Earthsea Reread Post

Luke Berliner

 

Prior revisit posts: Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist

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This format has proven itself inadequate for this series - as shown by the months it's taken me to write this post, despite having taken thorough notes.

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Diverging from the other revisit posts near-immediately, I have no recollection at all of when I first read the Earthsea books. I will presume some time in middle school but it is a blank for me. When I went into the reread I remembered barely anything of the books themselves besides a few loose images and the general impression that I enjoyed them. I know I read the first three and then I think I read Tehanu, though if the first three are barely remembered Tehanu is blank entirely. I will get around to the back half trilogy at some point.

Since I took notes this time, this will generally go in chronological order. Though I must not have taken the right kind of notes because actually compiling them into a post has taken far too long. Whatever I did for LotR, I need to figure out how to do it again.

 

A Wizard of Earthsea

The map has always given me a certain feeling of claustrophobia when I look at it. Too small by far, despite the occasional reference to possible lands beyond the ocean. Regardless of that more than in most books the map is a necessity here, considering how much navigating there is - the copy of Wizard I was reading had smaller, more focused maps at different points of the story, which was welcome.

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I really appreciate how swiftly the book establishes a narrative voice, and begins what will be a repeated technique of establishing Ged's character through both the present narrative and the events to happen in the future (as for the narrator, both of these are in the past).

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When magic is described, especially here in the first book, it tends towards these big lists -"the crafts of finding, binding, mending, unsealing, revealing", "tricks and pleasantries, spells of Illusion" - it's got a poetic flair to it.

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I love the image of weather-workers shunting a storm cloud between villages, absolutely love it. We get more of the same magical overflow when we arrive in Thwil, and this sort of common magic is necessary for making the magic feel like part of the world.

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The Hardic language has 600 runes. Possibly a logo-syllabary? Logo-abugida? Couldn't say.

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Ged in the opening of Wizard is sketched very well (like most things in Earthsea, LeGuin astounds with her succinctness - so, so many modern fantasy authors fail hard in the words to total length ratio) - he's a gifted kid from a poor town who had a bad family life (neither his father nor his aunt are particularly great people), who ends up doing some dumbass things because he's a dumbass teenager who wants validation from his older peers (Jasper and Vetch). He fucks around and finds out, and carries that with him for the rest of his life

(Of note also is how Vetch, being Ged's friend and bond-brother, returns later despite the time and events between. Jasper vanishes from the narrative and from Ged's life, as forgotten as any figure we falsely think so important during school)

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Throughout the books, LeGuin is always building sacred space - this feeling that this place, these actions, these words are important, and there are ways to pass into the sacred from the mundane. (Those of you who have read ahead know it comes back in Book 3 with the subtlety of a cinder block)

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I have never seen the Ghibli adaptation of Earthsea, but I feel much more kindly disposed toward it after this re-read. No one else could do it

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Interesting biology note: male dragons watch over the eggs, while the females move on.

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"Where is men's greed gone?" is such a good line for a dragon to drop.

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Another thing LeGuin does with such skill and consistency that it falls into the background is dropping the details of the world (not only who lives where and the great diversity of cultures and peoples therein, but what they believe via stories and songs and lore) and just letting them be. So you'll get offhand references to "the lawless lords of interior Horsk" and so on and they are left alone, permitted, all that and more to exist in the open spaces off the boundaries of the page.

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There's a very naturalistic bent to the powers of Earthsea - dragons take the sky, the Nameless Powers are of the deep earth, and the sea stands alone. I like that - the sea needs no gods or greater powers, good or evil - because this is a seafaring culture and the ocean is powerful enough to stand alone.

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(ed: I initially thought this was Ged, turns out it was a different character) Serret straight up turns a man's bone marrow into hot lead while escaping the court of the Terranon holy shit.

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I kept imagining the servants of the Stone to be pterodactyls, or something very much like them.

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The hut on the islet is both heartbreaking and particularly terrifying to me.

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You will notice that I have not mentioned the gebbeth at all in this segment of the review. I'm saving it for the end.

Tombs of Atuan

I think this one might be my favorite of the three. It's an adventure story - complete with dangerous ruins, dark gods, and magical treasure - but so unlike the typical fantasy adventure story. It's also a minor episode in the life of Ged despite being a major one for Tenar, and that keeps with the "the world goes on" aspect. And this sort of reversed parallelism (perpendicularism?) just keeps going throughout the book, woven back into Wizard to strengthen both themes and world.

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The ritual where Tenar's name is eaten is the first time (potentially only?) we have seen anything made of steel - specifically the sword.

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I feel it noteworthy that both Tenar and Ged had abusive fathers who swiftly pass from the story. And likewise they both come to have substitutes - Ged has Ogion, Tenar has Manan. But where Ged found a teacher, Manan is still a slave, and for all his kindness and care for Tenar she often treats him poorly, up to the very end.

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I appreciate this book a lot for showing us what the Kargad lands are like on the inside - we have up to now only seen their raiding ships, but now we get what they think about those raids, how they view the outside, how they view themselves, and how their spirituality works.

(In short: Their empire is only about 150 years old, they have long-standing animus towards archipelagans (citing wizard-led raiding parties out to kill dragons). They worship a God-King, twinned divine figures the God Brothers, and the Nameless Ones. They believe in reincarnation and that they alone have souls. They have no magical practices of their own, distrust those of the Archipelago, have little in the way of writing and are deeply misogynistic.)

In later conversation we see Tenar's curiosity about the Archipelagans contrasted with the ignorance of her teachers' and the answers they take to be true - one more openly bigoted than the other, but both operating under what little information they have in their isolation.

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The way the labyrinth is described makes me think of sites like Gobekli Tepe - structures and enclosures that have been buried, so that the paths between them are now tunnels. Given the age of the Place and the practices therein, this makes a good deal of sense to me.

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The Undertomb is a reversal of the sacred space - not in that it is a place of the profane (that comes in Book 3), but because those who enter it are thrown into a radically different ordering of the universe, one that ultimately has no place for humans in it.

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Penthe doesn't show up much but I enjoy the parts she's in. Good foil for Arha.

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Even the keepers of the Place do not care enough to sweep the dust from the steps of the throne in the temple. I love how this theme is gradually woven into the narrative as Arha grows up - we the readers follow along her trajectory of learning that the Place is, while the center of her world, a backwater that the rest of the world has passed by.

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"Very few are the precious things that remain precious" - in regards to the Ring of Erreth-Akbe in particular, but I think this is just a very good line in general.

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Arha, like Ged, has her teenage rebellion. Where his was rooted in the desire for validation from others, hers is based in the desire for self-actualization. As Arha she is not allowed to have a self, and despite how important she is told she is, she knows that it's a sham. But then when she is confronted with that fact (through Ged), she clings to that shell of identity she's been forced into. For understandable reasons: Tenar is a provincial teenager who lashes out at learning about the world beyond because it makes her feel small and stupid, and false as Arha is, it is the identity she has kept herself afloat with.

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I love how Ged just appears out of nowhere, right in the middle of his own adventure. He's remarkably casual about getting locked in, too, till the Powers drain his strength. And even when that has happened and Tenar has chained him down there, he remains calm and patient - though he's still a young man at this point, we get to see a fuller picture of who he became over the course of the first book (he does seem a good deal older).

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Are the birdlike figures in the Painted Room kin to the servants of the Terranon in Book 1? Devoured humans?

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The feeling kept returning to me that the influence of the Powers on Tenar is akin to an addiction. Her desires are split between wanting to leave and go out into the world as Tenar, or to remain with the Powers - not because she loves them, but because she fears what they will do to her in parting. There's a struggle against a hated dependency.

Parallels with the One Ring might be drawn here - inasmuch as Tolkien and LeGuin coming to the same conclusion on the human relationship with evil.

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The ring is a humble thing, despite its importance. Innocuous to us and to the characters, despite its age and inscrutability. This, I think, is a good move. The story here was never really about the ring. The loss of the rune of peace between nations is a problem for the outside world, not Tenar.

The Farthest Shore

This book, breaking tradition of the prior two, opens in spring and goes into summer, and doesn't contain any great elisions of time (except for the weeks of sailing in the back third, but that is weeks instead of years.

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I noticed early on, and I recall it continuing through this book, that there was more exposition from characters, rather than from the narrative voice - another diversion from the preceding two books.

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"Fortune telling and love potions are not of much account, but old women are worth listening to."

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On reread I immensely appreciate how the three books reflect each other without repeating. Each of the three main protagonists is faced with a different adolescent conflict. The Land of the Dead appears in 1 and 3, the Nameless Powers in 1 and 2. Things from offscreen in the past will always be relevant but it is different each time. On and on. Dragons appear directly in 1 and 3, but fill the spaces between all three.

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I remember this book being my least favorite of the three from my first readthrough, finding it confusing and disconnected from itself. While I get what it's going for now (and appreciate it a great, great deal), I still feel that the sequence in Hort Town is a strange curveball, where things are happening (often only apparently) and I cannot tell what things they are or why.

But, I also suppose the disconnect is the point. Our introduction to the loss of magic is sharp and swift and brutal. The robbery and slave-ship and the man who was once a wizard croaking out "Yes, I remember being alive" in a drug-fueled haze.

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I'm finding Farthest Shore to be the hardest one to write about (it is the cause of a multi-month delay in getting this post out) - my notes seem particularly irrelevant to the text at hand. 

I think this is in part to Arren being my least favorite of the three protagonists of the trilogy, combined with the central conceit's possession of a gravity well reserved for supermassive black holes.

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"The council of the dead is not profitable to the living" is an absolute BANGER of a line.

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The central conceit of Farthest Shore is like a lodestone drawing everything else to it, to the point where trying to do my typical scattershot bullet point review cannot do it justice. This is likely why it has taken me months to actually finish this post despite having all the notes written out.

The loss of magic in Earthsea is not played for melancholy, nor nostalgia. It is violent and sudden, a wound in the world, a patina that descends upon everything. Ged and Arren cannot afford wistfulness. The world is collapsing around them, because humanity's ability to know the world - of the world knowing itself - has been damaged. A support has been torn out and there's nowhere to turn to, not that anyone knows. There are islands burning on the horizon. (Haunting imagery there)

It is apocalyptic, well and truly so. The veil has been torn off (or perhaps it has been lowered upon us?)

I think, perhaps, the most meaningful thing I can say about the matter is that Arren's episodes of despair during their long boat journey in the south are familiar.

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We do not get words for the meeting with Orm Embar at sea. That would be an intrusion of the profane. We've already gotten enough of that with most dragons reduced to mindlessness.

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The bit about the servants of the Anti-King principle embodying "Let the world burn so long as I live!" is, ah, yeah that's on point. Certain was the case in the 70s, certainly is the case now. Despair will drag everyone else down with you.

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Cobb is, appropriately, a pathetic figure. Embodiment of everything that Ged and Arren have been discussing, and of all the ruin that's beset the world. That thematic throughline makes up for him being introduced at the eleventh hour, I think. He's another symptom of the world's sickness, not it's true architect.

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I was actually quite surprised that Ogion was still alive. Either wizards live very long in Earthsea, or he was younger than I thought in the first book.

 

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It would have been very pat, perfectly perfunctory, to have Ged die at the end of this book. I am glad that he doesn't. Noble sacrifices of that sort do not fit with Earthsea.

 

Joshua Carson

Final Thoughts

Earthsea is a difficult thing to put into words, as most beautiful things are. It goes into the same category as Lord of the Rings, as is right and good. But it approaches that place from a different angle, mirroring the steps taken at a different pace.

It is a trilogy very much concerned with death, of what life is like living under its shadow. But it is death as great and as empty as the night, a thing of vast, terrible dignity. A work's attitude towards death is one of the primary points I might hang a critique of whether or not it is truly great, or simply good - does it understand, can it give voice to those agonies we hold close to our hearts, that bubble up when we are deep in our cups or too long away from home. Death and the fear of death - the gebbeth and all that comes with it.

And therein is the power in these books. We are, all of us, bound to our own gebbeth. We will all have to walk the blind track where the Deep Powers sleep. We will all reach the furthest shore.

I have not seen the Ghibli movie, but after reading the books and watching Beyond Ghibli talk about it, I am more kindly disposed towards it. I would not trust an adaptation to anyone else's hands - that even that did not succeed fully, I would say that it is unadaptable.

Good.