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Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea; The Series that Saves the World

"We read fantasy because we want to be reminded of the wonder that still exists in the real world."

By Eric DovigiPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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Earthsea

Alright everyone, buckle up. Go get a glass of wine and a snack and settle in. Bring up this link if you want. Close your other tabs.

We need to​​ talk about Earthsea.

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Somewhere between the scope of Middle Earth, the verisimilitude of Westeros, the gravity of Skyrim and the magic of Harry Potter lies Ursula K Le Guin’s iconic archipelago, Earthsea.

I’m going to talk to you about what makes Earthsea not only an engaging and magical place, but, I will argue, the most compelling fantasy world out there.

In 1969 Ursula K Le Guin got an unexpected request from a publisher. “What about a book for older kids?”

Le Guin, then in her late thirties, had a few novels under her belt. She was starting to make a name for herself in the realm of sci-fi/spec. But she had never tried her hand at young adult fiction, and agreed only on the condition that she be allowed total creative freedom. The result was A Wizard of Earthsea, which would be published in 1968.

In A Wizard, we follow a young boy named Ged who grows up on the rural, backwater mountain island of Gont. Gontians are mostly farmers working whatever arable land they can find on the steep slopes and tradespeople. Ged’s father is a metalworker. Technologically, Gont (as well as the rest of Earthsea) has not progressed past the Iron Age. However, magic is a real and practical presence in their lives and it augments their basic technologies.

A Still from Studio Ghibli's "Tales From Earthsea"

Gontians are isolated. To them, the world is Gont, plus a few neighboring islands. But Earthsea is in fact vast, and much of the wonder of the first novel derives from Ged’s travels around his increasingly expanding world, where he encounters dragons, shadow-monsters, magical academies, and endless, rolling seas.

The entire planet of Earthsea seems to be covered in water, except for the vast eponymous archipelago where the story is set. The largest of the islands, which sits at the center of the archipelago, is no bigger than Great Britain. Gont would probably be around the size of Hawaii’s Big Island. Most of Earthsea’s islands are smaller than that, some little more than shoals and strands of beach on which inhabitants have erected rickety shacks that can barely hold their own against ocean storms.

Like any fantasy world worth its salt, Earthsea depicts a large range of human experience. There are rich cultures and impoverished cultures, sea-dwelling peoples (one of which spends almost all its years floating on the open ocean in a city made entirely of rafts) and land-locked peoples, warm tropical islands and icy northern islands.

Above all the world is dominated by one feature: Le Guin’s imagination. In the sixth Earthsea books (five novels and one story collection) she populates the world so richly that, even though the stories only cover a small fraction of the whole archipelago, we feel the archipelago to be endlessly rich.

Middle Earth, for all its wonder, is not a richly designed place. For the most part, Tolkein the world-builder was a pragmatist; he used what he created. The “off-screen” parts of Middle Earth seem to be mostly stretches of unpopulated wilderness. We get some hints that people might inhabit other areas of the world, but these are usually described as savage, backward cultures. To be fair, this is consistent with Tolkein’s story. He’s describing a world in decline. The few holdouts of population fear the vast stretches of wild because to them, they represent death and danger.

Harry Potter is also sparse in its way. Like me, at some point you probably did the math and figured out that the entire student body of Hogwarts is like barely a few hundred kids. There’s a single exclusively wizarding village in all of Britain and it’s tiny. The whole wizarding world is an almost literal shadow of the real world. And again, this is part of the draw of her story, sure. There could be a wizarding family right next door to you. When you were a kid, this made the world of Harry Potter seem really close and real.

But where Middle Earth and Harry Potter are sparse worlds that were created to serve a story, Earthsea is a rich realm, and the stories were created to serve it.

As Ged adventures across the archipelago and passes an island, the island almost always teeming with life, a vast reservoir of humanity and story that we are just brushing shoulders with. Once, in the first novel, Ged passes a narrow, sandy island on which sits one rickety shack. He sees in the distance and old man and old woman. The narrator speculates that they were a prince and princess once, left on the island by a rival to the throne decades ago. They’ve languished there ever since. And then they disappear behind the horizon. This isn’t their story. The books are full of tantalizing tidbits like that.

Another point of interest that makes Earthsea unique is that, in a time period of the fantasy genre dominated by the white-washed world of Tolkein, Earthsea is populated mostly by characters of color. Only one of the northern islands has white people, and only one major character across the six books is white. Ged, the main protagonist of the series is dark-skinned. And not in the token way that JK Rowling post-facto “reveals” that she wrote Hermione black (despite the fact that she did essentially no work to establish this in the series); Le Guin lets you know that her world is diverse. She was consciously trying to confront the lack of diversity in the genre.

Ursula Le Guin

I’ll finish with a short personal anecdote about my experience reading the third Earthsea novel, The Farthest Shore.

In the universe, there is a class of people who can do magic. They either cultivate the skill using an apprentice system in their home lands, or journey to a specific island to learn at a prestigious college (as does the protagonist, Ged). At the beginning of The Farthest Shore, a very simple plot device gets thing rolling: magic is disappearing.

Increasingly, magicians across Earthsea are losing their power and no one can figure out why. But it isn’t just a question of magicians losing their abilities. People are forgetting ancient songs. Master dyers are forgetting their trade. Once-bustling ports have become hostile to visitors and once-friendly people are now apathetic. It seems like the general oomph of the whole Earthsea archipelago is wilting.

When I read this novel I was only a few months out of a depressive episode, and I felt that the plot device was meant to portray the experience of depression.

For me, depression was a draining of the magic in my own world. Playing piano, which I used to love to do, give me no pleasure. Reading was difficult. Food tasted bland. Everything seemed obvious and expected instead of new and fun. Like the despondent characters in the novel, I just didn’t want to talk to anyone. The color of the world was draining away.

The way Le Guin sketches the gradual decline of Earthsea in the book is masterful. It was upsetting and intense for me to read as she depicts the small, gradual ways that Ged sees the world devolve around him. Little things like a one-time friend being rude and standoffish, or a once-skillful magician now inexplicably lazy and ineffectual, or a village in fear as they all realize that they’ve forgotten the trade on which they’ve relied for generations. "Earthsea is depressed," I thought.

The rich and magical realm that she spent two novels and several short stories creating, she was now destroying. It was as if she was saying, “Don’t take this place for granted, reader. Magic is a fragile thing, and it can wither away.”

In the end, Ged discovers the source of the decline and manages to save the world and restore magic to Earthsea. In my own life, a confluence of medication and the passage of time were what saved me.

But the message of Earthsea stuck with me.

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Here's that message: it is a common misconception that we turn to fantasy worlds because we want to escape from the real world. True lovers of fantasy know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. We turn to fantasy worlds because we want to be reminded of the beauty and awe and wonder that still exist in the real world. Diagon Alley reminds of the beauty of a winding, twisting alley in Medieval London. Middle Earth reminds us of the English countryside, with its misty rolling hills and hidden treasure hordes.

In short, we turn to fantasy because we love our own world, and we want to take a break from all the bullshit that distracts us from its beauty.

Earthsea, I argue, is the most compelling fantasy world because it transcends its stories. It exists whether we’re reading it or not. It’s diverse, fascinating, beautiful, mysterious, unique.

Most importantly, it reminds us why we read: we read to fiercely protect what we care about in the world. Like Ged, we are wandering the vast ocean in a little rickety boat, with little to help us but our friends and our hope, on a mission no less important than restoring magic to the world.

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About the Creator

Eric Dovigi

I am a writer and musician living in Arizona. I write about weird specific emotions I feel. I didn't like high school. I eat out too much. I stand 5'11" in basketball shoes.

Twitter: @DovigiEric

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