The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Tell me of the Patterner.”

  She smiled. “Seserakh calls him the Warrior. She says only a warrior would fall in love with a dragon.”

  “Who followed him to the dry land—that night?”

  “He followed Alder.”

  “Ah,” Ged said, with surprise and a certain satisfaction.

  “So did others of the masters. And Lebannen, and Irian . . .”

  “And Tehanu.”

  A silence.

  “She went out of the house. When I came out she was gone.” A long silence. “Azver saw her. In the sunrise. On the other wind.”

  A silence.

  “They’re all gone. There are no dragons left in Havnor or the western islands. Onyx said: as that shadow place and all the shadows in it rejoined the world of light, so they regained their true realm.”

  “We broke the world to make it whole,” Ged said.

  After a long time Tenar said in a soft, thin voice, “The Patterner believes Irian will come to the Grove if he calls to her.”

  Ged said nothing, till, after a while: “Look there, Tenar.”

  She looked where he was looking, into the dim gulf of air above the western sea.

  “If she comes, she’ll come from there,” he said. “And if she doesn’t come, she is there.”

  She nodded. “I know.” Her eyes were full of tears. “Lebannen sang me a song, on the ship, when we were going back to Havnor.” She could not sing; she whispered the words. “O my joy, be free . . .”

  He looked away, up at the forests, at the mountain, the darkening heights.

  “Tell me,” she said, “tell me what you did while I was gone.”

  “Kept the house.”

  “Did you walk in the forest?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  AFTERWORD

  Here at last, for the first time, is Earthsea, in English, all together in the right order. I’m most grateful to all the publishers and editors involved for working together to bring to being this unified edition, where people can see at last that it all really is one story.

  The six books of Earthsea were published over thirty-one years, by four different hardcover publishers, and in various paperback editions. It still gets called a trilogy here, though it hasn’t been one since 1990, and in England one publisher calls it a quartet, and another reversed the order of the fifth and sixth books as if it didn’t matter.

  I think of the books not as a trilogy or a sextet, a series or a cycle, but simply as Earthsea. If we must have technicalities, and if fantasy must occur in threes, could we call it the Earthsea Trilogies, in the plural? That at least acknowledges the difference between the first three books and the last three.

  By market definition, the first three are “young adult” novels, the last three aren’t. YA, however, like most marketing categories, really defines nothing but books written specifically to fit it. YA stories have adolescent protagonists—so, is Romeo and Juliet a YA? Should Huckleberry Finn be read only by people Huck’s age?—I wrote A Wizard of Earthsea to meet the publisher’s request for a book for younger readers. And I gave the next two books a central character who is a genuine, authentic young adult: Ged is still only nineteen at the end of A Wizard, and Tenar and Arren are probably not even that old at the end of their books.

  But in the Tombs Ged is at least thirty, and middle-aged in Farthest Shore. And with Tehanu I broke altogether from such constraints of category. I said to myself, People who like fantasy read fantasy, no matter what age either the readers or the characters are. Nine-year-olds read The Lord of the Rings, eighty-nine-year-olds reread Alice in Wonderland. I want to follow my characters out of adolescence into their whole lives, and I trust my readers to follow them with me.

  So in Tehanu there are no adolescents at all. Therru is a little girl, Tenar a middle-aged woman, Ged a middle-aged man. Then came the Tales, all about people of extremely various ages. Finally in The Other Wind, no principal character is under twenty except the Princess Seserakh, while Tenar is gray-haired, and Ged a man of seventy. I was writing my main characters through my own life and their lives, and they were long, rich lives. I am grateful to my readers for living those lives with them.

  I am also grateful for having been able to write this book, or as I would prefer to put it, for the gift of this story. Such a gift is always a mystery to a writer. In some ways the story itself remains mysterious to me.

  I can see now its theme coming together from elements of all the previous books, joining forces and playing out in a way I could never have foreseen when I started A Wizard of Earthsea. Even when I started The Other Wind, all I knew certainly was that the increasing imbalance in the practice of wizardry was caused by a profound error, made long ago; and that not only Cob in The Farthest Shore but Thorion of Roke embodied this misunderstanding of the uses of power, the desire for control, and the nature of death. This was my great theme. To find its resolution I had to play it through. I did so. I knew partly what I wanted it to say; not till it was said did I know fully.

  I don’t and won’t attempt to explain what it says. I’ve been asked a thousand times to say what a story “means,” and every time I’ve grown surer that so long as I’ve told the story rightly, finding its meaning, or a meaning, is rightly up to its readers.

  To take me through this end game, I needed not only my protagonists from the other books but new characters. Alder, Seppel, Seserakh, each came forward when their moment appeared—Alder, indeed, on the first page. The one who most surprised me was Seserakh. I was never sure what she was going to say or do next. I didn’t even know what she looked like till she burst out of her red tent and hurled herself at Tenar. New winds were certainly blowing in Earthsea, and this one blew in very fresh from the east, to the king’s consternation, and my delight.

  Without her, without Ged, who sends Alder to Havnor, without each one of those who meet on Roke Island on that climactic night, none of them could come to the wall of stones that lies between life and death. They could not set the prisoners of false darkness free.

  I have, believe me, learned never to call any book “the last.” But I want to tell the kind people who write me asking for another Earthsea story that so far as I know, the story I had to tell ends here. With Tenar and Ged, on Gont.

  It has come round to and past where it began so long ago. In that dark night on Roke and the great sunrise in the other world, it came where it was going all along—and yet it goes on past that, being not a closed circle but a spiral, like the orbit of our Earth. Lives end, lives go on, a story ends, others go on. I know the reign of King Lebannen and Queen Seserakh will be long remembered both in the Archipelago and the Kargad Lands. I think Roke will change, and maybe magic itself will change. I’m not sure if the dragons will ever return out of the west beyond the west, yet I know Tehanu will. I know where Ged goes next.

  But the storyteller doesn’t tell all she knows. When the story is over she falls silent. Then, after a while, perhaps she says, “But listen now! I have another tale to tell! Once upon a time, on the western shore of the world, lived people who could work strange spells . . .”

  A DESCRIPTION OF EARTHSEA

  PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES

  People

  The Hardic Lands

  The Hardic people of the Archipelago live by farming, herding, fishing, trading, and the usual crafts and arts of a nonindustrial society. Their population is stable and has never overcrowded the limited habitable land available to them. Famine is unknown and poverty seldom acute.

  Small islands and villages are generally governed by a more or less democratic council or Parley, headed, or represented in dealings with other groups, by an elected Isleman or Islewoman. In the Reaches there is often no government other than the Isle Parley and the Town Parleys. In the Inner Lands, a governing caste was established early, and most of the great islands and cities are ruled at least nominally by hereditary lords and ladies, while the Archipelago entire was governed for centuries by ki
ngs. Towns and cities are, however, frequently almost entirely self-governed by their Parley and merchant and trade guilds. The great guilds, since their network covers all the Inner Lands, answer to no overlord or authority except the King in Havnor.

  Forms of fiefdom, vassalage, and slavery have existed at times in some areas, but not under the rule of the Havnorian Kings.

  The existence of magic as a recognised, effective power wielded by certain individuals, but not by all, shapes and influences all the institutions of the Hardic peoples, so that, much as ordinary life in the Archipelago seems to resemble that of nonindustrial peoples elsewhere, there are almost immeasurable differences. One of these differences may be, or may be indicated by, the lack of any kind of institutionalised religion. Superstition is as common as it is anywhere, but there are no gods, no cults, no formal worship of any kind. Ritual occurs only in traditional offerings at the sites of the Old Powers, in the great, universally celebrated annual festivals such as Sunreturn and the Long Dance, in the speaking and singing of the traditional songs and epics at these festivals, and, perhaps, in the performance of spells of magic.

  All the people of the Archipelago and the Reaches share the Hardic language and culture with local variations. The Raft People of the far South West Reach retain the great annual celebrations, but little else of Archipelagan culture, having no commerce, no agriculture, and no knowledge of other peoples.

  Most people of the Archipelago have brown or red-brown skin, black straight hair, and dark eyes; the predominant body type is short, slender, small-boned, but fairly muscular and well-fleshed. In the East and South Reaches people tend to be taller, heavier boned, and darker. Many Southerners have very dark brown skin. Most Archipelagan men have little or no facial hair.

  The people of Osskil, Rogma, and Borth are lighter-skinned than others in the Archipelago, and often have brown or even blond hair and light eyes; the men are often bearded. Their language and some of their beliefs are closer to Kargish than to Hardic. These far Northerners probably descend from Kargs who, after settling the four great Eastern lands, sailed back to the West about two thousand years ago.

  The Kargad Lands

  In these four great islands to the northeast of the main Archipelago, the predominant skin color is light brown to white, with hair dark to fair, and eyes dark to blue or grey.

  Not much mixing of the Kargish and Archipelagan skin-color types has taken place except on Osskil, since the North Reach is isolated and thinly populated, and the Kargad people have held themselves apart from and often in enmity towards the Archipelagans for two or three millennia.

  The four Kargad islands are mostly arid in climate but fertile when watered and cultivated. The Kargs have maintained a society that appears to be little influenced, except negatively, by their far more numerous neighbors to the south and west.

  Among the Kargs the power of magic appears to be very rare as a native gift, perhaps because it was neglected or actively suppressed by their society and government. Except as an evil to be dreaded and shunned, magic plays no recognised part in their society. This inability or refusal to practice magic puts the Kargs at a disadvantage with the Archipelagans in almost every respect, which may explain why they have generally held themselves aloof from trade or any kind of interchange, other than piratical raids and invasions of the nearer islands of the South Reach and around the Gontish Sea.

  DRAGONS

  Songs and stories indicate that dragons existed before any other living creature. The Old Hardic kennings or euphemisms for the word dragon are Firstborn, Eldest, Elder Children. (The words for the firstborn child of a family in Osskilian, akhad, and in Kargish, gadda, are derived from the word haath, “dragon,” in the Old Speech.)

  Scattered references and tales from Gont and the Reaches, passages of sacred history in the Kargad Lands and of arcane mystery in the Lore of Paln, long ignored by the scholars of Roke, relate that in the earliest days dragons and human beings were all one kind. Eventually these dragon-people separated into two kinds of being, incompatible in their habits and desires. Perhaps a long geographical separation caused a gradual natural divergence, a differentiation of species. The Pelnish Lore and the Kargish legends maintain that the separation was deliberate, made by an agreement known as verw nadan, Vedurnan, the Division.

  These legends are best preserved in Hur-at-Hur, the easternmost of the Kargad Lands, where dragons have degenerated into animals without high intelligence. Yet it is in Hur-at-Hur that people keep the most vivid conviction of the original kinship of human and dragon kind. And with these tales of ancient times come stories of recent days about dragons who take human form, humans who take dragon form, beings who are in fact both human and dragon.

  However the Division came about, from the beginning of historical time human beings have lived in the main Archipelago and the Kargad Lands east of it, while the dragons kept to the westernmost isles—and beyond. People have puzzled at their choosing the empty sea for their domain, since dragons are “creatures of wind and fire,” who drown if plunged under the sea. But they have no need to touch down either on water or on earth; they live on the wing, aloft in air, sunlight, starlight. The only use a dragon has for the ground is some kind of rocky place where it can lay its eggs and rear the drakelets. The small, barren islets of the farthest West Reach suffice for this.

  The Creation of Éa contains no clear references to an original unity and eventual separation of dragons and humans, but this may be because the poem in its presumed original form, in the Language of the Making, dated back to a time before the separation. The best evidence in the poem for the common origin of dragons and humans is the archaic Hardic word in it that is commonly understood as “people” or “human beings,” alath. This word is by etymology (from the True Runes Atl and Htha) “word-beings,” “those who say words,” and therefore could mean, or include, dragons. Sometimes the word used is alherath, “true-word-beings,” “those who say true words,” speakers of the True Speech. This could mean human wizards, or dragons, or both. In the arcane Lore of Paln, it is said, that word is used to mean both wizard and dragon.

  Dragons are born knowing the True Speech, or, as Ged put it, “the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one.” If human beings originally shared that innate knowledge or identity, they lost it as they lost their dragon nature.

  LANGUAGES

  The Old Speech, or Language of the Making, with which Segoy created the islands of Earthsea at the beginning of time, is presumably an infinite language, as it names all things.

  This language is innate to dragons, not to humans, as said above. There are exceptions. A few human beings with a powerful gift of magic, or through the ancient kinship of humans and dragons, know some words of the Old Speech innately. But the very great majority of people must learn the Old Speech. Hardic practitioners of the art magic learn it from their teachers. Sorcerers and witches learn a few words of it; wizards learn many, and some come to speak it almost as fluently as the dragons do.

  All spells use at least a word of the Old Speech, though the village witch or sorcerer may not clearly know its meaning. Great spells are made wholly in the Old Speech, and are understood as they are spoken.

  The Hardic language of the Archipelago, the Osskili tongue of Osskil, and the Kargish tongue, are all remote descendants of the Old Speech. None of these languages serves for the making of spells of magic.

  The people of the Archipelago speak Hardic. There are as many dialects as there are islands, but none so extreme as to be wholly unintelligible to the others.

  Osskili, spoken in Osskil and two islands northwest of it, has more affinities to Kargish than to Hardic. Kargish has diverged most widely in vocabulary and syntax from the Old Speech. Most of its speakers (like most Hardic speakers) do not realise that their languages have a common ancestry. Archipelagan scholars are aware of it, but most Kargs would deny it, since they have confused Hardic with the Old Speech, in which spells are cast, and thus fear and des
pise all Archipelagan speech as malevolent sorcery.

  WRITING

  Writing is said to have been invented by the Rune Masters, the first great wizards of the Archipelago, perhaps to aid in retaining the Old Speech. The dragons have no writing.

  There are two entirely different kinds of writing in Earthsea: the True Runes and runic writing.

  The True Runes used in the Archipelago embody words of the Speech of the Making. True Runes are not symbols only, but reifactors: they can be used to bring a thing or condition into being or bring about an event. To write such a rune is to act. The power of the action varies with the circumstances. Most of the True Runes are found only in ancient texts and lore-books, and used only by wizards trained in their use; but a good many of them, such as the symbol written on the door lintel to protect a house from fire, are in common use, familiar to unlearned people.

  Long after the invention of the True Runes, a related but non-magical runic writing was developed for the Hardic language. This writing does not affect reality any more than any writing does; that is to say, indirectly, but considerably.

  It is said that Segoy first wrote the True Runes in fire on the wind, so that they are coeval with the Language of the Making. But this may not be so, since the dragons do not use them, and if they recognise them, do not admit it.

  Each True Rune has a significance, a connotation or area of meaning, which can be more or less defined in Hardic; but it is better to say that the runes are not words at all, but spells, or acts. Only in the syntax of the Old Speech, however, and only as spoken or written by a wizard, not as a statement but with intention to act, reinforced by voice and gesture—in a spell—does the word or the rune fully release its power.

  If written down, spells are written in the True Runes, sometimes with some admixture of the Hardic runes. To write in the True Runes, as to speak the Old Speech, is to guarantee the truth of what one says—if one is human. Human beings cannot lie in that language. Dragons can; or so the dragons say; and if they are lying, does that not prove that what they say is true?