The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Most people called it the Old Mage’s House. Some of the villagers would tell a stranger, “He that was the Archmage, away off there in Roke, he lives there,” when city folk and foreigners from Havnor came seeking him; but they said it distrustfully and with some disapproval. They liked Tenar better than they liked him. Even though she was white skinned and a real foreigner, a Karg, they knew she was their kind, a thrifty housewife, a tough bargainer, nobody’s fool, more canny than uncanny.

  A girl, white face, dark hair, sudden, startled, stared at him across a cavern of dazzling crystal and water-carved stone, topaz and amethyst, in the trembling radiance of werelight from his staff.

  There, even there in their greatest temple, the Old Powers of the earth were feared, wrongly worshipped, offered the cruel deaths and mutilations of slaves, the stunted lives of girls and women imprisoned there. He and Arha had committed no sacrilege. They had released the long hunger and anger of the earth itself to break forth, bring down the domes and caverns, throw open the prison doors.

  But her people, who tried to appease the Old Powers, and his people, who held witchery in contempt, made the same mistake, moved by fear, always fear, of what was hidden in the earth, hidden in women’s bodies, the knowledge without words that trees and women knew untaught and men were slow to learn. He had only glimpsed it, that great quiet knowledge, the mysteries of the roots of the forest, the roots of the grasses, the silence of stones, the unspeaking communion of the animals. The waters underground, the rising of the springs. All he knew of it he had learned from her, Arha, Tenar, who never spoke of it. From her, from the dragons, from a thistle. A little colorless thistle struggling in the sea wind between stones, on the path over the High Fall . . .

  She came round the divider with a bowl, as he knew she would, and sat down on the milking stool beside the bed. “Sit up and have a spoonful or two,” she said. “It’s the last of Quacker.”

  “No more ducks,” he said. The ducks had been an experiment.

  “No,” she agreed. “We’ll stick to chickens. But it’s a good broth.”

  He sat up and she pushed the pillow behind him and set the bowl on his lap. It smelled good, and yet he did not want it. “Ah, I don’t know, I’m just not hungry,” he said. They both knew. She did not coax him. After a while he swallowed a few spoonfuls, and then put the spoon into the bowl and laid his head back against the pillow. She took the bowl away. She came back and stooped to brush the hair back from his forehead with her hand. “You’re a bit feverish,” she said.

  “My hands are cold.”

  She sat down on the stool again and took his hands. Hers were warm and firm. She bowed her head down to their clasped hands and sat that way a long time. He loosened one hand and stroked her hair. A piece of wood in the fire snapped. An owl hunting out in the pastures in the last of the twilight gave its deep, soft double call.

  The aching was in his chest again. He thought of it not so much as an ache as an architecture, an arch in there at the top of his lungs, a dark arch a little too large for his ribs to hold. After a while it eased, and then was gone. He breathed easily. He was sleepy. He thought of saying to her, I used to think I’d want to go into the woods, like Elehal, to die, he meant, but there’d be no need to say it. The forest was always where he wanted to be. Where he was whenever he could be. The trees around him, over him. His house. His roof. I thought I’d want to do the same. But I don’t. There’s nowhere I want to go. I couldn’t wait to leave this house when I was a boy, I couldn’t wait to see all the isles, all the seas. And then I came back with nothing, with nothing left at all. And it was the same as it had been. It was everything. It’s enough.

  Had he spoken? He did not know. It was silent in the house, the silence of the great slope of mountainside all round the house and the twilight above the sea. The stars would be coming out. Tenar was no longer beside him. She was in the other room, slight noises told him she was setting things straight, making up the fire.

  He drifted, drifted on.

  He was in darkness in a maze of vaulted tunnels like the Labyrinth of the Tombs where he had crawled, trapped, blind, craving water. These arched ribs of rock lowered and narrowed as he went on, but he had to go on. Closed in by rock, hands and knees on the black, sharp stones of the mountain way, he struggled to move, to breathe, could not breathe. He could not wake.

  It was bright morning. He was in Lookfar. A bit cramped and stiff and cold as always when he woke from the broken sleep and half sleep and quick, quick-vanishing dreams of nights in the boat alone. Last night there had been no need to summon the magewind; the world’s wind was easy and steady from the east. He had merely whispered to his boat, “Go on as you go, Lookfar,” and stretched out with his head against the sternpost and gazed up at the stars or the sail against the stars until his eyes closed. All that fiery deep-strewn host was gone now but the one great eastern star, already melting like a water drop in the rising day. The wind was keen and chill. He sat up. His head spun a little when he looked back at the eastern sky and then forward again at the blue shadow of the earth sinking into the ocean. He saw the first daylight strike fire from the tops of the waves.

  Before bright Éa was, before Segoy

  Bade the islands be,

  The wind of morning on the sea. . . .

  He did not sing the song aloud, it sang itself to him. Then came a queer thrumming in his ears. He turned his head seeking the sound, and again the dizziness passed through it. He stood up holding to the mast as the boat leapt on the lively sea, and scanned the ocean to the western horizon, and saw the dragon come.

  O my joy! be free.

  Fierce, with the forge smell of hot iron, the smoke plume trailing on the wind of its flight, the mailed head and flanks bright in the new light, the vast beat of the wings, it came at him like a hawk at a field mouse, swift, unappeasable. It swept down on the little boat that leapt and rocked wildly under the sweep of the wing, and as it passed, in its hissing, ringing voice, in the true speech, it cried to him, There is nothing to fear.

  He looked straight into the long golden eye and laughed. He called back to the dragon as it flew on to the east, “Oh, but there is, there is!” And indeed there was. The black mountains were there. But he had no fear in this bright moment, welcoming what would come, impatient to meet it. He spoke the joyous wind into the sail. Foam whitened along Lookfar’s sides as the boat ran west, far out past all the islands. He would go on, this time, until he sailed into the other wind. If there were other shores he would come to them. Or if sea and shore were all the same at last, then the dragon spoke the truth, and there was nothing to fear.

  On August 7, 1992, Ursula K. Le Guin presented the lecture, “Children, Women, Men, and Dragons,” which was later printed as “Earthsea Revisioned,” at Worlds Apart, a children’s literature institute sponsored by Children’s Literature New England and held at Keble College, Oxford University, Oxford, England.

  In our hero-tales of the Western world, heroism has been gendered: the hero is a man.

  Women may be good and brave, but with rare exceptions—Spenser, Ariosto, Bunyan?—women are not heroes. They are sidekicks. Never the Lone Ranger, always Tonto. Women are seen in relation to heroes: as mother, wife, seducer, beloved, victim, or rescuable maiden. Women won independence and equality in the novel, but not in the hero-tale. From the Iliad to The Song of Roland to The Lord of the Rings, right up into our lifetime, the hero-tale and its modern form—heroic fantasy—have been a male preserve: a sort of great game park where Beowulf feasts with Teddy Roosevelt, and Robin Hood goes hunting with Mowgli, and the cowboy rides off into the sunset alone. Truly a world apart.

  Since it’s about men, the hero-tale has concerned the establishment or validation of manhood. It has been the story of a quest, or a conquest, or a test, or a contest. It has involved conflict and sacrifice. Archetypal configurations of the hero-tale are the hero himself, of course, and often the night sea journey, the wicked witch, the wounded king, the
devouring mother, the wise old man, and so on. (These are Jungian archetypes; without devaluing Jung’s immensely useful concept of the archetype as an essential mode of thought, we might be aware that the archetypes he identified are mind forms of the Western European psyche as perceived by a man.)

  When I began writing heroic fantasy, I knew what to write about. My father had told us stories from Homer before I could read, and all my life, I’d read and loved the hero-tales. That was my own tradition, those were my archetypes, that’s where I was at home. Or so I thought until—in the enchanting phrase of my youth—sex reared its ugly head.

  The late sixties ended a long period during which artists were supposed to dismiss gender, to ignore it, to be ignorant of what sex they were. For many decades, it had been held that to perceive oneself as a woman writer or as a man writer would limit one’s scope, one’s humanity; that to write as a woman or as a man would politicize the work and so invalidate its universality. Art was to transcend gender. This idea of genderlessness or androgyny is what Virginia Woolf said was the condition of the greatest artists’ minds. To me it is a demanding, a valid, a permanent ideal.

  But against the ideal, the fact was that the men in charge of criticism, the colleges, and the society had produced male definitions of both art and gender. And these definitions were set above question. The standards themselves were gendered. Men’s writing was seen as transcending gender; women’s writing as trapped in it. Why am I using the past tense?

  And so the only way to have one’s writing perceived as above politics, as universally human, was to gender one’s writing as male. Writing as a man, to male standards of what is universally human, was centralized, privileged; writing as a woman was marginalized. Masculine judgment of art was definitive; feminine perception and option was secondary, second-rate. Virginia Woolf warned us that a woman’s writing will not be adequately judged so long as the standards of judgment are established and defended by men. And this is in the present tense, as it was sixty years ago.

  Well, then, if art—if language itself—doesn’t belong to women, women can only borrow it or steal it. Le vol; flighty, women are. Thieves, fly-by-nights. Off on their broomsticks.

  And why should men listen to stolen stories unless they concern important things—that is, the doings of men? Children, of course—even man-children—are supposed to listen to women. Part of women’s work is telling stories to children. Unimportant work, but important stories. Stories of the heroes.

  From the general to the personal: since my Earthsea books were published as children’s books, I was in an approved female role. So long as I behaved myself, obeyed the rules, I was free to enter the heroic realm. I loved that freedom and never gave a thought to the terms of it. Now that I know that even in fairyland there is no escape from politics, I look back and see that I was writing partly by the rules, as an artificial man, and partly against the rules, as an inadvertent revolutionary. Let me add that this isn’t a confession or a plea for forgiveness. I like my books. Within the limits of my freedom, I was free: I wrote well; and subversion need not be self-aware to be effective.

  To some extent, I pushed against the limits. For example, I followed the intense conservatism of traditional fantasy in giving Earthsea a rigid social hierarchy of kings, lords, merchants, peasants, but I colored all the good guys brown or black. Only the villains were white. I saw myself as luring white readers to identify with the hero, to get inside his skin and only then find it was a dark skin. I meant this as a strike against racial bigotry. I think now that my subversion went further than I knew, for by making my hero dark-skinned, I was setting him outside the whole European heroic tradition, in which heroes are not only male but white. I was making him an Outsider, an Other—like a woman, like me.

  (You will not see that dark man on most of the covers of the Earthsea books, by the way; publishers insist that jackets showing black people “kill sales” and forbid their artists to color a hero darker than tan. Look at the jackets of Alice Walker’s or Paule Marshall’s novels to realize how strong this taboo is. I think it has affected many readers’ perceptions of Ged.)

  I had a vanilla villainess in the first book, but in the sequel, it was my heroine who was white. I’m not sure why. I’d made the Kargish people white in the first book, and had to stick to it, but perhaps also I simply lacked the courage to make my heroine doubly Other.

  In The Tombs of Atuan, Arha/Tenar is not a hero—she is a heroine. The two English words are enormously different in their implications and value; they are indeed a wonderful exhibition of how gender expectations are reflected/created by linguistic usage.

  Tenar, a heroine, is not a free agent. She is trapped in her situation. And when the hero comes, she becomes complementary to him. She cannot get free of the Tombs without him.

  But—a fact some critics ignore—neither can Ged get free without her. They are interdependent. I redefined my hero by making him dependent, not autonomous. But heroines are always dependent, not autonomous—even a Fidelio. They act only with and for their man. I had reimagined the man’s role, but not the woman’s. I had not yet thought what a female hero might be.

  No wonder; where are the women in Earthsea? Two of the books of the trilogy have no major female characters, and in all three, the protagonist, in the precise sense of the word, is male.

  Communities of men in Earthsea are defined as powerful, active, and autonomous; the community of women in Atuan is described as obedient to distant male rulers; a static, closed society. No change can come, nothing can be done, until a man arrives. Hero and heroine depend on each other in getting free of this terrible place, but the man originates the action of the book.

  And in all three books the fundamental power—magic—belongs to men; only to men; only to men who have no sexual contact with women.

  The women of Earthsea have skills and powers and may be in touch with obscure earth forces, but they aren’t wizards or mages. They know, at most, a few words of the language of power, the Old Speech; they are never methodically taught it by the men who do know it. There are no women at the School of Wizards on Roke. At best, women are village witches. But that’s at worst, too, for the saying is quoted more than once: “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic.”

  So, no women in college, no women in power, and that’s how things are in Marlboro country. Nobody said anything about it when the books first came out.

  The tradition I was writing in was a great one, a strong one. The beauty of your own tradition is that it carries you. It flies, and you ride it. Indeed, it’s hard not to let it carry you, for it’s older and bigger and wiser than you are. It frames your thinking and puts winged words in your mouth. If you refuse to ride, you have to stumble along on your own two feet; if you try to speak your own wisdom, you lose that wonderful fluency. You feel like a foreigner in your own country, amazed and troubled by things you see, not sure of the way, not able to speak with authority.

  It is difficult for a woman to speak or write with authority unless she remains within a traditional role, since authority is still granted and withheld by the institutions and traditions of men (such as this amazing medieval institution where we are guests this week, on whose august lawns Virginia Woolf was forbidden to walk). A woman, as queen or prime minister, may for a time fill a man’s role; that changes nothing. Authority is male. It is a fact. My fantasy dutifully reported the fact.

  But is that all a fantasy does—report facts?

  Readers and reviewers of the trilogy did not question Ged’s masculinity, as far as I know. He was seen as thoroughly manly. And yet he had no sex life at all. This is of course traditional in the hero-tale: the hero may get a pro forma bride as a final reward, but from Samson and Delilah to Merlin and Nimue to the war stories of our century, sexuality in the hero is shown not as prowess but as weakness. Strength lies in abstinence—the avoidance of women and the replacement of sexuality by nonsexual male bonding.

  The establishment of
manhood in heroic terms involves the absolute devaluation of women. The woman’s touch, in any sense, threatens that heroic masculinity.

  By the early seventies, when I finished the third book of Earthsea, traditional definitions and values of masculinity and femininity were all in question. I’d been questioning them myself in other books. Women readers were asking how come all the wise guys on the Isle of the Wise were guys. The artist who was above gender had been exposed as a man hiding in a raincoat. No serious writer could, or can, go on pretending to be genderless. I couldn’t continue my hero-tale until I had, as woman and artist, wrestled with the angels of the feminist consciousness. It took me a long time to get their blessing. From 1972 on, I knew there should be a fourth book of Earthsea, but it was sixteen years before I could write it.

  The fourth book, Tehanu, takes up where the trilogy left off: in the same hierarchic, male-dominated society, but now, instead of using the pseudo-genderless male viewpoint of the heroic tradition, the world is seen through a woman’s eyes. This time the gendering of the point of view is neither hidden nor denied. In Adrienne Rich’s invaluable word, I had “revisioned” Earthsea.