Reviews of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and related work
- Sequel: The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
- Sequel: The Farthest Shore (1972)
- Adaptation: Tales from Earthsea (2006)
- Sequel: Tehanu (1990)
- Spin-off: “Darkrose and Diamond” (1999)
- Sequel: “Dragonfly” (2001)
- Spin-off: “On the High Marsh” (2001)
- Prequel: “The Bones of the Earth” (2001)
- Prequel: The Finder (2001)
A Wizard of Earthsea (1968
) – previously
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
One of the better clones of Tolkien for young adults. It’s a secondary world of high integrity, carefully built on a stronger central premise, with a shorter story told in fairly dense prose, no epic war and no sapient species other than humans and dragons. I don’t like the dragons; their long mental immaturity is nice, but they are too feeble next to the human hero.
The idea of magic revolving around true names is found in large parts of the ancient world and is a feature of The Bible (ca. 110 CE) where Adam names the animals and Yahweh’s name cannot be spoken, but it may have come from Egyptian mythology into Earthsea. This would be appropriate, since Le Guin here makes a deliberate effort not to put whites at the centre of the secondary world. For some reason she includes them at the periphery and excludes women from formal training in wizardry.
References here: Draken mot nybörjarna, The Farthest Shore (1972), Lord Foul’s Bane (1977), Star Wars (1977), Always Coming Home (1985), “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece” (1988), After the Campfires (1998), “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000), Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), Food Wars: The Fourth Plate (2019).
‣ The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
A peasant’s toddler in a warlike Bronze Age tyranny is selected to head the cult of uncommunicative, nameless chthonic deities identified with the primal terrors of night and death. Her responsibilities weigh on her conscience and she is caught up in the intersection of politics and a nunnery’s tedium. Her friends are a sympathetic atheist and a eunuch.
The basic premise is great. I dislike the dungeon complex, featuring Ged as a looter, a mere D&D-style wizard. I don’t mind the extended metaphor about the position of women in Kargish society; in this metaphor the dungeon is the internal sex organs. What I dislike is the usual problem with dungeons: There is no answer to the question of who actually expended the extreme effort to build this one, nor why it is untouched by geological forces or mould. The powers in it are inconsistent with the corresponding ancient power in the preceding novel, which was much more impressive, to the point of setting the course of Ged’s life. Here we do not even get a definitive answer to the question of Tenar’s possible connection to prior priestesses.
References here: The Farthest Shore (1972), After the Campfires (1998), Tales from Earthsea (2006), Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018).
‣ The Farthest Shore (1972)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
More typical young-adult fantasy than the previous two novels, with a capable, self-assured, wine-drinking, aristocratic, Aragorn-like teen hero who is fated to become a great ruler by virtue of his descent from a legendary figure and who immediately becomes a fanboy of Ged’s. Similarly, there is a strong moral dichotomy and a great deal of violence, another unfortunate contrast to the preceding books. Meh.
The initial threat is the loss of magic, a genre motif. Le Guin narrowly avoids the most common implication associated with this motif, i.e. that an ordinary life is poor because it is not supernatural. Though the author seems to dodge that bullet, those who are robbed of magic will then deny the very existence of magic, as if magic were nothing more than a metaphor for joie de vivre. This somewhat undermines the worldbuilding and clearly contradicts the more healthy critical thinking exhibited in The Tombs of Atuan (1971).
At the same time, in this book Ged formulates both the anarchist and the Daoist premises of the series more clearly than before. In the space of one page he declares:
I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me! [---] an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted the earth is lighter, the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. [---] But we [people], in so far as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature.
If you don’t take the point, the entire novel will seem quite ordinary for its genre, as A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) seemed to me when I gave it a cursory initial reading, before becoming acquainted with Le Guin’s philosophy. The ultimate fate of Ged in this volume, to stop working magic, like Ogion, is both a natural conclusion and an elegant worldbuilding stratagem, accounting for why the world is not ruled by wizards. To be powerful, they must first understand nature, and when they understand nature, they love it more than their own artifice.
There is some elaboration on the afterlife in Earthsea. It resembles the Sumerian notions expressed in the poem beginning “In those days, in those far-off days” which is traditionally appended to The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100–1100 BCE). It doesn’t improve upon the beautiful glimpse Ged gets in the first novel.
References here: Tehanu (1990).
‣‣ Tales from Earthsea (2006
)
Suzuki Toshio (producer), Niwa Keiko (writer).
Magic is on the wane and there are many portents. Fear of death has driven a prince and one of the few magicians who can still rely on his power quite insane. Another mage travels calmly across the face of Earthsea, trying to shore up a delicate balance.
Not to be confused with the book Tales from Earthsea (2001). The film was directed by Miyazaki Gorō, the eldest son of Hayao, mentioned in “A Greeting of Solidarity — Afterword” (1987) as having some talent for images. The appointment of Gorō to direct this film was an unfortunate nepotist twist to which the elder Miyazaki, supposedly, barely agreed after decades of failure to train surviving successors. Le Guin herself did not expect it when she agreed, at long last, to have her work adapted by the Japanese studio. The elder Miyazaki steered clear of the production entirely, according to what he noted in “Feeling Responsible for the Future of Children and Not Wanting to Make Halfhearted Films” (2006). The result is not much better than The Cat Returns (2002), making it Ghibli’s second worst feature.
Even so, the film is a beautiful and well paced pastoral, rather like Katabuchi Sunao’s Princess Arete (2001). I particularly enjoyed Cob’s “future proof” fortress—despite its video-game-like qualities—which is original to the film. I also enjoyed the replanting of the seed beds, one of several scenes taken from The Journey of Shuna (1983) with Le Guin’s Tehanu as Thea/Tea. It’s enjoyable to see the awesome talents of Ghibli applied to a relatively conventional genre-bound script for a change, even if that genre-boundedness owes less to Le Guin than to role-playing games. The feel of the novels is absent and the moral message is both heavy-handed and absurd, amounting to no more than a blustering defence of an intuitive non sequitur, where Le Guin was much more careful.
The script is based primarily on The Farthest Shore, which is the source of the characters Arren, Hare and Cob, the ex-sorceress selling bolts of cloth, and the motif of dragons fighting amongst themselves. The most obvious single departure in the script is that almost all the characters are light-skinned. That racist choice is a huge missed opportunity to make a predominantly and visibly dark-skinned fantasy epic.
The second most obvious departure from the book is the patricide committed by Arren, which I assume is intended to recall Tenar’s order to have three political prisoners killed in The Tombs of Atuan (1971), rather than Arren’s dark thoughts about Ged under Cob’s influence in The Farthest Shore, or the “vague sense of unease that pervades Japan” as its population went into decline in “Worlds of Insects, Trees and Humans” (2006), or, for that matter, the younger Miyazaki replacing his father. It is a bold creative choice, but a poor one. Prefer Daibosatsu Pass (1966) and “Firebird: Karma Chapter” (1986).
Cob and Arren are both weak shades of Nausicaä’s imperial brothers. The other characters are uninteresting, including Hare as a sort of Kurotowa character cast as a toady inexplicably collecting slaves in a city almost crossed by very tall aqueducts doubling as streets. The novel’s Hare is not such a toady, slaves there are collected by robbers, and there is no mention of aqueducts. I suppose this Hare is based more closely on Aspen from Tehanu (1990). The worst characters are the two unnamed evil ordinary women who hate Tenar, rely on her for a potion anyway, don’t pay her, and then immediately sell her out to Hare, out of greed rather than fear; Both Le Guin and Miyazaki Hayao knew better than to portray ordinary people with such contempt.
There are more complicated intertextual relationships. Compare Chihiro recalling her true name in Spirited Away (2001) to Tenar recalling her true name in The Tombs of Atuan. There’s a taint of furry/scaly wish fulfillment in Tales from Earthsea, perverted in its taking from Spirited Away, but present also in Tehanu. Many other deviations mix up the Earthsea books and prior Miyazaki productions like Shuna in similarly unwise ways, such as Arren having his own gebbeth without magic while Ged still bears the scars which, in the book, he got from a gebbeth that required great magic to appear. Alas, it is impossible to say whether it is better to start with the books or the film: The film relies on some familiarity with the books, yet willfully corrupts their contents. A poor combination.
The film seems narratively incoherent compared to Ghibli’s classics, but that’s a high bar. Its storytelling is adequate if you compare it instead to animated US sword and sorcery films like Fire and Ice (1983). Its worldbuilding inconsistencies are no worse than Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) which, incidentally, has more weather and water than this movie. Certainly I wish the script and director had been more faithful and more competent, but the overall product is decidedly enjoyable as a fantasy epic.
References here: Ghibli movie titles.
moving picture adaptation Ghibli animation Japanese production fiction
‣ Tehanu (1990)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
Tenar’s life as a widow past middle age, around the ending of The Farthest Shore (1972).
Markedly more concerned with adults and adulthood. It improves on the preceding two books in everything except the ending, an unfortunate combination of an evil conspiracy with a deus ex machina and an inexplicable half-dragon, which may have some relationship with the folktale of Kiyohime at Dōjō-ji. I quite like the way Le Guin unnecessarily ties up loose ends, letting Ogion die like a normal person, focusing on the everyday tasks that sustain any reasonable Iron Age economy and adding a mature feminine perspective.
References here: Tales from Earthsea (2006), Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018).
‣ “Darkrose and Diamond” (1999)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
‣ “Dragonfly” (2001)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
I dislike the final twist for the same reason I disliked it in Tehanu, but the way there is very good.
‣ “On the High Marsh” (2001)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
A cattle healer.
The treatment of the supernatural here is disappointing. It mixes a biblical anxiety about the efficacy of magic with the use of said magic for the strictly unnatural purpose of animal husbandry.
‣ “The Bones of the Earth” (2001)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
Ogion’s youth.
The death of Ogion in Tehanu added quite enough humanity to the character. This is redundant.
‣ The Finder (2001)
Ursula K. Le Guin (writer).
Read in 2018.
A sorcerer lives through the founding of the school of magic on Roke.
Almost as long as the earlier books and closer to ordinary epic fantasy. The wizard Gelluk, running a hellish cinnabar mine in a darkly symbiotic relationship with petty king Losen, is a wonderful compromise between Le Guin’s deep humanism and the mad and evil wizards of D&D, in a plot that reminds me of The Plague of the Zombies (1966). It may have been conceived as a miniature version of the relationship between Emperor Wu of Han (reigning 141–87 BCE) and his most famous court alchemist, Li Shaojun, as described in Taoism (1957/1965). Li pioneered both alchemical transmutation—of cinnabar into a fake gold more powerful than real gold—and the drinking of cinnabar as an elixir of life, with results similar to those in this story.