The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Earlier in this conference, Jill Paton Walsh suggested that in Tehanu, I was “doing penance.” Irredeemably secular, I’d call it affirmative action. In my lifetime as a writer, I have lived through a revolution, a great and ongoing revolution. When the world turns over, you can’t go on thinking upside down. What was innocence is now irresponsibility. Visions must be re-visioned.

  In Atuan, Tenar lived in a world apart, a tiny desert community of women and eunuchs; she knew nothing beyond it. This setting was in part a metaphor of the “innocence” long instituted as the value of a girl, her “virtue” (the word deriving from “vir,” “man”; her worth to men being her only worth). That book and that innocence ended as she entered the “great world” of men and their doings. In Tehanu, she has lived in that world for years and knows her part of it well, the part she chose. She chose to leave the mage Ogion, her guardian and guide to masculine knowledge; she chose to be a farmer’s wife. Why? Was she seeking a different, an obscurer knowledge? Was she being “womanly,” bowing to society’s resistance to independently powerful women?

  Tenar certainly considers herself independent and responsible; she is ready to decide and to act. She has not abnegated power. But her definition of action, decision, and power is not heroic in the masculine sense. Her acts and choices do not involve ascendance, domination, power over others, and seem not to involve great consequences. They are “private” acts and choices, made in terms of immediate, actual relationships. To those who still believe that the public and the private can be separated, that there is a great world of men and war and politics and business and a little world of women and children and personal relations, and that these are truly worlds apart, one important, the other not—to such readers, Tenar’s choice will appear foolish, and her story sadly unheroic.

  Certainly, if we discard the axiom “what’s important is done by men,” with its corollary “what women do isn’t important,” then we’ve knocked a hole in the hero-tale, and a good deal may leak out. We may have lost quest, contest, and conquest as the plot, sacrifice as the key, victory or destruction as the ending; and the archetypes may change. There may be old men who aren’t wise, witches who aren’t wicked, mothers who don’t devour. There may be no public triumph of good over evil, for in this new world, what’s good or bad, important or unimportant, hasn’t been decided yet, if ever. Judgment is not referred up to the wise men. History is no longer about great men. The important choices and decisions may be obscure ones not recognized or applauded by society.

  Indeed, Ged’s first heroic act, in A Wizard of Earthsea, was this kind of heroism; a personal choice almost unwitnessed and not sung about in the songs. But it was rewarded, and its reward was immediate: power. His power increased. He was on his way to becoming Archmage. In Tenar’s Earthsea, there’s neither acclaim nor reward; the outcomes of actions are complex and obscure.

  Perhaps it is this lack of applause, of “importance,” that has led some reviewers to state that all the men in Tehanu are weak or wicked. There are certainly a couple of very nasty villains, but all the men? Ogion? I suppose dying is a kind of weakness, but I thought he came through it rather well. As for the young king, he rescues Tenar from a persecutor, just as a hero should, and is clearly going to be an innovative and excellent statesman. Several women readers have objected fiercely that Tenar’s son, Spark, is a selfish lout. Are all sons good, then, all wise, all generous? Tenar blames herself for Spark’s weakness (just like a woman!), but I blame the society that spoiled the boy by giving him unearned power. After he’s managed that farm awhile alone, he’ll probably shape up. Why do we expect more of the son than of the daughter?

  But as for Ged, well, he has indeed lost his job. That’s something we punish men for very cruelly. And when your job is being a hero, to lose it means you must indeed be weak and wicked.

  In Tehanu, Ged’s virtues are no longer the traditional male heroic ones: power as domination over others, unassailable strength, and the generosity of the rich. Traditional masculinists don’t want heroism revised and unrewarded. They don’t want to find it among housewives and elderly goatherds. And they really don’t want their hero fooling around with grown women.

  There didn’t use to be any sex in Earthsea. My working title for Tehanu was Better Late Than Never.

  Tenar always loved Ged, and knew it, but she can’t figure out why she now, for the first time, desires him. Her friend—the witch Moss—explains it to her: wizards give up one great power, sex, in order to get another, magic. They put themselves under a permanent spell of continence that affects everyone they have to do with. “Why didn’t I know that?” Tenar says, and Moss cackles and explains that the magic of a really good spell is that you don’t know it’s working. It just “is”; the way things “are.” But when Ged loses his power as a mage, his spell of chastity went with it, and like it or lump it, he’s got his manhood back. The witch thinks this is funny.

  Moss is a dirty old woman who’s led a lively life. It seems that witches don’t have to be chaste. They don’t make the great sacrifice. Perhaps their powers are even nourished by their sexuality, but that’s not clear. In fact, curiously little is known about witches in Earthsea, even by witches, even by the author. It looks as if the wizards have generally used their own powers in their own interests to keep their knowledge and skills from women. Women’s work, as usual, is the maintenance of order and cleanliness, housekeeping, feeding and clothing people, childbearing, caring of babies and children, nursing and healing of animals and people, caring of the dying, funeral rites—those unimportant matters of life and death; not part of history or of story. What women do is invisible. (Since they live without women, the wizards must do a lot of these invisible, “disappeared” things themselves, such as darning and dishwashing, a fact that I, like Moss, find funny. But pleasing, also. I was touched and delighted to discover that Ged was better at mending than I am.)

  Old Moss is no revolutionary. She was taught that what men do is what matters. She supports this in her own devious way, saying, “Ours is only a little power, seems like, next to theirs. But it goes down deep. It’s all roots. It’s like an old blackberry thicket. And a wizard’s power is like a fir tree, maybe, great and tall and grand, but it’ll blow right down in a storm. Nothing kills a blackberry bramble.” I’m afraid Moss is as essentialist as Allan Bloom. But because in this book, Tehanu, the witch is allowed to speak; her mere presence subverts the tradition and its rules. If women can have both sex and magic, why can’t men?

  Continence, abstinence, denial of relationship. In the realm of male power, there is no interdependence of men with women. Manhood—according to Sigmund Freud, Robert Bly, and the hero-tale—is obtained and validated by the man’s independence from women. The connection is severed. The heroic man’s relation to women is limited to the artificial code of chivalry, which involves the adoration of a woman-shaped object. Women in that world are nonpeople, dehumanized by a beautiful, worshipful spell—a spell that may be seen, from the other side, as a curse.

  A world in which men are seen as independently real and women are seen only as non-men is not a fantasy kingdom. It is every army. It’s Washington, DC, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It’s the corporate boardroom and the executive suite and the board of regents. It’s the canon of English Literature. It’s our politics. It’s the world I lived in when I wrote the first three books of Earthsea. I lived under the spell, the curse. Most of us did—most of do—most of the time. The myth of man alone, or alone with his God, at the center, on the top, is a very old, very powerful myth. It rules us still.

  But thanks to the revisioning of gender called feminism, we can see the myth as a myth: a construct, which may be changed; an idea, which may be rethought, made more true, more honest.

  A rule may be unjust, yet its servants may be just. At the university Virginia Woolf could not enter, Tolkien taught. The mages of Roke were honest and just men, trying to use their power mindfully, keeping Equilibrium accordin
g to their lights. When she first came to Gont, Tenar lived as a student with a very wise mage, Ogion. Wouldn’t he have taught her the uses of power? Well, we don’t know if he would or not, because she refused. She quit grad school. She went off to be a nobody; a wife and mother. And now, as an aging widow not even allowed to own her farm, she’s a subnobody. Was this a sacrifice? If so, what for?

  Ged’s bargain seems clearer. In the third book, he sacrifices his power, spending it to defeat a mortal evil. He triumphs, but at the cost of his heroic persona. As Archmage he is dead. And in Tehanu, we find him weak, ill, depressed, forced to hide from enemies, at best a mere farmhand, good with a pitchfork. Readers who want him to be the Alpha Male are dismayed. They’re dubious of a strength that doesn’t involve contests and conquests and bossing people around.

  Apparently, it was the bossing around that Tenar refused, when she stopped studying with Ogion. Maybe Ogion, a maverick mage, would have shared his knowledge with her, but even if the wizardly hierarchy had accepted her, which seems doubtful, she evidently didn’t want their kind of power. She wanted freedom.

  She doesn’t approve of sacrifice. “My soul can’t live in that narrow place—this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life. . . . There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption—beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom.” And she didn’t do any dying to get it. All her former selves are alive in her: the child Tenar; the girl-priestess Arha, who still thinks in Kargish; and Goha the farmwife, mother of two children. Tenar is whole, but not single. She is not pure. The sacrificial image of dying to be reborn is not appropriate to her. Just the opposite. She has borne, she has given birth to, her children and her new selves. She is not reborn, but rebearing. The word seems strange. We think of birth passively, as if we were all babies or all men. It takes an effort to think not of rebirth but of rebearing, actively, in the maternal mode: to think not as the apple but as the apple tree.

  But what is Tenar’s freedom? A very contingent thing. She lives alone. One night, men surround her house, meaning to rape her and take her child from her. Victimized, she panics; she rushes from door to window. At last, fear turns to rage, and seizing a knife, she flings the door wide open. But it is Ged, playing the man’s role to the hilt, who actually stabs one of the assailants. He has been gendered into violence, just as much as they have. And she has been gendered into mere response. Neither acts with genuine freedom, though they do act.

  At the end of the book, both Ged and Tenar face the defenders of the old tradition. Having renounced the heroism of that tradition, they appear to be helpless. No magic, nothing they know, nothing they have been, can stand against the pure malevolence of institutionalized power. Their strength and salvation must come from outside the institutions and traditions. It must be a new thing.

  Tenar’s last child is one not born of her body, but given to her out of the fire, chosen by her soul. Raped, beaten, pushed into the fire, disfigured, one hand crippled, one eye blinded, this child is innocence in a different sense of the word. This is helplessness personified: disinheritance, a child dehumanized, made Other. And she was the key to this book. Until I saw Therru, until she chose me, there was no book. I couldn’t see the story till I could look through her eye. But which eye, the seeing or the blind?

  In a story I wrote not long before Tehanu, called “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” a child called Myra survives a plane crash in the Oregon desert and is found by a coyote—that is, by Coyote, who created the world, according to the people there, and made quite a mess of it in the process. Myra has lost the sight of one eye in the crash. Some of Coyote’s neighbors, Bluejay and Rattler and others, hold a dance and stick an eye made of pine pitch into the socket, and after Coyote licks it, it works fine. And Myra has a kind of double vision. She sees where the animals live not as burrows and dens but as a little village. She sees Coyote as a skinny woman in blue jeans with grayish blonde hair and a lot of no-good boyfriends, and she sees Horse as a beautiful long-haired man, and so on. And though the animals know she’s human, they see her as one of their own kind—Coyote sees her as a pup; Horse sees her as a filly; and Owl, who isn’t paying much attention, sees her as an egg. But when Myra gets near where human beings live, she sees, with one eye, just a town like the one she grew up in; streets and houses and schoolkids. With the other eye—the new one, the wild one—she sees a terrifying hole in the fabric of the world—a no place where time rushes like a torrent, and everything is out of joint—Koyaanisqatsi. In the end, she has to go back and live there, with her own people; but she asks Grandmother Spider if she can keep her new eye, and the Grandmother says yes. So maybe she will go on being able to see both worlds.

  In Tehanu, Tenar is brushing her hair on a windy dry morning, so that it crackles and makes sparks, and the one-eyed child Therru is fascinated, seeing what she calls “the fire flying out all over the sky.”

  At that moment, Tenar first asked herself how Therru saw her—saw the world—and knew she did not know; that she could not know what one saw with an eye that had been burned away. And Ogion’s words—“they will fear her”—returned to her, but she felt no fear of the child. Instead, she brushed her hair again, vigorously, so the sparks would fly, and once again, she heard the little husky laugh of delight.

  Soon after this scene, Tenar herself has a moment of double vision, seeing with two different eyes. An old man in the village has a beautiful painted fan; on one side are figures of lords and ladies of the royal court, but on the other side, usually hidden against the wall:

  Dragons moved as the folds of the fan moved. Painted faint and fine on the yellowed silk, dragons of pale red, blue, green moved and grouped, as the figures on the other side were grouped, among clouds and mountain peaks.

  “Hold it up to the light,” said old Fan.

  She did so, and saw the two sides, the two paintings, made one by the light flowing through the silk, so that the clouds and peaks were the towers of the city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes.

  “You see?”

  “I see,” she murmured.

  What is this double vision, two things seen as one? What can the blinded eye teach the seeing eye? What is the wilderness? Who are the dragons?

  Dragons are archetypes, yes; mind forms, a way of knowing. But these dragons aren’t St. George’s earthy worm, nor are they the emperor of China’s airy servant. I am not European, I am not Asian, and I am not a man. These are the dragons of a new world, America, and the visionary forms of an old woman’s mind. The mythopoeticists err, I think, in using the archetype as a rigid, filled mold. If we see it only as a vital potentiality, it becomes a guide into mystery. Fullness is a fine thing, but emptiness is the secret of it, as Lao Tze said. The dragons of Earthsea remain mysterious to me.

  In the first three books, I think the dragons were, above all, wildness. What is not owned. A dragonlord wasn’t a man who tamed dragons; nobody tamed dragons. He was simply, as Ged said, a man dragons would take notice of. But he couldn’t look at them, not eye to eye. The rule was clear: a man must not look into a dragon’s eyes.

  In the first book, we briefly met a young girl who wore a very small dragon on her wrist, like a bracelet; it had consented, temporarily, to be jewelry. Some tiny note was struck here that I remembered when, in the last book, Tenar meets a dragon—a full-scale one. She knows the rule, but then, she’s not a man, is she? She and the dragon look at each other, eye to eye, and they know who they are. They recognize each other.

  This echoes a legend told early in the book about the time when dragons and human beings were all one people, and how they became separated, and how they might yet be one.

  And that legend brings into the European hero-tale tradition the great Native American mythos of the time when animals were people the time of the making. Myra, the little Buffalo Gal in the Oregon desert, can live for a while in that Dreamtime, that spiritual realm, because she�
�s a child and a child adopted by a coyote; a wolf-child. Tenar doesn’t live in it, but she connects with it—she can look the dragon in the eye—because she chose freedom over power. Her insignificance is her wildness. What she is and does is “beneath notice”—invisible to the men who own and control, the men in power. And so, she’s freer than any of them to connect with a different world, a free world, where things can be changed, remade. And the pledge of that connection is, I think, her adoption of the child who has been destroyed by the irresponsible exercise of power, cast out of common humanity, made Other. Tenar is a wolf-mother.

  The dragon Kalessin in the last book is wildness seen not only as dangerous beauty but as dangerous anger. The fire of the dragon runs right through the book. It meets the fire of human rage, the cruel anger of the weak, which wreaks itself on the weaker in the endless circle of human violence. It meets that fire and consumes it, for “a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.” There’s no way to repair or undo what was done to the child, and so there must be a way to go on from there. It can’t be a plain and easy way. It involves a leap. It involves flying.

  So the dragon is subversion, revolution, change—a going beyond the old order in which men were taught to own and dominate, and women were taught to collude with them: the order of oppression. It is the wildness of the spirit and of the earth, uprising against misrule.

  And it rejects gender.

  Therru, the burned child, will grow up to be fully sexed, but she’s been ungendered by the rape that destroys her “virtue” and the mutilation that destroys her beauty. She has nothing left of the girl men want girls to be. It’s all been burned away. As for Ged and Tenar, they’re fully sexed too, but on the edge of old age, when conventional gendering grants him some last flings and grants her nothing but modest grandmotherhood. And the dragon defies gender entirely. There are male and female dragons in the earlier books, but I don’t know if Kalessin, the Eldest, is male or female or both or something else. I choose not to know. The deepest foundation of the order of oppression is gendering, which names the male normal, dominant, active, and the female Other, subject, passive. To begin to imagine freedom, the myths of gender, like the myths of race, have to be exploded and discarded. My fiction does that by these troubling and ugly embodiments.