The Doorkeeper, smiling, said, “He has done with doing. He goes home.”
And they watched the dragon fly between the sunlight and the sea till it was out of sight.
THE DEED OF GED TELLS that he who had been archmage came to the crowning of the King of All the Isles in the Tower of the Sword in Havnor at the world’s heart. The song tells that when the ceremony of the crowning was over and the festival began, he left the company and went down alone to the port of Havnor. There lay out on the water a boat, worn and beaten by storm and the weather of years; she had no sail up, and was empty. Ged called the boat by name, Lookfar, and she came to him. Entering the boat from the pier Ged turned his back on land, and without wind or sail or oar the boat moved; it took him from harbor and from haven, westward among the isles, westward over sea; and no more is known of him.
But in the island of Gont they tell the story otherwise, saying that it was the young king, Lebannen, who came seeking Ged to bring him to the coronation. But he did not find him at Gont Port or at Re Albi. No one could say where he was, only that he had gone afoot up into the forests of the mountain. Often he went so, they said, and did not return for many months, and no man knew the roads of his solitude. Some offered to seek for him, but the King forbade them, saying, “He rules a greater kingdom than I do.” And so he left the mountain, and took ship, and returned to Havnor to be crowned.
AFTERWORD
BEFORE I WROTE THE FIRST of these books, I’d written a couple of short stories set on islands where wizardry was practiced and dragons were feared. As I’ve said, when I began to conceive that first book of Earthsea, I realized those islands belonged to a great archipelago, a world of islands, and I drew the map.
All the islands were on it, but I knew nothing of them except their names, their shapes, the bays and mountains and rivers I had marked, the names of cities on some of them. They all remained to be discovered, one by one.
There are still many islands that I’ve never been to. I can look at the map and wonder about them, just as I wonder about Tenerife or Zanzibar. And even though I’ve been to the Outer Hebrides or the Windward Isles, to Roke or Havnor, I can still wonder about them; there’s always more to learn.
The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.” It is a sentence that has meant a great deal to me. Sometimes it tells me that by going where it is necessary for us to go, by following our own path, we learn our way through the world. Sometimes it tells me that we can only learn our way through the world by just starting out and going.
Understood either way, it describes how I learned Earthsea.
When I first arrived, I knew very little about wizardry and even less about dragons. Ogion and the Masters of Roke educated me about what wizards did. But I had a lot of pictures and notions about dragons in my head that I had to work through, get rid of, or borrow from, before I could see my own dragons clearly.
There are many kinds of dragon in the world, and growing up I’d learned something about a good many of them. There was the kind of dragon, in fairy tales and the Norse lore, who eats maidens and hoards jewelry. A close relative was St. George’s dragon, often a rather pathetic specimen, which I knew mostly from paintings where the saint is about to slay it, or has already slain it and is standing with one armored foot planted smugly on it. Then there were the far more impressive Chinese dragons, coiling imperially through the clouds with a fiery jewel in their claws. There were the lovable dragons of Pern. There was, barely hinted but unforgettable, the dragon whose tooth forms a great gateway in one of Lord Dunsany’s tales. There was, magnificently, Smaug.
All rich, all excellent. I plundered freely. Smaug, the great Worms of the North, and aerial Chinese dragons are certainly ancestors of the Dragons of Pendor in the first book of Earthsea.
But, by going with Ged where he had to go, I still had much to learn about the dragons of Earthsea, their history, their kinship with human beings. In The Farthest Shore, I began to see them clearly. Ged told me what to see, when he said to Arren, “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet I would remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”
The dragons are, perhaps above all, beautiful.
As tigers are beautiful. Could anyone regret having seen a tiger? Unless, of course, they had a little while to regret it while the tiger ate them.
The dragons are beautiful, and also mortal, as tigers are. Long-lived, but not indestructible. Terrible, but not monstrous. Fierce, fiery, careless of human life, sometimes careless of their own lives. Destructive when angry, very much to be feared, and untamably wild. Mysterious, as all great wild creatures are mysterious.
But not incomprehensible. Speech is natural to them, inborn: they don’t have to learn it, as we do. Their language, the only one they will speak, is the tongue the wizards must learn, the tongue that works magic, the True Speech, the language of the Making.
When I wrote The Farthest Shore, I saw the dragons as wildness itself, and thus as utterly other than human. And yet, looking back, I see that I already felt their otherness as not absolute. They share a language with us, or some of us, as no animal does. And when Cob’s desire for immortality leads him to make a breach in the human world from which life and light drain out like water through a breach in a dyke, the dragons are damaged by it just as human beings are, losing their reason, their power of speech, their magic.
I didn’t understand why that was so, when I wrote the book, but I knew it was so.
People like to believe that writers know exactly what they are doing and have their story under control, thought out, plotted from beginning to end. It makes sense of the whole strange enterprise of novel writing, makes it rational. Many academic critics believe this, so do many readers, so do some writers. But not all writers have this kind of control of their material, and I wouldn’t even want to have it.
There’s a difference between control and responsibility. Aesthetically and morally, I take full responsibility for what I write. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t feel free to let the material control itself to the extent I do. I’d have to manage it consciously and continuously, making everything happen as I planned it to happen. But I never wanted that kind of control. By “going where I have to go,” being willing to guess that there is such a place without knowing clearly how I am to get there, trusting to my story to take me there, I know I’ve gone farther than I could ever have gone if I’d fully known my goal and the way to it before I set out. I left room for luck and chance to come and aid me, room for my narrow plans and ideas to grow and include what I didn’t know when I set out.
What told me to do this—to leave room? I have no idea. Luck, chance. A kind of passive courage. A willingness to follow.
Follow what?
A dragon, maybe. A dragon flying on the wind.
IT WOULD BE LOVELY IF writing a story was like getting into a little boat that drifted off and took me to the promised land, or climbing on a dragon’s back and flying off to Selidor. But it’s only as a reader that I can do that. As a writer, to take full responsibility without claiming total control requires a lot of work, a lot of groping and testing, flexibility, caution, watchfulness. I have no chart to follow, so I have to be constantly alert. The boat needs steering. There have to be long conversations with the dragon I ride. But however watchful and aware I am, I know I can never be fully aware of the currents that carry the boat, of where the winds beneath the dragon’s wings are blowing.
A writer lives and works in the world she was born into, and no matter how firm her own purpose, or how seemingly far from the present day her subject, she and her work are subject to the changing winds and currents of that world.
I was a child during the Great Depression, and eleven years old when America entered the Second World War. I wrote this book soon after the Sixties—a time of high tides and high winds, of great hope and wild folly, when for a while it seemed a more generous vis
ion might replace the sour dream of profiteering and consumerism that has been the bane of my country.
As I look back at the book now, I see how it reflects that time. Along with the active movement to free America from racist injustice and from militarism, there was a real vision of getting free from compulsive materialism, the confusion of goods with good. Yet already we were watching much of that vision blur off into wishful thinking or become drug-dependent.
Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.
So the book’s dark themes of loss and betrayal took shape. So Ged and Arren had to come to Hort Town, and drug addiction and slavery are seen for the first time in the Archipelago. Evil, in this book, has an immediate, ugly, human shape, because I saw evil not as some horde of foreign demons with bad teeth and superweapons but as an insidious and ever-present enemy in my own daily life in my own country: the ruinous irresponsibility of greed.
We are frequently told that greed for endless increase of material goods is natural and universal—as is greed for endless life. We are all supposed to agree that you can’t be too rich or live too long.
The desire to live is certainly natural and universal, since it’s the basic directive of living creatures: once born, our job and our desire is to try to stay alive.
But is that the same as a desire to stay alive forever, to be immortal? Or is it just that we can’t imagine not being, so we invent an endless existence called immortality?
Knowing that everything on earth has an end, we know the afterlife can’t be on earth, so it has to be somewhere else—a totally other place where the living can’t come and where nothing can ever change. To me, the imagery of the various afterlives and underworlds, the heavens and hells, appears marvelous and powerful, but I can’t believe in any of them except as I “believe” in any imaginative creation as a hint, an indication, a sign of something more than can be said or shown. The idea of individual immortality, an endless ego-existence, is more dreadful to me than the idea of letting go the self in death to rejoin shared, eternal being. I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, and living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.
So in this book Ged goes down into the dreary realm of the dead, knowing that he will not come back from it, and willing to pay that price.
But even wizards don’t know everything. He’s wrong. He does come back, saved by his young companion’s innocence and strength. Both of them are transformed by the terrible passage. The boy Arren returns as the man Lebannen, and Ged has lost, not his life, but his power to do magic. The Archmage is no mage now.
What may be implied about Ged’s future in that loss, that change, is just hinted at by the Doorkeeper when he says, “He has done with doing. He goes home.”
URSULA K. LE GUIN is one of the most distinguished fantasy and science fiction writers of all time. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Honor. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her online at ursulakleguin.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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The Farthest Shore (Earthsea Cycle) Page 20
