longer an artist, but rather a mindless cultist. Conan and Lord of the Rings are now enshrined as corporate-owned properties, encouraging fans to become pretty much the same thing: unquestioning, brand-loyal consumers.
“We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go ‘there and back again,’ and ‘there’ is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities. And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life - of a sort, for a while.”
Ursula K. Le Guin Foreword to ‘Tales From Earthsea’ (2001)
A Wizard of Earthsea taught fantasy how to avoid stagnation.
Le Guin was aware of the genre in which she worked and was alive to its potential. Unlike most intellectuals, she embraced fantasy not with a view to dissect or rehabilitate, but with a fascination for its themes and an eagerness to do something new with it. Like Angela Carter, she eschewed the literary realism of her (male) peers and instead found truth through the lens of the fantastic.
Howard and Tolkien laid the foundations of modern fantasy, while Le Guin showed the genre how to innovate.
No one’s building an Earthsea theme park any time soon, but since when was popularity or even visibility a gauge of artistic worth? A Wizard of Earthsea’s response to what had gone before offers perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.
“Serious consideration of magic, and of writing for kids, combined to make me wonder about wizards. Wizards are usually elderly or ageless Gandalfs, quite rightly and archetypically. But what were they before they had white beards? How did they learn what is obviously an erudite and dangerous art? Are there colleges for young wizards? And so on.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves (1973 essay)
Le Guin took a look at epic fantasy as laid down by Tolkien, T.H. White, Mallory and beyond, recognised the thing that was familiar, and took it in a new direction, in this case taking the supporting character of the wise old wizard and making him the star of the show. She turned an archetype into a character.
The young wizard in question is the lean and haughty Ged, whom, “in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.”
Instead of us watching Ged in his legendary senior years, puffing on his pipe from beneath a big hat and ordering people around, Earthsea focuses on the wizard’s less dignified teenage years. And how drama-ripe those years are, as Ged makes a string of wonderfully calamitously decisions.
Born on an island of smelly goat-herders, the boy Ged proves himself adept at magic, weaving a fog that saves his village from seafaring raiders. This feat draws the attention of the wandering wizard Ogion, who takes Ged under his wing to ensure the lad learns to use his power responsibly. But Ged almost gets himself killed showing off in front of a cute girl. He’s hungry for power and glory and control and soon takes leave of his wise mentor to join the wizard’s school on Roke Island. Once enrolled, he enjoys showing off his gift for enchantment. He gets into a wizard’s duel with a rival student, accidently summoning a Gebbeth – a lethal shadow entity that is a manifestation of his boyish aggression and pride. The thing almost tears off Ged’s face, determined to take complete possession of him and will now hunt the young wizard until the end of his days like a spectral Terminator.
Ged’s youthful mistakes cost himself and others dearly – a blameless tutor dies from the strain of healing Ged’s wounds. Like many a youthful genius, Ged is a jackass, and Wizard of Earthsea is the story of his road to maturity. In an indelible sequence involving a shapeshifting battle and a brilliantly tense stand-off, Ged conquers a brood of marauding, articulate dragons, refusing their offer to help destroy the thing that hunts him.
There’s no prophesised promise of a happy ending, no sacred destiny to guide him, no ‘Chosen One’ assurances. Ged becomes a man by his own hand2, learning and growing by suffering consequences and making hard decisions, constantly threatening the balance of the world with his male pride and his terrifying genius for magic. Gandalf and Merlin were never so human.
Genres thrive and endure through humanising their tropes and conventions, by writing in response to what has gone before. A fan rarely questions the mechanics of their favourite genre and its classics, whereas the artist will explore ‘gaps’ in the material.
Not flaws, gaps! (Author
addresses this in his brief essay, Seeing With an Artist’s Eye.)Just as Le Guin noticed a traditional absence of backstory when it came to the archetype of the wizard, George R. R. Martin noticed the traditional absence of sex in epic fantasy. Thus, sexuality and intimacy are part of what drive Martin’s characters in Game of Thrones, making them all the more recognisably human. Joe Abercrombie saw the traditional absence of moral compromise in heroic fantasy and threw away the moral compass. Namina Forna saw the traditional absence of non-European lands and characters and so wrote her West African-inspired fantasy The Gilded Ones (2021). And so on.
Fantasy that innovates is usually in a dialogue – whether conscious or not – with the stories that have come before3. Their writers have an eye for assumption.
Here’s something that got on Le Guin’s nerves, the assumption that “Fantasy by definition concerns a Battle Between Good and Evil. This is the one where the copywriters shine. There are lots of fantasies about the Battle Between Good and Evil, the BBGE, sure. In them, you can tell the good guys from the evil guys by their white hats, or their white teeth, but not by what they do. They all behave exactly alike, with mindless and incessant violence, until the Problem of Evil is solved in a final orgy of savagery and a win for the good team.”4
Le Guin didn’t think like Tolkien; she thought for herself. Tolkien was Catholic; Le Guin a Taoist5. For her, good and evil were relative, two sides of the same gold piece. The Gebbeth can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely cannot be destroyed because the Gebbeth is Ged, an inextinguishable part of him that must be accepted in order for Ged to make himself whole.
Le Guin’s aversion to violence in Wizard of Earthsea is a moral judgement that goes beyond the mechanics of narrative. Such judgements tend to be triggering, as if any author has a monopoly on truth. Yet politics, perspective, and ethics are part of any artistic innovation, keeping the genre-ball rolling, triggering new stories and offering evermore groundbreaking judgements.
Le Guin’s unique Taoist perspective influenced her concept of magic. In Wizard of Earthsea, magic is conceived along truly mystical lines, rather than a set of game-rules or a CGI-ready lightshow. Ged learns that magic is rather like an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds Earthsea together.
Magic here is the art of naming, of defining a thing in order to command it, but also bringing that thing into a world of conflicting opposites.
“You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on the act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
The Master Hand, Teacher of Illusions.
Magic can shake the balance of drama too. A fantasy in which swords can be pulled out of hats at just the right moment destroys the cause-and-effect required to make that story work as drama. Firing off magic willy-nilly breaks the very spell the fantasy author is trying to create.
Ged learns that he must guard against extremes or else risk poisoning the force upon which he draws. Magic – the power to adjust reality – can seduce wizards, authors and readers alike. Thankfully, Le Guin refuses to submit to enchantment so entirely that she forsakes the humanity that gives the magic meaning.
“Every prentice-sorcerer learns the tale of the wizard Bordger of Way, who delighted in taking bear’s shape, and did so more and more often until the bear grew in him and the man died away, and he became a bear, and killed his own little son in the forests, and was hunted down and slain. And no one knows how many of the dolphns that leap in the waters of the Inmost Sea were men once, wise men, who forgot their wisdom and their name in the joy of the restless sea.”
Wizard of Earthsea never dazzles the reader with crackling fireballs and weird creatures – the fantasy equivalent of the horror movie that can’t generate tension and so resorts to showering the viewer in gore. Le Guin is subtle in her literary sorcery, enveloping the reader in her fantasy world without them even noticing.
“The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards.”
The very first line addresses you like a native. You’re already there.
Le Guin describes her miracles without puffs of smoke or flashes of fire.
“It seemed to him that he had passed through the doorway: yet he stood outside on the pavement where he had stood before.”
She can defy reality with a single line of dialogue.
“‘No matter how many sit at this table, there is always room.’”
Magic is never far from the mundane.
“Not one of them would blink to see a boy turn into a fish or a house fly up into the air, but knowing it for a schoolboy prank would go on cobbling shoes or cutting up mutton, unconcerned.”
The feeling is of an earthy, rational fairy tale, in which not only the world, but its perspective, its thinking is fantastical.
“When Nemmerle looked up through the leaves of the tree, those with him did not know if he watched the stars of summer fading in daybreak, or those other stars, which never set above the hills that see no dawn.”
Le Guin provides a map of her world, but she doesn’t let it restrict her. The boundaries are left vague. What we know of Earthsea is an archipelago surrounded by boundless ocean, solid earth meets misty, fathomless sea. The geography isn’t exhaustive. There’s room still for magic. Here be dragons.
Ursula K. Le Guin was a seasoned writer of sci-fi long before she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea. It was her first attempt at fantasy and – like Ged – grasped it like a master. Like Howard and Tolkien, she understood the genre’s fundamental yet often forgotten principle: that fantasy is – and can never be – just escapism, but a symbolic language employed to better comprehend and live with the real.
“On another level, [fantasy] is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not anti-rational, but para-rational; not realistic, but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which as Jung warned us, are dangerous things… Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (1973 essay)
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Le Guin expanded upon two previous short stories, The Rule of Names and The Word of Unbinding (both 1964), both published in sci-fi/fantasy digest Fantastic (1952-80).
It took Le Guin several years to bring a female perspective to Earthsea. “Briefly, what happened in the seventeen years between Farthest Shore [1972] and Tehanu [1990] was that feminism was reborn, and I became seventeen years older, and learned a good deal. One of the things I learned was how to write as a woman, not as an honorary, or imitation, man.” (Guardian interview, 2004)
Unless it’s one of those ultra-rare, category-defying thunderbolts like Gormenghast.
From, Some Assumptions About Fantasy, a speech by Ursula K. Le Guin. Presented at the Children’s Literature Breakfast. BookExpo America, Chicago, IL, 2004.
And wrote a brilliant translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching in 1997.
Epic post my friend! I think I need to touch base with Earthsea again.
This is such a good post! I recently read The Language of the Night, a collection of some of her essays & speeches. Highly recommend it & other collections of her essays. Anyone who wants to be a SF author should read them. And the Earthsea series, of course.
She also has a blog worth reading.