Photo: The cover of 'A Wizard of Earthsea' (2021 edition).
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
By Ursula K Le Guin
‘All power is one in source and end… Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man’s hand and the wisdom in a tree’s root… My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water… all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining stars. There is no other power. No other name.’
These words are spoken by Ged/Sparrowhawk, hero of this classic book, as he comes into full adulthood. I still remember the poster in my school library: a half-human, half-bird figure confronts a young man, watched by another youth from behind an ornate curtain. So far, so standard fantasy, yet the frisson I felt then has stayed with me. I believe I knew instinctively that this story carried an important message about life decisions, and the power and conflict we all carry within ourselves. The Quaker psychoanalyst Jack Wallis writes of the ‘supreme importance of morality’ in understanding emotions and urges; Earthsea offers a narrative of (self) discovery that speaks powerfully to me, and which may speak to other Friends.
Central to this novel is the lesson that light cannot exist without dark. How we understand that fact and choose to act upon it is up to us, and will define our humanity. George Fox recognised this truth: ‘the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within… And I cried… “Why should I be thus…” And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions… and in this I saw the infinite love of God.’
It has taken me forty years to read this wind-worn, salt-sprayed fable of contrast and balance. Any frustration at my delay is offset by the sense of reading immediate truths, the bracing sense of standing on a shoreline at low tide. Hard winter sun cuts across the water into my eyes as I breathe the cold sea air.
Le Guin channels her childhood upbringing by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, interweaving this with her academic study of French and Italian literature, and her excitement at the freedom offered by anarchism, lending her story the heft of Nordic and Arthurian myths. Her wise working of mythic material is felt in every sentence, yet there is also an electric thread woven into the tapestry. Jung peers over her shoulder as she works.
We land in Earthsea, an archipelago whose islands are scattered across a huge ocean. Magic is as familiar here as electricity is to us, based on the ‘true naming of a thing’. Most communities have a resident wizard; some attend lords and princes, while others serve the more prosaic needs of farmers and fishermen. We meet Sparrowhawk, a proud goatherd on Gont, the youngest son of an embittered bronzesmith. His mother died when he was a year old, and the directionless lad might have whiled the whole of his life away in the hills but for his aunt, a village witch who recognises his abilities.
After learning all she can teach him, Sparrowhawk uses a weather charm to confound raiders, attracting the notice of Ogion, Gont’s wizard, who apprentices him and presents him with his true name: Ged. Ogion is a great mage who understands that magic must be used sparingly: ‘You want to work spells… You’ve drawn too much water from that well… Mastery is nine times patience.’ One day Ged meets a beguiling girl in the meadows whose challenge to impress her sends him rifling through Ogion’s books. As he reads, the light dims, the room grows cold; a dark figure lurks in the corner.
This first encounter is cut short by Ogion, but the shadow has entered Ged’s life. Torn between frustration at Ogion’s constraints and love for this father figure, Ged asks to be sent to the School of Wizards on Roke. There, this rough-necked Harry Potter finds his Ron Weasley in Vetch, and his Draco Malfoy in lordly Jasper, who is only too happy to mirror Ged’s shadow side.
Ged hears the same caution from his teachers as from Ogion: ‘A wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world… To light a candle is to cast a shadow.’ Nevertheless, his rivalry with Jasper festers; he attempts a forbidden spell to raise the dead. From within the apparition he has summoned, the shadow erupts and attacks.
‘Ged defeats the outer dragons, but his inner ones remain’
Ged survives through his tutors’ care. Scarred, sobered, and scared, he graduates, being assigned to a remote fishing community where the archmage hopes he will be safe from his shadow. Still, he is permanently marked by his errors and experiences; the scars Ged bears shapes his maturity and understanding.
Inevitably, Ged’s sense of destiny sends him on a quest: he sets out to tame the dragons of Pendor. Fleeing from his shadow into more tangible peril, he feels something like freedom: ‘At least he sought this danger of his own will… for this hour perhaps before his death, he was free.’ Ged defeats the outer dragons, but his inner ones remain. The shadow draws nearer, naming him and stripping away his abilities. He stumbles into an enchanted castle where he recovers under the gaze of the Lady of Terrenon, revealed to be the girl who dared him to read Ogion’s spellbook, and who now tempts him further. She may represent Ged’s anima, urging him toward maturity. Discovered by the Lord of Terrenon, she and Ged escape, pursued by demonic forces. She is killed, though Ged’s anima seems certain to reappear in later books.
Ged returns to Ogion and is nursed back to health. He now fully acknowledges his love of and fealty to Ogion. This sense of completion is necessarily transient, another step toward maturity. Ogion explains, with shades of TS Eliot, ‘If [you] would not be a stick whirled in the stream… be the stream itself.’ Ged must face his shadow.
The final portion of the novel shifts the balance: hunted turns hunter, and the shadow flees. There are frantic races across land and sea, seeds planted for later books, and a reunion with Vetch, who accompanies Ged into the open sea. There, on a rising scrap of land, Ged finally meets his shadow and speaks its name: ‘and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: “Ged.” The two voices were one voice… Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.’ Ged is completed: ‘“The wound is healed… I am whole, I am free.” Then he bent over… weeping like a boy.’
Sometimes we need to venture to the depths before rising. Two centuries after Fox, Elizabeth Fry wrote of her sense of humility: ‘The more I have been made much of by the world, the more I have been inwardly humbled… When I have ascended before man, I have descended in humiliation before God.’ Ged is ready for further adventures. Beyond that he will have to sacrifice all magical power to save the world, but as a result will finally unite with the woman he has loved.
Perhaps it was meant to be that I would take so long to read this book. Perhaps I was waiting for the second half of my life to appreciate this Jungian parable of anima and shadow, ego, persona, and destiny. Looking back over my uneven life, I feel that in my own modest way I have also grappled with my shadow, sometimes slipping and falling, fumbling toward some sort of enlightenment. An inevitable story reworked throughout our lives, as so many people, so many Quakers, have done before.
Earthsea contains an earthen, woven wisdom. Some elements feel notably modern, as with Le Guin’s light-touch use of characters of colour – Ged and Jasper are brown-skinned, Vetch is black, while the Kargish invaders are white-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed and rapaciously warlike. Other elements reflect the era of writing: only men attend the Wizards’ School, while women, though often witches, are spoken of as ‘weak’ or ‘wicked’. Reading further into the cycle, this appears to be an honest ethnographic portrayal of patriarchy found in traditional societies and, regrettably, in many modern ones. Le Guin counters this by alternating male and female perspectives across the first four books.
I am glad to have finally read Earthsea. Ged has passions and urges, some admirable, some shameful, all human. The story tells how he learns to understand them, trying to honestly answer the needs within himself, others, and the world. In its thrilling offering of hot, hard truths wrapped in coarse, salt-stiffened cloth, Earthsea echoes Jack Wallis’ exhortation that we acknowledge our deeper feelings: ‘Those who have difficulty accepting the idea of a personal shadow… think morality attaches to feelings… They do not realise that feelings… are neutral. The supreme importance of morality is the way we choose to act on our feelings. And we shall not be free to choose if we do not know what they are.’
Isaac Penington advised, ‘Give over thine own willing, give over thy own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything and sink down to the seed which God sows in the heart… and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of Life.’ In expressing its own take on that sentiment, Earthsea offers a wise and vivid view of the vast, wide worlds within us.
