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PALGRAVE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A NEW CANON
Ursula K. Le Guin’s
“A Wizard of Earthsea”
A Critical Companion
Timothy S. Miller
Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon
Series Editors
Sean Guynes
Independent Scholar
Ann Arbor, USA
Keren Omry
Department of English
University of Haifa
Haifa, Israel
Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon provides short intro-
ductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) speaking to why
a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers,
scholars, and fans. These books aim to serve as a go-to resource for think-
ing on specific texts and series and for prompting further inquiry. Each
book will be less than 30,000 words and structured similarly to facilitate
classroom use. Focusing specifically on literature, the books will also
address film and TV adaptations of the texts as relevant. Beginning with
background and context on the text’s place in the field, the author and
how this text fits in their oeuvre, and the socio-historical reception of the
text, the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers,
and scholars can think dynamically about a given text. Each book will
describe the major approaches to the text and how the critical engage-
ments with the text have shaped SFF. Engaging with classic works as well
as recent books that have been taken up by SFF fans and scholars, the goal
of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show
how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new
canon. In addition to their suitability for undergraduate courses, the books
will appeal to fans of SFF.
Timothy S. Miller
Ursula K. Le Guin’s
“A Wizard of
Earthsea”
A Critical Companion
Timothy S. Miller
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, FL, USA
ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic)

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon
ISBN 978-3-031-24639-5 ISBN 978-3-031-24640-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24640-1
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to my parents.
Series Preface
The infinite worlds of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) dance along the
borders between the possible and the impossible, the familiar and the
strange, the immediate and the ever-approaching horizon. Speculative fic-
tion in all its forms has been considered a genre, a medium, a mode, a
practice, a compilation of themes, or a web of assertions. With this in
mind, “Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon” offers an
expansive and dynamic approach to thinking SFF, destabilizing notions of
the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony.
We take canon not as a singular and unchallenged authority but as shifting
and thoughtful consensus among an always-growing collective of readers,
scholars, and writers.
The cultural practice and production of speculation have encompassed
novels, stories, plays, games, music, comics, and other media, with a lin-
eage dating back at least to the nineteenth-century precursors through to
the most recent publications. Existing scholarship has considered some of
these media extensively, often with particular focus on film and TV. It is
for this reason that “Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy” will forgo the
cinematic and televisual, aspiring to direct critical attention at the other
nodes of SFF expression.
Each volume in the series introduces, contextualizes, and analyzes a
single work of SFF that ranges from the acknowledged “classic” to the
should-be-classic, and asks two basic, but provocative questions: Why does
this text matter to SFF? and Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF
readers, scholars, and fans? Thus, the series joins into conversation both
with scholars and with students of the field to examine the parameters of
vii
viii SERIES PREFACE
SFF studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like

genre, medium, and canon. By emphasizing the critical approaches and
major questions each text inspires, the series aims to offer “go-to” books
for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF.
Haifa, Israel; Ann Arbor, MI Keren Omry

Sean Guynes
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Elizabeth Miller for being the first reader of this book
and to Paul Beattie for assistance navigating some Japanese when it came
up unexpectedly. I would especially like to thank the five members of the
undergraduate honors thesis writing course that I led at Florida Atlantic
University in the spring of 2021: Sarah Bagnall, Maegan Barber, Talia
Magielnicki, Tristan Sheridan, and Maiya Xirinachs. These students gra-
ciously allowed me to contribute my draft of the third chapter of this book
to their writing workshop, and quickly overcame their initial intimidation
to offer some excellent constructive feedback on their professor’s own
work in progress. I also thank all of the other students over the years who
have read and discussed A Wizard of Earthsea with me along their way to
this or that degree: “You have made a good beginning.”
ix
Contents
1 T
he Boy Wizard and the Young Grand Master 1
References 13
2 B
etween Children’s Literature and “Adult Fantasy”: The
Antecedents and Audiences of A Wizard of Earthsea17
Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Old King Arthur: Earthsea and Its
Predecessors 17
Earthsea Pedagogies: Learning to Live in an Enchanted World 25
References 30
3 F
antasy and the Weight of Whiteness: Racial Dynamics in
Earthsea33
A Wizard of Earthsea in Black and White: Uncoupling
Whiteness and Goodness 33
Illustration, Adaptation, and the Racial Politics of the Visual
Imagination 40
References 49
4 L
ight and Shadow, Good and Evil: Ethical, Psychological,
and Other Critical Approaches to the Fantastic51
A Brief Taxonomy of Critical Approaches to Le Guin 51
The “Way” to Read Le Guin?: Earthsea and Daoism 55
Fantasy and the Unconscious: Jung and the Nature of the Shadow 58
References 62
xi
xii Contents
5 B
ringing Women to Roke Knoll: Gender and the Lifelong
Evolution of Earthsea65
Introduction: Reimagining Earthsea 65
“You need not fear a woman”: The Witch and the Sorceress 68
Ennobling Hearth and Home 71
References 75
6 C
onclusion: Le Guin’s Legacies in Fiction and in Scholarship77
The Schools for Wizards: Magical Pedagogy Today 77
The Future(s) of Le Guin Studies 80
References 83
Works Cited85
Index95
About the Author
Timothy S. Miller teaches both medieval literature and contemporary

speculative fiction as Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic
University, where he contributes to the department’s MA degree concen-
tration in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Recent graduate course titles
include “Theorizing the Fantastic” and “Artificial Intelligence in Literature
and Film.” He has published widely on both later Middle English litera-
ture and contemporary science fiction and fantasy.
xiii
CHAPTER 1
The Boy Wizard and the Young Grand

Master
Abstract This chapter describes the trajectory of Le Guin’s early writing

career and situates the original 1968 publication of A Wizard of Earthsea
within various contexts related to genre publishing and the development
of young adult literature as a category. It describes how the anthropologi-
cal and literary work of her parents, Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora
Kroeber, influenced the development of her own fiction, and introduces
some of the other key influences on her fantasy writing, including
J. R. R. Tolkien’s secondary-world fantasy, the tradition of Arthurian
romance, and folktales such as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Keywords Fantasy • Ursula K. Le Guin • Young adult literature •

Genre fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea has long been regarded as a

classic of both fantasy fiction and young adult literature more broadly, and
we can find writers outside those genres as renowned as David Mitchell
and Margaret Atwood continuing to praise it in the highest terms a half
century after its publication.1 This enduring and near universal acclaim is
1
See Kerridge, “The Fantasy that Inspired David Mitchell,” and Russell, “Margaret
Atwood Chooses ‘A Wizard of Earthsea.’”
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
T. S. Miller, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea”, Palgrave
Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24640-1_1
2 T. S. MILLER
an impressive legacy for a humble small press hardcover that Le Guin had
been invited to write on a whim by her mother’s publisher, and with the
age range “11 Up” printed on the original dust jacket. A Wizard of
Earthsea debuted in 1968, a year that proved pivotal in the history of the
still nascent fantasy genre and a turning point in Le Guin’s own literary
career as well. While the book was neither the author’s first published
novel nor even her first published story set on the fictional archipelago of
Earthsea, the immediate success of A Wizard of Earthsea set her on the
path to becoming the towering presence across multiple literary genres
that she quickly became, and indeed ultimately the second woman to
receive, in 2003, the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from
the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Early in her own
career, she tasked herself with the challenge of imagining the early career
of greatness, the boyhood of a Merlin or a Gandalf, those wizened fonts of
arcane knowledges and hard-earned wisdom, as she explains in her 2012
afterword to the novel: “Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young
once, right? And when they were young, when they were fool kids, how
did they learn to be wizards? And there was my book” (“Afterword”
129).2 To imagine a “portrait of the wizard as a young man” as A Wizard
of Earthsea does was still a novel concept in the 1960s, although in the
decades since the school for wizards has effectively become a genre cate-
gory unto itself, particularly in the YA sphere.3 Only two chapters of A
Wizard of Earthsea take the form of a school story, however, and the
education of Ged, her young wizard, takes place across many of the islands
of Earthsea and within himself, culminating in, as Le Guin puts it, “the
kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life”
(“Afterword” 130). Ged’s long struggle to recognize, acknowledge, and
come to terms with his own “shadow” self has generated a substantial his-
tory of critical interpretations that range in character from the psychologi-
cal to the theological to the ethical and more.
The series of Earthsea books that followed on Wizard over the next
several decades earned Le Guin both considerable sales and accolades. At
the time of the author’s death in 2018, the series had grown to consist of
2
Unless otherwise noted, all references to Le Guin’s Earthsea novels and stories are taken
from the 2018 omnibus edition The Books of Earthsea, which also collects the author’s 2012
afterwords and her important 1993 essay “Earthsea Revisioned.”
3
Later fantasies concerned with magical pedagogy include the Chrestomanci books by
Dianna Wynne Jones (1977–2006), Neil Gaiman’s comic miniseries The Books of Magic
(1990–1991), and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter heptalogy (1997–2007), among many others.
1 THE BOY WIZARD AND THE YOUNG GRAND MASTER 3
five novels, a short story collection, a few additional uncollected short

stories, and already several adaptations across media. While Le Guin wrote
the first two sequels very rapidly after the breakout success of
Wizard—1970’s The Tombs of Atuan and 1972’s The Farthest Shore—she
would return again and again to this secondary world at different points in
her life and literary career until the final posthumous publication of a last
Earthsea short story in a venue as prestigious as The Paris Review, of all
the once unthinkable places to conclude a series begun in the rather pulpy
genre magazine Fantastic Stories of Imagination (with the 1964 story
“The Word of Unbinding”). That valedictory story, “Firelight,” itself
looks back with special fondness and wistfulness on the events and settings
described in A Wizard of Earthsea: “He lost the thread of his thoughts in
a surge of slow, bodily memories of his childhood in that steep village, the
dank bedding, the smell of woodsmoke in the dark house in the bitter
winter cold” (972). Today A Wizard of Earthsea continues to lie at the
nexus of several overlapping issues in fantasy studies related to young adult
literature, gender, race, adaptation, and theoretical considerations of what
fantasy and fantasy worlds “mean” and how the genre should be read and
understood, almost as firmly lodged in the center of that “fuzzy set” Brian
Attebery proposes as a framework for defining fantasy as Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings.4
A Wizard of Earthsea remains as memorable and groundbreaking for its
hero Ged as it is for the early secondary world it conjures, and also the
ways that Le Guin uses her distinctive fantasy setting to explore many of
the issues that dominate her other works, whether science fiction, poetry,
or nonfiction. Wizard is of course on the most basic level a kind of
Zaubererroman chronicling the maturation of a mage from early youth to
young adulthood, but the easy confidence of the novel’s worldbuilding
can obscure its metaphorical and metafictional depths. For example,
Earthsea’s magic system, famously reliant on the existence of “true names”
and the power that knowledge of them can grant, works above all to
articulate several of the main themes that would preoccupy Le Guin
throughout her long literary career, including the nature of power and its
4
See Strategies of Fantasy 12–14, in which Attebery argues that “[g]enres may be
approached as ‘fuzzy sets,’ meaning that they are defined not by boundaries but by a center”
(12). In his own informal poll of fantasy scholars—which asked respondents to assess various
titles on a scale of 1–7, 1 meaning “quintessentially fantasy”—Attebery reports that “Le
Guin’s Earthsea trilogy scored 1.3,” only referencing one title with a lower score, Tolkien’s
opus itself at 1.07 (14).
4 T. S. MILLER
use, language as mediator between self and other, and simply how to live
(and die) in the world.5 Additionally, we can observe some of the ecologi-
cal concerns of much of her subsequent work here, concerns that become
most obvious in two fictions she published very shortly on the heels of A
Wizard of Earthsea, the antiwar environmentalist parable The Word for
World Is Forest (1972), and the slower meditation on vegetal cognition
“Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” (1971). In the next decade, her
heterogeneous 1987 collection Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences
and 1985’s Always Coming Home, the latter a candidate for her magnum
opus, also echo Indigenous American epistemologies that assume the
ubiquity of nonhuman personhood: “[R]ealistic fiction is drawn towards
anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it,” she writes (“Critics” 87). But
even in Wizard, this early novel for young adults, the protagonist Ged
similarly pauses to reflect on the nonhuman world after his animal com-
panion seems to bring him back from the brink of death with its mere
presence: “From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who
never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech
or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in
silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures
of trees” (58).6
We encounter most of Le Guin’s later themes in at least germinal form
in A Wizard of Earthsea, despite the many ways in which the novel—and
to a large extent the entire original trilogy—does remain anchored to a
narrower view of fantasy as fundamentally masculinist and feudal in char-
acter: wizards are men, and in the third book a king must return to right
the ship of state. For the most notable exception, then, to the statement
that Wizard engages most of Le Guin’s lifelong concerns, we must turn to
gender identity and gender politics, which only the latter books of Earthsea
would center. In the twenty-first century, Wizard can feel limited but
never quite hidebound on gender issues; consider the infamous passage
from early in the novel contrasting women’s and men’s magic, which
leaves some space for ambiguity: “There is a saying on Gont, Weak as
5
In an afterword to The Other Wind, the final Earthsea book, Le Guin explains that what
she was able then to perceive as the central theme of the books collectively had evolved in
ways she could not have fully anticipated in 1968, referring specifically to the “misunder-
standing of the uses of power, the desire for control, and the nature of death”: “This was my
great theme” (894).
6
When Le Guin speaks in Rocannon’s World of “the different shapes minds come in” (30),
it is clear she has other than human modalities of cognition already in mind.
woman’s magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman’s magic”

(9). Le Guin’s narrator does not endorse this view but also fails to refute
it, and later books investigate the potential gap between such a perception
of women’s magic and its reality. “How much of that was truth, how
much was fear?,” Ged wonders about the old saying in “Firelight” (971).
Of the three women characters with any significant role in Wizard, how-
ever, two do demonstrate a mean, self-serving kind of magic and attempt
to use it to ensnare Ged. While the third, his mage friend Vetch’s younger
sister Yarrow, remains a much more positive character, she nevertheless
becomes emblematic of conventional domesticity and a particular limited
sphere appropriate for women; Chap. 5 will examine these characters
much more closely and gesture to Le Guin’s reconsideration of gender in
and with Earthsea in the later books. But, in his 1985 NovaCon talk,
Terry Pratchett was certainly correct to include Le Guin—“Can you imag-
ine a girl trying to get a place at the University of Gont?”—in his critique
of the gendered way he perceived magic to be represented in genre fan-
tasy: “[M]agic done by women is usually of poor quality, third-rate, nega-
tive stuff, while the wizards are usually cerebral, clever, powerful, and
wise” (“Why Gandalf Never Married”). Le Guin herself became only too
aware of how she had unconsciously cleaved to a history of anti-feminist
representations of women using magic, in later works choosing not to
annihilate distinctions between gendered kinds of magic in Earthsea, but
dramatically reframing those distinctions and their significance. In
“Firelight,” Ged reflects on his aunt—in Wizard cast as a selfish, ignorant,
and cowardly witch—in a way that insists on the centrality of women to
Ged, to Earthsea, and to fantasy: “But after all, it was a woman who first
taught me, too, he thought, and the thought had a little gleam of revela-
tion in it” (971). Here in this posthumous story she is also finally given a
name, Raki.
Pratchett mentions Le Guin in the same breath as Tolkien because she
had already become a central figure for the new fantasists of the 1970s and
’80s; Earthsea’s foundational position in the history of genre fantasy can-
not be overstated. At the same time, Le Guin’s literary ambitions were
initially much more rarefied and mainstream, and the first major project
she sought to publish took the form of faux historical fiction set in the
invented Central European country of Orsinia. Le Guin would return to
her far more realist juvenilia in earnest after establishing herself in specula-
tive fiction, the fruits of which efforts were the 1979 novel Malafrena and
the 1976 collection Orsinian Tales. Le Guin’s first published story, “An
6 T. S. MILLER
die Musik,” was indeed an “Orsinian tale” and neither science fiction nor
fantasy, appearing in 1961 in the small literary magazine The Western
Humanities Review. Long before the novel that would become Malafrena
made it to print, 1966 saw the publication of her science fantasy Rocannon’s
World, an Ace double stitched in the tête-bêche format to Avram
Davidson’s The Kar-Chee Reign, and the first novel-length work in her
celebrated Hainish Cycle. A Wizard of Earthsea departed from the early
Hainish novels in its more committed high fantasy setting, but did have
some precedent in Le Guin’s work in that it followed on two fantasy short
stories very different in tone but belonging in an embryonic way to the
same setting, “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names”
(1964). Despite those initial “literary” aspirations, and unlike some writ-
ers who sought to escape from the potentially limiting label of genre fic-
tion, Le Guin fiercely defended fantasy and science fiction against aesthetic
snobbery while simultaneously earning early recognition herself within
that so-called literary mainstream. She eventually received the high literary
imprimatur of several Library of America editions of her works, but also
published poetry throughout her career in prestigious literary magazines
such as The Kenyon Review (including six poems in the Autumn 1979
issue such as “Wordhoard,” and in the Spring 1987 issue the poem “In
that Ohio”), and multiple short stories in The New Yorker (the first being
her 1979 story “Two Delays on the Northern Line”). We can contrast Le
Guin’s embrace of a pluralistic identity as a genre writer and more with the
perspective of an author such as Kurt Vonnegut, known for dismay at the
labeling of his first novel Player Piano as science fiction and its conse-
quences for his early career: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file
drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particu-
larly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal”
(1). Le Guin was far more interested in what these drawers designated
“science fiction” or “fantasy” could accomplish rather than trying to
escape them.7
7
By the late 1970s Le Guin had published a string of book-length works of realism—
Orsinian Tales, Malafrena, the short YA novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976)—
such that in 1980 John Updike praised her new reputation in the literary mainstream, writing
in his New Yorker review of her 1980 metafantasy The Beginning Place that “only recently has
her reputation, passing through the same cultural space-warp utilized by Ray Bradbury and
Kurt Vonnegut, entered what is hailed from the other side as ‘mainstream fiction’” (283).
This turn to realism, if it can be called a turn, was obviously short-lived. As we might expect,
Updike praises Le Guin at the expense of other genre writers and indeed genre fiction itself,
highlighting the “mainstream tact, color, and intelligence” of her earlier speculative fic-
tion (283).
Indeed, A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels not only secured Le Guin
a prominent position in the canon of secondary-world fantasy, earning her
a number of major awards, but she would quickly become an early theorist
of fantasy as a form, publishing several essays reflecting on the genre and
“genre” more generally, including “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”
(1973); “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” (1974); and several
other pieces eventually assembled alongside them in her 1979 collection
The Language of the Night; as well as the later volley “The Critics, the
Monsters, and the Fantasists” (2007).8 In the early twenty-first century we
also see Le Guin delving more deeply into the relationships between fan-
tasy and YA specifically, around the time that she had returned to writing
YA with her Annals of the Western Shore trilogy (2004–2007).9 In much
of Le Guin’s critical writing on fantasy she adopts the role of apologist as
often as theorist as such, for example in her 2004 talk “Some Assumptions
about Fantasy”:
Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the

real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may
seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imagina-
tive literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots
of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of
ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war,
and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody.
Fantasy is good at thinking about those other ways. (“Some Assumptions”)
A Wizard of Earthsea, with its emphasis on psychological self-examination

and its lack of the large-scale wars and battles many readers may have come
to associate with high fantasy, thus strives to shape and reshape the fantasy
genre in particular nonviolent ways, but also seeks to intervene, from Le
Guin’s perspective, in other arenas including politics.
The uniqueness and influentiality of the now perhaps overfamiliar
wizard-in-training premise of A Wizard of Earthsea in its own time must
also be stressed. It was during the 1960s that both the concepts of “fan-
tasy fiction” and “young adult fiction” came into being as
8
Among her many awards and honors, in 1989 the Science Fiction Research Association
bestowed one of the early Pilgrim Awards on Le Guin for her criticism; the award has since
been renamed the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship.
9
Many of these pieces on children’s literature/YA and fantasy appear collected in Cheek
by Jowl.
8 T. S. MILLER
recognizable—and financially lucrative—publishing categories.10

Secondary-world fantasy on the Tolkienian model remained in its infancy,
still almost a decade before the new explosion of high fantasy that Terry
Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) would inaugurate. Le Guin’s
novel was thus invited by Herman Schein of Berkeley’s Parnassus Press at
a time when both genre fantasy and YA fiction were relatively new, “the
next big thing” a small press might gamble on: “He wanted to begin
doing novels for older kids. When I said, ‘Oh no!’ he just said, ‘Well, think
about it. Fantasy, maybe—whatever you like’” (“Afterword” 127). Le
Guin did deliver a made-to-order fantasy aimed at young adults, but also
a first step towards much more.
Although it remains a groundbreaking work of early fantasy fiction, A
Wizard of Earthsea did not of course emerge from nor enter into a void.
On the contrary, in 1968 dragons and unicorns were in the very air: the
same year also saw the original publication of Peter S. Beagle’s classic fan-
tasy novel The Last Unicorn as well as Anne McCaffrey’s saga-spawning
science fantasy Dragonflight, the first entry in the long-running
Dragonriders of Pern series. In the same year, Lloyd Alexander’s The High
King provided the conclusion to his Chronicles of Prydain series (aimed
at a slightly younger age range), and fantastical traditions in other hemi-
spheres also continued to flourish and develop in new directions, exempli-
fied by Gabriel García Márquez’s own famous 1968 “Tale for Children,”
the emblematic magical realist short story “A Very Old Man with
Enormous Wings.” The English translation of Italo Calvino’s complete
collection of science fables Cosmicomics also appeared in 1968, and the
Ballantine Adult Fantasy line would launch in the following year, with the
unicorn—already firmly enshrined by Beagle as emblem for fantasy—
becoming the original colophon for the series.
Of course, the other major fantasy novel of 1968 was The Lord of the
Rings with its continuing high volume of paperback sales. Thus,
McCaffrey’s extraterrestrial dragons notwithstanding, we can say that
three of the major fantasy novels of the twentieth century were written by
authors of strikingly different backgrounds, religious and otherwise:
10
The division of the American Library Association now known as the Young Adult
Library Services Association began in 1957, and the decade that followed witnessed an
increasing number of books written for teenagers rather than younger children, including
touchstone works such as Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962) and S. E. Hinton’s
coming of age classic The Outsiders (1967).
Tolkien, a traditionalist English Catholic notorious for resisting Vatican

II’s liturgical modernizations; Beagle, a young Jewish kid from the Bronx;
and Le Guin, a West Coast Daoist and anarchist.11 Tolkien, in his famous
lecture-turned-essay “On Fairy-stories,” interestingly speaks of a divinity
perceptible behind fantastical mythologies and tales in connection with
the theme of power, a theme that his works share with Le Guin’s despite
their religious differences: “Something really ‘higher’ is occasionally
glimpsed in mythology: Divinity, the right to power (as distinct from its
possession)” (44).12 In his fiction, we can see this distinction in action
quite clearly, as villains such as Sauron and Saruman possess and wield
power without that “right to power” we can assume belongs to a character
like Aragorn. If, conversely, any of Le Guin’s characters demonstrate a
“right” to power, they demonstrate it precisely by knowing not to exercise
it, one of the most difficult lessons for Ged to master despite the excellent
example his first mentor Ogion provides. The word “power” and its varia-
tions appear well over one hundred times in A Wizard of Earthsea, and Le
Guin’s understanding of power owes much to her own lifelong Daoist
commitments, as Chap. 4 will explore at length. As Robert Steed argues,
many of Le Guin’s interpretations of Daoist thought find their most obvi-
ous expression in Earthsea, including a complex philosophy of non-action:
“Several of the masters of Roke as well as a few other characters express
ideas of the kind of (non) action that flows from respecting the
Equilibrium” (188).
Le Guin’s interest in Daoism originated in her father’s study of Lao
Tzu, and her parents were both enormously significant writers and intel-
lectual figures in their own right. Born in 1929 in Berkeley, California to
celebrity anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber, Le
Guin was exposed to anthropological modes of thinking and her parents’
11
In an article first published in 2003 in The Mail on Sunday, Tolkien’s grandson Simon
Tolkien recalls his grandfather persisting in giving the Latin responses during mass: “I vividly
remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and
it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My Grandfather
obviously didn’t agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest
of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating,
but My Grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right” (“My
Grandfather”).
12
The scholarly commentary on Tolkien’s Catholicism is extensive, but only recently has
the “Jewishness” of Beagle’s The Last Unicorn begun to attract a critical mass of interest. See,
for instance, Michael Weingrad’s 2019 essay “The Best Unicorn” and Adam Roberts on
“Jewish Fantasy.”
10 T. S. MILLER
various intellectual circles from a young age, bouncing between a summer

home in the Napa Valley and the family’s primary residence in Berkeley
near the university, where her father headed the anthropology depart-
ment. Her mother’s literary connections also helped advance her early
writing career, especially after Theodora Kroeber published her bestselling
1961 book about Ishi, the famous Indigenous Californian with whom her
father had worked long before Le Guin’s birth, Ishi in Two Worlds. In
1964 Le Guin’s mother published a book for young people about Ishi
with Parnassus Press, the same local Berkeley publisher that would invite
and inspire Le Guin to write her fantasy novel for teenagers. Not by chance
does Le Guin choose to describe Ged’s ethnicity in ways that might sug-
gest a physical resemblance with some Native groups, such that Ruth
Robbins, the original illustrator and cover artist for both Theodora
Kroeber’s Ishi: Last of His Tribe (1964) and the Parnassus edition of
Wizard, depicts Ishi and Ged quite similarly in appearance, as Chap. 3 will
discuss in greater contextual detail.
It should be noted that Alfred Kroeber’s work with Ishi and his wider
legacy are viewed very differently today by Native activists and many in the
predominantly non-Native anthropology community. Contrast, for exam-
ple, the successful campaign to remove Kroeber’s name from UC
Berkeley’s anthropology building and the largely defensive session of the
2021 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association orga-
nized by Herbert S. Lewis in response to the removal titled “Alfred
L. Kroeber: The Man, His Work and His Legacy” (or Berkeley anthro-
pologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s earlier blog post arguing against the
campaign).13 For our immediate purposes, though, Kroeber’s prominence
in the discipline of anthropology and his life’s work studying the Indigenous
13
For contemporary reporting on the renaming, see Gomez, “UC Berkeley removes
Kroeber Hall name,” or the fuller account presented on the university’s website (Kell). As
part of her argument against the name change, Nancy Scheper-Hughes references Le Guin’s
work as a part of Kroeber’s legacy: “Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber’s daughter,
Ursula Le Guin, published many books based on her early exposure to Ishi’s story. Ishi’s
history informed all of Le Guin’s greatest literary works of the 1960s and 1970s: Planet of
Exile, City of Illusions, The Word for World Is Forest, The Dispossessed, and her masterpiece, The
Left Hand of Darkness” (“On the Renaming”). While Scheper-Hughes may overstate the
specific connections between Ishi (d. 1916) and Le Guin’s work, the omission of A Wizard
of Earthsea, published during this same period, seems odd. Scheper-Hughes contributed to
the 2021 AAA session as well, individual paper abstracts from which remain available here:
https://easaonline.org/downloads/networks/hoan/HOAN_Newsletter_20f-202111_
Kroeber_AAA_Session.pdf.
peoples of California meant that Le Guin had a proximity to Native people

and their stories that few other early settler fantasists did. While the novel’s
resonance with Indigenous thought may not be as obvious as in some of
her other works, A Wizard of Earthsea merits particular consideration in
conjunction with Le Guin’s relationships with Native storytelling tradi-
tions, Native epistemologies, and indeed Native people.14
The multiethnic archipelago of Earthsea also stands as a deliberate chal-
lenge to Tolkien‘s medieval Western European focus in the regions of
Middle-earth explored in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as Le Guin
explains:
My purpose in making most of the people of Earthsea [nonwhite], and the

whites a marginal and rather backward people, was of course a moral one,
aimed at young American and European readers. Fantasy heroes of the
European tradition were conventionally white—just about universally so in
1968—and darkness of skin was often associated with evil. By simply sub-
verting an expectation, a novelist can undermine a prejudice. (“Gedo Senki”)
Even so, the most direct literary sources and influences that lie behind A
Wizard of Earthsea remain grounded in European traditions more than
Indigenous American ones. Le Guin studied Romance languages and lit-
eratures extensively, and earned a Master’s degree from Columbia
University in 1952 with a thesis on “Ideas of Death in Ronsard’s Poetry.”
She intended to complete a doctoral degree continuing her studies of
medieval and Renaissance French literature, but shortly broke off her
studies after marrying the historian Charles Le Guin while both were on
14
In a 1982 interview with George Wickes and Louise Westling, Le Guin describes her
early fascination with Native narratives: “I had a child’s curiosity, and there were Indian
legends all over the place. My father told us stories that he had learned from his informants,
and my mother was interested, too” (Conversations 15). Theodora Kroeber’s first book was
in fact a set of retold Native stories titled The Inland Whale: Nine Stories Retold from
California Indian Legends (1959). On the possible influence of Native ideas on Earthsea’s
naming conventions, see Barrow and Barrow, “Voyages,” 22–24, but we should also heed
the cautionary note about Le Guin’s engagements with indigeneity in Stone et al., “The
Language of the Dusk.” We can find discomfort about and important critical reflections on
Le Guin’s engagement with Native cultures in the scholarly tradition dating back to at least
Elyce Rae Helford’s 1997 article “Going ‘Native.’”
12 T. S. MILLER
Fulbright Fellowships in France.15 Le Guin was thus equipped to draw

extensively on early European romance in her fantasy even if she did not
have quite the medievalist chops of a Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, or even
T. H. White, those combination medievalist scholars and founding fathers
of twentieth-century fantasy (Le Guin not coincidentally cites Gandalf and
Merlin as her images for a future Ged). In A Wizard of Earthsea, it is
Chapter 7, “The Hawk’s Flight,” that channels medieval romance the
most obviously, bearing some resemblance to the Middle English Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight in its series of sexually charged temptations
at the enigmatic and claustrophobic “Court of the Terrenon” (see Barrow
and Barrow 30). Premodern literary allusions in the novel are numerous:
the door to the School on Roke is constructed of horn and ivory like the
gates of true and false dreams described in Homer and Virgil, and Ged’s
ill-fated decision to call up the spirit of the legendary beauty Elfarran
evokes Faustus’s summoning of Helen of Troy with “the face that launch’d
a thousand ships” in Marlowe’s tragedy.16 But the narrative that most
lends structure to A Wizard of Earthsea overall is the folktale type some-
times known as “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” perhaps most familiar to
modern audiences via the image of Mickey Mouse in his star-spangled hat
facing down regiments of burly broomsticks intent on following his com-
mand to carry in buckets of water. This memorable segment from the
1940 Disney film Fantasia adapts Goethe’s 1797 version of the story, but
folklorists would group a number of related stories as versions of “The
Magician and His Pupil,” Aarne-Thompson tale type 325.17 There are
three major episodes in the novel that specifically recall variants on the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice tale, with the stakes and level of Ged’s personal
responsibility increasing each time: Ged (then known as Duny) calling the
15
For a chronology of Le Guin’s earlier life and additional biographical information, see
the prefatory material and first chapter of Charlotte Spivack’s compact book Ursula K. Le
Guin, or the first chapter of Bernardo and Murphy, Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion.
The back matter by Brian Attebery in the more recent Library of America editions of Le
Guin’s works also compiles a thorough chronology, for example in Always Coming Home,
902–919.
16
For an exploration of the significance of the classical image of the gate, see Tavormina,
“A Gate of Horn and Ivory.”
17
For a compilation of variants of the tale and some commentary, see the selection curated
and introduced by Jack Zipes in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales;
Zipes also comments briefly on Le Guin and Earthsea himself (73–74). Bucknall notes the
parallel in passing (39), and Attebery discusses it at greater length (Fantasy Tradition
173–175).
goats to himself using an overheard charm that he cannot then suspend;

the forbidden consultation of his mentor Ogion’s book; and the calami-
tous loosing of his shadow double on Roke Knoll. While she had not read
any Jung at the time of writing Wizard, Le Guin herself would go on to
explore Jungian thinking and more general reflections on archetypes and
cross-cultural narratives as a way of reexamining her own works.18
Although Le Guin did become one of the most prolific critics on her
own writing, wider academic interest in Earthsea developed early, yielding
now more than a half century of scholarship on Wizard, and scholarship
that has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades,
just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when compos-
ing later works set in the fantasy world. Amy J. Ransom has incomparably
summarized the tremendous range of responses that Le Guin’s work has
garnered from both general and academic audiences: “Le Guin has been
labeled a man-hating feminist and not feminist enough, a utopian thinker
and an anti-utopian critic, a radical anarchist and a conservative realist”
(144). The Earthsea books in particular became a kind of testing ground
for new developments in literary studies and fantasy studies, as we will see
more clearly in Chap. 4. Above all, the multiple generations of readers,
writers, and scholars that A Wizard of Earthsea has engaged in so many
rich and varied ways show why this “old text” nevertheless belongs in a
“new canon.” It is not only a key novel in the author’s career and the
genre in which it participates, but one that at once looks back to Tolkien
and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le
Guin’s own continuing feminist and progressive education; and antici-
pates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contempo-
rary form. Chapter 2 will begin by situating several of the novel’s prominent
episodes within these overlapping histories and trajectories.
References
Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le
Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Barrow, Craig, and Diana Barrow. “Le Guin’s Earthsea: Voyages in Consciousness.”
Extrapolation 32.1 (1991): 20–44.
18
Examples include the essays “The Child and the Shadow” (1975) and “Myth and
Archetype in Science Fiction” (1976), both of which appear collected in The Language of
the Night.
14 T. S. MILLER
Bernardo, Susan M. and Graham J. Murphy. Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical

Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
Bucknall, Barbara J. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Ungar, 1981.
Gomez, Melissa. “UC Berkeley removes Kroeber Hall name, citing namesake’s
‘immoral’ work with Native Americans.” The Los Angeles Times 27 Jan. 2021.
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor y/2021-0 1-2 7/uc-b erkeley-
kroeber-hall. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Helford, Elyce Rae. “Going ‘Native’: Le Guin, Misha, and the Politics of
Speculative Literature.” Foundation 71 (1997): 77–88.
Kell, Gretchen. “Kroeber Hall, honoring anthropologist who symbolizes exclu-
sion, is unnamed.” Berkeley News. 26 Jan. 2021. https://news.berkeley.
edu/2021/01/26/kroeber-hall-unnamed/. Accessed 28 May 2022.
Kerridge, Jake. “The Fantasy that Inspired David Mitchell.” The Telegraph 17
Nov. 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/classic-childrens-books/
david-mitchells-favourite-book/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2022.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home: Author’s Expanded Edition. 1985.
New York: Library of America, 2019.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition.
New York: Saga Press, 2018.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Cheek by Jowl. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Child and the Shadow.” Quarterly Journal of the Library
of Congress 32 (1975): 139–48.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Carl Freedman.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists.” The Wordsworth
Circle 38.1–2 (2007): 83–87.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Gedo Senki: A First Response to “Gedo Senki,” the Earthsea
Film Made by Goro Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli.” http://www.ursulakleguinar-
chive.com/GedoSenkiResponse.html. Accessed 6 March 2021.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science
Fiction. Rev. ed. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Some Assumptions About Fantasy.” 4 June 2004.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/some-assumptions-about-fantasy. Accessed
19 May 2022.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile,
City of Illusions. New York: Tor, 2016.
Pratchett, Terry. “Why Gandalf Never Married.” 1985. https://ansible.uk/misc/
tpspeech.html. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Ransom, Amy J. “Three Genres, One Author: Recent Scholarship on Ursula K. Le
Guin.” Science Fiction Studies 36.1 (2009): 144–153.
Roberts, Adam. “Jewish Fantasy.” 11 May 2021. https://medium.com/adams-
notebook/jewish-fantasy-ad1e581b798b. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Russell, Anna. “Margaret Atwood Chooses ‘A Wizard of Earthsea.’” The Wall

Street Journal 16 Oct. 2014. https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-book-
club-margaret-atwood-chooses-a-wizard-of-earthsea-1413493430. Accessed
19 May 2022.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “On the Renaming of Anthropology’s Kroeber Hall.”
Berkeley Blog 1 July 2020. https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2020/07/01/on-the-
renaming-of-anthropologys-kroeber-hall/. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Spivack, Charlotte. Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
Steed, Robert. “A Note on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daoist Interests.” Mythlore 40.2
(2022): 185–191.
Stone, Katie, Eli Lee, and Francis Gene-Rowe. “The Language of the Dusk:
Anthropocentrism, Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le
Guin.” The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics. Ed.
Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier, and Pierre-Louis Patoine. Cham,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 83–105.
Tavormina, M. Teresa. “A Gate of Horn and Ivory: Dreaming True and False in
Earthsea.” Extrapolation 29.4 (1998): 338–48.
Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien On Fairy-stories. Ed. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas
A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins, 2018.
Tolkien, Simon. “My Grandfather – J R R Tolkien.” 2003. https://www.simon-
tolkien.com/mygrandfather. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Updike, John. “Imagining Things.” Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism.
New York: Knopf, 1983.
Vonnegut, Kurt. “Science Fiction.” Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions).
1974. New York: Dial Press, 2020.
Weingrad, Michael. “The Best Unicorn.” The Jewish Review of Books 15 April
2019. Accessed 19 May 2022.
Zipes, Jack, ed. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2017.
CHAPTER 2
Between Children’s Literature and “Adult

Fantasy”: The Antecedents and Audiences
of A Wizard of Earthsea
Abstract This chapter first positions A Wizard of Earthsea in relation to

its most important literary predecessors in fantasy, including
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and T. H. White’s The Once and
Future King with their iconic elderly wizards, and then argues that Le
Guin frames the education of her own young magician as a process that
occurs both within and beyond the formal school for magic that has now
become a commonplace of the fantasy genre. Le Guin in fact explores
several sometimes conflicting “magical pedagogies” as she illustrates the
moral maturation of her young hero over the course of a life lived in and
in response to the world.
Keywords J. R. R. Tolkien • T. H. White • Fantasy maps • Fantasy

worlds • Arthurian literature • Schools for magic
Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Old King Arthur: Earthsea

and Its Predecessors
A Wizard of Earthsea begins with a map, and then a place:
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the
storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24640-1_2
18 T. S. MILLER
in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman
has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard
or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to
isle of all Earthsea. (7)
By 1968, high fantasy with its maps and its elaborate nomenclatures had
come to America, and Le Guin began to write Wizard shortly after
“Tolkien mania” first gripped the United States in the 1960s, and just as
the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line was to take off and begin building a first
canon for fantasy.1 Le Guin’s novel itself helped cement the expectation
that readers, upon opening up a fantasy novel set in a secondary world,
would be furnished with maps to help guide them through it, although
she opted for a deliberately diffuse multiethnic archipelago rather than a
map, like Tolkien’s and in many fantasy novels to come, modeled more or
less on Western Europe.2 Only after orienting its readers in a wider sec-
ondary world with both cartography and this specific anchor point, Gont
Mountain, does the novel introduce the eponymous wizard: “Of these
some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called
Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage.
His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of
the time before his fame, before the songs were made” (7). Here A Wizard
of Earthsea presents itself as but a humble appendage or footnote to some
greater body of work produced within its secondary world, one Tolkienian
flourish among many more. But Le Guin owes more to Tolkien than
matters of form and style: the great theme of both the Earthsea books as
a unit and Wizard as a discrete narrative is arguably death and the accep-
tance of death, recalling Tolkien’s own analysis of the central theme of The
Lord of the Rings, “Death and the desire for deathlessness” (GoodKnight
1
On the historical trajectory of fantasy as a genre and a publishing category, see Jamie
Williamson’s 2015 book The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, especially 1–7. Williamson judges
the Earthsea trilogy to be “probably the most original of the work from the period standing
in the stream of Tolkien influence,” and also the most influential: “Of the new work from the
1960–75 period, Le Guin’s trilogy has probably been the most widely influential” (193). For
an intriguing account of Le Guin’s own early “pulp” sensibilities and the nature of publish-
ing on the more science fictional side during this same period, see Slusser, “The Pulp
Cauldron of the 1960s.”
2
On maps in fantasy novels, see Ekman’s Here Be Dragons, which argues that, for Tolkien
and like-minded authors, “the map aids in the construction of an internally consistent
world,” and “serve[s] to provide the secondary world with […] width, depth, and
height” (14).
2 BETWEEN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND “ADULT FANTASY”… 19
19).3 If Le Guin ultimately demonstrates very different theological and

political perspectives from the man she referred to as “an illustrious prede-
cessor” both inside and outside of their respective works, Tolkien’s under-
standing of fantasy and Le Guin’s converge in some core ways nonetheless
(Always Coming Home 688). This chapter will think through such literary
antecedents for and influences on Wizard as well as the many ways in
which Le Guin diverges from her forebears and strikes out to map new
territories of psychological and philosophical complexity in the genre
using familiar fantasy and folkloric patterns, emphasizing Le Guin’s ambi-
tions to use old stories to teach new lessons.
John Garth and some other commentators have recently proposed that
Le Guin’s debt to Tolkien specifically may have been so enormous that she
chose to embed the author’s surname in the linguistic fabric of her invented
world, the word in Earthsea’s Old Speech for “rock”/“stone” (=“earth”?)
being “tolk,” and that for “sea” being “inien.”4 The Master Namer on
Roke even explains to Ged that the latter word can appear shortened when
combined with others in the modern language: “We call the foam on
waves sukien: that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, suk,
feather, and inien, the sea” (36). To solve the equation crudely as “earth
+ sea = Tolkien” may finally represent nothing more than an example of
literary-critical pareidolia, but Tolkien’s approach to mythmaking remains
foundational to Earthsea in the texture and depth Le Guin gives to the
world through the use of both invented languages and half-mythical his-
tories that have left their impression on the cultures and places of the pres-
ent in which Ged finds himself: “‘Sparkweed,’ said Jasper. ‘They grow
where the wind dropped the ashes of burning Ilien, when Erreth-Akbe
3
“[T]he tale is not really about Power and Dominion,” writes Tolkien: these glosses
appear in a 1957 letter first published in 1975 with commentary by Glen GoodKnight (19).
The particular thematic conjunction of death and the moral education of a young adult will
also recall a line from Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”: “[I]t is one of the lessons of fairy-stories
(if we can speak of the lessons of things that do not lecture) that on callow, lumpish, and
selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes
wisdom” (58).
4
Garth, a noted Tolkien scholar, argues that the word “tolk” itself occupies an unusually
prominent place in the Earthsea books, suggesting that the Tolkien/Earthsea conjunction
“could directly point to Tolkien as a major part of the bedrock of inspiration for Earthsea”
(“Ursula Le Guin”). In the blog post, Garth also documents many of the places where Le
Guin praises Tolkien in her nonfiction.
20 T. S. MILLER
defended the Inward Isles from the Firelord’” (32).5 While she did create
the rudiments of her own invented language of power, the Old Speech or
True Speech, Le Guin’s interest in language and nomenclature is not as
philological or nearly as systematic as Tolkien’s, and primarily establishes
the operation of magic in Earthsea as fundamentally tied to onomastic
mastery: “For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing. So
Kurremkarmerruk had said to them, once, their first night in the Tower;
he never repeated it, but Ged did not forget his words. ‘Many a mage of
great power,’ he had said, ‘has spent his whole life to find out the name of
one single thing—one single lost or hidden name” (36).6 Indeed, the nov-
el’s most Tolkienian narrative episode is likely Ged’s verbal sparring with
the Dragon of Pendor, a crafty foe colored with shades of Smaug, though
not in the end pierced by an arrow, but rather laid low by linguistic knowl-
edge. Ged knows the dragon’s true name, even when he cannot yet name
his own shadow-self. That latter challenge remains before him: Ged utters
the dragon’s name and so nullifies its capacity to do harm at approximately
the midpoint of the novel. “You never think of going on past the dragon,”
muses a character in Le Guin’s 1980 novel The Beginning Place: “You only
think about getting to it. But what happens afterwards?” (191). A Wizard
of Earthsea and indeed the entire series of novels turns on repetitions of
this same narrative structure, the defeat of a “dragon” followed by an
exploration of what comes after—“[I]t was hard to turn from the bright
danger of the dragons to that formless, hopeless horror” (67)—the life
that even a dragonlord must continue to lead day in and day out, “the
kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life”
(“Afterword” 130).7 In this approach, too, Le Guin may follow Tolkien
5
Le Guin credits such strategies to Tolkien’s teaching: “I learned the trick of hinting at a
whole background with a few names, so you’d feel situated in a real world, not a fantasy
bubble” (Jaggi).
6
Williamson likewise describes how “the quasi-historical depth of the canvas, with its allu-
sions to traditional myths and legends, echoes Tolkien,” but concludes that it is rather “the
further development of a metaphysical structure underscoring magic” that most “moves
Earthsea into (then) quite original territory” (193). Like Ged working his first great magic,
the young Le Guin “had the strength to turn the spell to [her] own ends” (Wizard 13).
7
The narrator of Le Guin’s realist YA novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else concludes
with just such a gesture towards the ongoing nature of story and life: “There is more, of
course, but that seems to be all of this thing I wanted to tell. The ‘more’ is just what hap-
pened next and keeps on happening—each day’s new gorilla nest” (129).
with his own emphasis on the return journey—“There and Back Again”—
and the aftermath.8
Le Guin consistently speaks highly of Tolkien across her assorted talks
and essays on fantasy and her literary influences, but another major
twentieth-century fantasist whose work has also invited comparisons with
Earthsea she regarded much less positively: C. S. Lewis.9 As classics of
children’s fantasy, the Chronicles of Narnia may seem the nearer prece-
dent for a YA project such as Wizard, but Le Guin has made clear time and
time again her dissatisfaction with the books’ moral orientation, “simply
Christian apologia, full of hatred and contempt for people who didn’t
agree” (Jaggi). Le Guin also regularly insisted that she had no inclination
to write for a particular age group (except when asked to do so by her
publisher), preferring to write with all ages in mind, and admiring fantasy
for its very ability to address multiple audiences: “The capacity of much
fantasy literature to override age-boundaries, to me a most admirable
power, is to the anti-wizards a degrading weakness” (“The Critics” 85).
Wizard did arrive at a rich time for fantasy for young people in particular:
the publication dates of several of the most enduring children’s fantasy
sagas overlap with those of Le Guin’s first trilogy, most of which bear
closer similarity to Earthsea than does Narnia: Lloyd Alexander’s
Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968); Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising
Sequence (1965–1977); and Madeleine L’Engle’s multiple fantasy series
(most notably 1962’s A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels).10 In contrast to
these other fantasy series, however, Le Guin allowed later Earthsea books
to develop beyond her publisher’s original target audience of “11 Up.”11
8
Le Guin shares an observation from 1975 about the primacy of the return journey—or
rather the journey as return—in her fiction. After revisiting her unpublished novel The
Necessary Passion, which would become Malafrena, she reflected that it read very like her
1974 novel The Dispossessed: “True pilgrimage consists in coming home—True journey is
return—and so on. I have not a few ideas: I have ONE idea” (Orsinian Tales Kindle
Locations 92–93).
9
See for example the comparative approach in Bailey, “Counter-Landscapes of Fantasy:
Earthsea/Narnia.”
10
Marek Oziewicz’s 2008 book One Earth, One People remains the authoritative study of
this boom in fantasy for young people, covering Le Guin, Alexander, and L’Engle.
11
Williamson observes that, during a time when fantasy continued to be associated with
children’s literature despite the efforts of the marketing behind the Ballantine Adult Fantasy
imprint, “the “children’s” aspect of [certain] books was often tiptoed around (genre paper-
back editions would appear with no note of YA origins, as with the Bantam editions of Le
Guin’s Earthsea trilogy)” (202n11).
22 T. S. MILLER
While, as Le Guin jokes about self-deprecatingly in “On Despising

Genres,” the proximity of her surname to L’Engle’s has led to some mix-
ups among readers, underappreciated in the critical commentary on A
Wizard of Earthsea is its resonance with Mary Stewart’s 1970 life of a
young Merlin, The Crystal Cave, and more generally the tradition of neo-
Arthuriana broadly.12 Arthur himself remains absent from Earthsea, and,
as a martial hero closely identified with a sword, he cannot be a close
match for Ged. We should not forget, however, that Ged, as a kind of
Merlin figure, does acquire his own One True King to mentor in The
Farthest Shore. Also, in terms of its larger narrative trajectory, Wizard and
the Earthsea series closely resemble White’s 1958 Arthurian retelling The
Once and Future King, the first volume of which, The Sword in the Stone,
originally appeared as a standalone book for young people two decades
before the completed and revised tetralogy was published with a more
mature audience in mind. Le Guin describes White’s book as having “had
a deep, permanent effect” on her, but Earthsea’s antecedents remain
numerous and always interlaced (Conversations on Writing 115).
Wizard in fact resembles premodern Arthurian narrative in its reliance
and overall emphasis on chance, and events often follow folkloric patterns
for all of the additional metaphysical architecture with which Le Guin
overlays such earlier narrative modalities. Like a hero of medieval romance,
Ged continually submits himself to the operations of “aventure,” that
word so beloved by Sir Thomas Malory, in Middle English typically mean-
ing something more like “chance” than its modern reflex “adventure,”
but also “fate,” “destiny,” or simply that which happens.13 For instance,
after Ged finds himself barred from Roke after defeating the dragon
because of the shadow that continues to hang over him, he resolves to
allow chance to direct his steps and his story: “He must trust to chance,
and run wherever chance took him” (70). Later in the same chapter, a
stranger directs him to the Court of the Terrenon in Osskil, prompting
Ged to reflect that “[a] wizardly man soon learns that few indeed of his
12
“On Despising Genres” attacks genre snobbery as do many of Le Guin’s earlier essays:
“[E]very time they give an award to another brand name novel, or some lady says to me,
‘Oh, my son just loves your books—of course I don’t read Sci Fi.’ And she stands there
expecting me to say, ‘No, of course you don’t, you’re far too mature, intelligent, discerning,
and, above all, tactful.’ Then I usually find out she thought I was Madeleine L’Engle, any-
how” (363).
13
For a preliminary exploration of the many valences of “aventure” in Malory, see Kennedy,
“Notions of Adventure.”
meetings are chance ones, be they for good or for ill” (71). Near his jour-
ney’s end Ged’s old friend corroborates this view—“Wizards do not meet
by chance, lad” (108)—but we see Le Guin at her most Arthurian describ-
ing the relationship between chance and design once Ged has arrived at
the Court of the Terrenon: “He had come to this tower-keep by chance,
and yet the chance was all design; or he had come by design and yet all the
design had merely chanced to come about” (79).14 Ged senses that he has
been trapped—“this was no place one came to by chance; even in the dull-
ness of his thoughts he began to see that” (79)—but also that apparent
chance and some higher fate may be linked on some level below percep-
tion, and this seventh chapter, “The Hawk’s Flight,” should not be dis-
missed as one interchangeable or random episode among many. While it
may read like a self-contained interlude, or even a distraction from the
main narrative, recalling the unexpected stopover in Beorn’s fairytale
homestead in the seventh chapter of The Hobbit, Ged’s own time spent in
“queer lodgings” proves pivotal. Ged’s resistance of the multiple tempta-
tions in the tower results in a reorientation of his life and a reunion with
Ogion, pointing him towards instead of away from his shadow. After all,
Le Guin chooses to highlight the image of “the hawk’s flight” in the nov-
el’s enigmatic in-universe epigraph from The Creation of Éa (5).15 Ged’s
literal flight from the Court of the Terrenon in a raptor’s shape has clearly
been preordained and foreshadowed to be suffused with meaning; Vetch
even sings the creation song and repeats the phrase about the hawk’s flight
after Ged’s climactic reintegration of his shadow, bracketing the entire
narrative with this image (125).
Le Guin thus allows a carefully ordered “chance” to arrange and lend
meaning to Ged’s adventures, and, while our hero does not belong to any
noble knightly lineage, we learn early in the novel that this blacksmith’s
son is cut from archetypal fairytale cloth nevertheless, a seventh son whose
14
Timothy Newman’s master’s thesis traces various “Arthurian Quest Motifs” across Le
Guin’s fiction, and for example observes the parallel in the narrative situations of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight and the episode at the Court of the Terrenon (62).
15
The excerpt reads, “Only in silence the word, / only in dark the light, / only in dying
life: / bright the hawk’s flight / on the empty sky” (5). In her Tough Guide to Fantasyland,
Diana Wynne Jones would skewer the trend in genre fantasy that Le Guin again herself
helped establish with this epigraph, noting that the obligatory fantasy map “will be followed
by a short piece of prose that says When the night of the wolf waxes strong in the morning, the
wise man is wary of a false dawn. Ka’a Orto’o, Gnomic Utterances, VI ii” (“How to Use
This Book”).
24 T. S. MILLER
mother who had died before his first birthday, a child shown no “tender-
ness” by his distant father and older brothers (7). After Ged proves his
tremendous capacity to work magic by saving his village from foreign raid-
ers, he enters quickly into Le Guin’s extended version of the “Sorcerer’s
Apprentice” or “Master and His Pupil” folktale, having acquired the first
of many (male) mentors in Ogion the Silent. The version of “The Master
and His Pupil” included in the nineteenth-century collection of English
Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs provides a representative example of this
important pre-text, and resonates with Le Guin’s framework in many
ways, beginning as follows:
There was once a very learned man in the north-country who knew all the
languages under the sun, and who was acquainted with all the mysteries of
creation. He had one big book bound in black calf and clasped with iron,
and with iron corners, and chained to a table which was made fast to the
floor; and when he read out of this book, he unlocked it with an iron key,
and none but he read from it, for it contained all the secrets of the spiritual
world. It told how many angels there were in heaven, and how they marched
in their ranks, and sang in their quires, and what were their several functions,
and what was the name of each great angel of might. And it told of the
demons, how many of them there were, and what were their several powers,
and their labours, and their names, and how they might be summoned, and
how tasks might be imposed on them, and how they might be chained to be
as slaves to man. (73–74)
Just such a book of lore containing true names that promise to grant a
student mastery over arcane powers tempts Ged one fateful day in Ogion’s
cottage: “Now the master had a pupil who was but a foolish lad, and he
acted as servant to the great master, but never was he suffered to look into
the black book, hardly to enter the private room. One day the master was
out, and then the lad, as curious as could be, hurried to the chamber…”
(74). The illustration by John D. Batten in the Jacobs edition depicts the
boy cowering in front of a grimoire open to Latin incantations with a
nonsense language on the facing page—“Kimo Kari Kimo”—and closely
anticipates Le Guin’s staging of the same scene by rendering the demon
that the pupil summons as a complete blackness, like a shadow (73).
Ogion returns to banish this intimation of the shadow that will later pur-
sue Ged—“a shapeless clot of shadow darker than the darkness” (21)—
before it can cause harm, just as the master saves the pupil from the
demon’s enthusiasm for the task it has been set: “But the master remem-
bered on his journey that he had not locked his book, and therefore
returned, and at the moment when the water was bubbling about the
pupil’s chin, rushed into the room and spoke the words which cast
Beelzebub back into his fiery home” (75). The folktale ends there, but for
Ged this scene signals a turning point in his education, and Ogion offers
him the choice to depart for the formal wizards’ School on Roke. The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice motif itself will recur as well, although Ged will have
no master to correct his future mistakes, and must instead learn how to
save himself from himself. Le Guin, too, follows her predecessors only up
to a point, and interweaves a great deal of her own with these prior narra-
tives, forms, and styles.
Earthsea Pedagogies: Learning to Live

in an Enchanted World
The pupil must have his master, and the apprentice his senior sorcerer. If
Gandalf and Merlin reimagined as young wizards provide the template for
Ged’s conception—wizards famed for the mentoring roles they play in
relation to others—it would seem imperative to analyze how Le Guin
imagines the mentors of these future mentors. How do the wise become
wise? Le Guin’s characteristically deceptively simple answer could be given
in a single word as “teachers,” but it turns out that Ged encounters teach-
ers of many kinds—not all of them in the classroom, and not all of them
human. In the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Peter
Nicholls praises the Earthsea trilogy for “the moral teaching it conveys,”
comparing it favorably to Narnia in this respect (Clute and Nicholls 347).
Indeed, one of the few concessions to the teen audience that Parnassus
Press sought to target may well be the narrative’s emphasis on not merely
teaching but specifically the adolescent experience of formal education
(and of course the protagonist’s age, ranging between 12 and 19 for most
of the book). While J. K. Rowling leans fully into the “school story” mode
with her Harry Potter books, each new book corresponding to an advance-
ment in grade level and closely following the school term, in this respect
Le Guin instead echoes Lewis’s simultaneous invocation of but ultimate
turning from the genre as a genre in the Narnia books.16 The Silver Chair,
16
On Rowling and the school story, see the essays by Rollin and Steege. Elizabeth Galway
has further argued that Rowling’s indebtedness to the genre causes the books to “operate
within an inherently elitist tradition” (67), such that the school “ultimately serves to mold
the hero into a member of the ruling elite and an ideal masculine citizen, ready to defend and
uphold the values of his school and the community to which it belongs (82).
26 T. S. MILLER
for instance, opens with a chapter titled “Behind the Gym,” but by its
third line explicitly calls attention to and rejects the genre into which the
narrative appears to fit: “It was a dull autumn day and Jill Pole was crying
behind the gym. She was crying because they had been bullying her. This
is not going to be a school story, so I shall say as little as possible about
Jill’s school, which is not a pleasant subject” (3). Lewis and Le Guin seem
to apprehend the appeal of the school story for young people but also its
inherent limitations, and Ged’s own educational progress in Wizard in fact
comes to depend on his recognition that leaving Ogion’s tutelage for the
School on Roke represented a mistake: “I have walked with great wizards
and lived on the Isle of the Wise, but you are my true master, Ogion”
(90). At the same time, Le Guin implies that leaving Ogion only to return
and acknowledge him as true teacher was a necessary part of Ged’s educa-
tion, one return journey among many in Wizard and in her fiction that has
resulted in the beginnings of a hard-earned Socratic wisdom for her hero:
“I have come back to you as I left: a fool” (88). Ged’s story—Ged’s life—
is an education.17
Le Guin effectively structures the first half of the novel around a succes-
sion of different teachers with different pedagogies to which Ged responds
in different ways, and many of the characters in the novel act in some
mentoring or teaching capacity, including not only Ogion and the Nine
Masters and two Archmages of Roke, but also his selfishly motivated aunt,
his friends Vetch and Pechvarry, his animal companion the otak, and even
Vetch’s sister Yarrow with her own hearth wisdom.18 Even before Ged’s
aunt agrees to teach him what she can, he learns a charm by overhearing
her use it on a goat, and the mishap that follows—the goats won’t stop
following the seven-year-old—provides the first foreshadowing of the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice narrative in which the student of magic cannot
control what he has unleashed: “He yelled the rhyme aloud, and the goats
17
Le Guin’s other work demonstrates an overriding concern with teaching and education,
but often through indirect means. With good reason, then, Richard D. Erlich chose to sub-
title his voluminous series of close readings of Le Guin’s corpus “The Teaching Stories of
Ursula K. Le Guin.”
18
At the Court of the Terrenon at a low point in the narrative, Ged feels the weight of all
of these teachers’ expectations: “And in Ged’s heart a cold shame settled also and would not
be dislodged, as he thought always how he had faced his enemy and been defeated and had
run. In his mind all the Masters of Roke gathered, Gensher the Archmage frowning in their
midst, and Nemmerle was with them, and Ogion, and even the witch who had taught him
his first spell; all of them gazed at him and he knew he had failed their trust in him” (79).
came to him. […] Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that
gave him power over the goats” (8). The laughter and delight of the child
reflect a child’s innocence, but the scene also warns of the temptation and
danger inherent in such power and domination over nature. When Duny/
Ged remains a child, the capacity of this perspective to do harm likewise
remains limited: “At first all his pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike,
the power it gave him over bird and beast” (11).19 But this “childlike”
view persists into young adulthood, souring Ged’s early days with Ogion,
and evolving finally into the dangerous state of mind that leads him to
loose the shadow on Roke Knoll: “The more he learned, the less he would
have to fear, until finally in his full power as Wizard he needed fear nothing
in the world, nothing at all” (41). There is no question that such a per-
spective would be incompatible with Ogion’s contemplative approach,
and the friction between student and teacher arises almost immediately:
Though a very silent man he was so mild and calm that Ged soon lost his
awe of him, and in a day or two more he was bold enough to ask his master,
“When will my apprenticeship begin, Sir?”
“It has begun,” said Ogion.
There was a silence, as if Ged was keeping back something he had to say.
Then he said it: “But I haven’t learned anything yet!”
“Because you haven’t found out what I am teaching,” replied the
mage. (17)
Ogion undoubtedly asks much from his young student, but seems con-
cerned to reorient Ged’s entire way of thinking, and to allow Ged to
achieve such a reorientation through long experience himself. For exam-
ple, when Ogion teaches Ged the name of the plant fourfoil, the stu-
dent—expecting “useful lore” of the kind his aunt had described as key to
gaining “great power over men” (11)—can only respond, “What is its use,
Master?” (18). Ogion, as with many thinkers associated with critical plant
studies, rejects this instrumentalist view of the nonhuman world, insisting
that the plant has as much use or meaning in itself as a human, but Ged
will not begin to learn from nonhumans until he gains his appreciation for
19
While Le Guin does speak of Ged’s love of calling animals as a “pleasure” that will con-
tinue with him later in life (11), this passage could be read as associating a scientistic desire
to use knowledge to dominate nature as itself “childish,” an impulse human civilization
needs to grow out of, much as she frames war and violence as literal childish games in Always
Coming Home, embarrassing in adults.
28 T. S. MILLER
it through Hoeg the otak, “the little silent soul that had led him back from
death’s dominion” (77). On the whole, Ged’s prolonged education under
Ogion’s gentle guidance and beyond recalls the pedagogical model that
Merlyn himself adopts in White’s The Once and Future King, which above
all prepares his student to learn for himself. In an illustrative exchange in
the second chapter of the second book, Merlyn refuses to spell out the
philosophy of justice he has been attempting to inculcate in Arthur even
when his student has come near to arriving at it himself:
“Might isn’t Right, is it, Merlyn?”

“Aha!” replied the magician, beaming. “Aha! You are a cunning lad,
Arthur, but you won’t catch your old tutor like that. You are trying to put
me in a passion by making me do the thinking. […] You will have to think
the rest yourself. Is might right—and if not, why not, give reasons and draw
a plan. Besides, what are you going to do about it?”
“What…” began the King, but he saw the gathering frown.
“Very well,” he said. “I will think about it.” (225)
Several chapters later, Arthur summons a council to explain what he has

concluded about power, or “might,” as White calls it for that rhyme with
right. Arthur has puzzled over why Merlyn helped Arthur win battles if
Merlyn believed war to be evil, and resolves that Merlyn must have in
mind a protective exercise of power in pursuit of justice:
“Do you see the idea? It will be using the Might instead of fighting against
it, and turning a bad thing into a good. There Merlyn, that is all I can think
of. I have thought as hard as I could, and I suppose I am wrong, as usual.
But I did think. I can’t do any better. Please say something!” The magician
stood up as straight as a pillar, stretched out his arms in both directions,
looked at the ceiling and said the first few words of the Nunc Dimittis. (248)
The “Nunc Dimittis” or “Canticle of Simeon” is a liturgical reference to

the Biblical story of Simeon, who lived to see a divine promise fulfilled that
he would meet the messiah before his death: “Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace.” In other words, Merlyn judges his life’s work
done: his student finally “gets it,” and has reached this new level of moral
enlightenment by learning how to learn.20
20
On pedagogy in White’s novel, see Adderley, “The Best Thing for Being Sad.”
When Ged exchanges Ogion for Roke, we sometimes see the same les-
sons Ogion had tried to impart spelled out more rigorously and less intui-
tively, as when the Master Summoner provides the explanation for a detail
that had perplexed Ged: why did Ogion always allow the rain to fall on
them instead of using his magic to dispel it (18)? The Master Summoner
makes clear a lesson Ogion has internalized: “[I]t was he who showed
them why the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to summon
up such earthly forces is to change the earth of which they are a part. ‘Rain
on Roke may be drouth in Osskil,’ he said, ‘and a calm in the East Reach
may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are about’”
(41). Ged at first feels a great affinity with the powerful and therefore
dangerous arts of summoning, but recognizes a deeper kinship with the
Master Namer, Kurremkarmerruk, also the instructor into whose peda-
gogy we receive the clearest insights. As the overseer of the rote study of
the infinitude of true names in the Isolate Tower, Kurremkarmerruk best
recognizes that education must never and can never cease: “Yet the maj-
esty of the task could not make the work of that long year in the Tower
less hard and dry; and at the end of the year Kurremkarmerruk said to
him, ‘You have made a good beginning.’ But no more” (37). Le Guin
insists that learning in any domain remains a lifelong process, and also
offers some excellent practical advice for students through her mouthpiece
Kurremkarmerruk: “Go to bed; tired is stupid” (51). Gensher, the new
Archmage who succeeds the first after Nemmerle gives his life saving Ged
from the shadow, further suggests consolation through education: “Go on
and do your work. Do it well. It is all you can do” (48). This encounter
with Gensher also underscores Le Guin’s larger theories of education and
learning, in that Ged almost receives the answer to the question of the
shadow’s nature that he will seek for years afterwards: “The power you
had to call it gives it power over you: you are connected. It is the shadow
of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast.
Has a shadow a name?” (48). Ged’s response, “Better I had died,” speaks
to his ignorance of the shadow’s identity as himself but also an incipient
temptation even to refuse the challenge of living (48).21 But the answer to
21
In many of Le Guin’s works set in Earthsea and elsewhere, antagonists live in fear of
death (Cob from The Farthest Shore being the clearest example), suggesting that this kind of
learning to live involves coming to terms with death. For an example outside Earthsea writ-
ten in close proximity to Wizard, we could look to the self-deceiving Shing in her 1967 novel
City of Illusions: “I honor life, I honor it because it’s a much more difficult and uncertain
matter than death” (280); “Fearing their own profound attraction towards death, they
preached Reverence for Life, fooling themselves at last with their own lie” (335).
30 T. S. MILLER
Gensher’s seemingly rhetorical question—“Has a shadow a name?”—is

obvious to readers who have completed the novel: of course a shadow has
a name, the same name as the one who casts it. Ged has therefore come so
close to being able to avoid all the tribulations that follow, had he only
been able in that moment to name the shadow “me,” “myself,” “mine.”
Instead, he required experience, required the long journey of education,
just as, in order to learn that he never should have left Ogion for Roke, he
had to leave Ogion for Roke. The lessons Le Guin seeks to impart through
Ged’s education are thus finally lessons for young people and adults, les-
sons about learning to live in the world as the world changes. The next
chapter will take up questions related to the reception of Wizard in adap-
tation, as a changing world mediates the book differently in different
contexts.
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CHAPTER 3
Fantasy and the Weight of Whiteness: Racial

Dynamics in Earthsea
Abstract This chapter emphasizes the historical and present importance

of Le Guin’s forward-looking handling of race in her multiethnic fantasy
world, which she populates with many nonwhite characters, very unusu-
ally for the time. Neither the majority of the novel’s early book covers nor
the screen adaptations to date translated the racial diversity of Earthsea
visually, including the TV miniseries The Legend of Earthsea (2004) and
Studio Ghibli’s animated Tales from Earthsea (2006). Beyond document-
ing such whitewashing and Le Guin’s frustrations with it, the chapter fur-
ther argues that Le Guin’s attention to racial issues and whiteness attempts
more broadly to overturn the typical associations in the fantasy genre of
whiteness with goodness and dark imagery with evil.
Keywords Race • Whitewashing • Whiteness • Adaptation • The

Legend of Earthsea • Tales from Earthsea
A Wizard of Earthsea in Black and White:

Uncoupling Whiteness and Goodness
Ged, the hero of a fantasy novel, is not a white man. In 1968, this fact
alone was sufficient to distinguish A Wizard of Earthsea from many of its
predecessors and contemporaries, and arguably remains one of the novel’s

Switzerland AG 2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24640-1_3
34 T. S. MILLER
more important interventions, an attempt early in the genre’s history to

circumvent what Helen Young calls the “habits of whiteness” operating
for so many decades afterwards in popular fantasy.1 A Wizard of Earthsea
does not represent a thoroughgoing attempt to scrub clean the language
of fantasy of all the conventional and often racially vexed symbolism
attached to the colors white and black; Le Guin will casually invoke “black
magic” as evil, for instance, in a line such as “the witch of Ten Alders was
no black sorceress” (9). Yet the novel does demonstrate a perhaps surpris-
ingly sophisticated effort to separate such language from the racial coding
it so often travels with. Above all, the secondary world Le Guin has fash-
ioned for Wizard decenters whiteness, and quite literally so: unlike
Tolkien’s white-towered city of Minas Tirith in Gondor, “the white towers
of Havnor Great Port at the center of the world” are not filled with white
people (24). Instead, Le Guin places the habitations of lighter-skinned
peoples such as Osskil and the Kargad Lands on the margins of her world,
with her ethnically diverse archipelago in its center both narratively and
topographically. This move stands in direct contrast with the usual habits
of fantastic cartographers, notorious for locating nonwhite peoples on the
hazy margins of their worlds, as with Tolkien’s swarthy corrupt Easterlings
and Southrons and infamous “black men like half-trolls” from “Far
Harad” (Return of the King 121).2 The default racial coding of evil across
fantasy worlds has consequences: as Maria Sachiko Cecire has put it, “the
racial politics of magical landscapes have real-world impact” (26), as fur-
ther documented in Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s monograph on “the
diversity crisis in young adult literature, media, and fan cultures,” The
1
Young acknowledges Le Guin’s efforts in 1968 to challenge the racial dynamics of the
rapidly expanding genre of fantasy literature, but goes on to explore how “the genrefication
of Fantasy from the late 1970s to the present ingrained” audience expectations for white
heroics and dark villainy (40), a few important early “[c]ounter-voices” such as Charles
R. Saunders and Samuel R. Delany notwithstanding (45). Compare also Farah Mendlesohn’s
point, in a discussion of fantasy quest narratives more broadly, that “the ‘racing’ of heroes
and villains is in part a consequence of a rhetoric that posits insight in terms of visual percep-
tion” (12).
2
Maria Sachiko Cecire makes much of Junot Díaz’s reference to this passage in his novel
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. During the title character’s depressed adulthood, this
Afro-Caribbean immigrant fantasy fan who aspires to become “the Dominican Tolkien”
nevertheless finds himself unable to continue rereading his favorite book when he reaches
this line, having encountered, in Cecire’s words, “his own racial identity figured as monstros-
ity in his most beloved text” (220).
3 FANTASY AND THE WEIGHT OF WHITENESS: RACIAL DYNAMICS… 35
Dark Fantastic (13).3 Indeed, Le Guin has written about how readers of
color discovered her books to be the sole exceptions that allowed them to
see themselves in the ostensibly infinitely imaginative yet overwhelmingly
white worlds of fantasy literature:
I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from readers of color who told
me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt
included in—and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents,
when they’d found nothing to read in fantasy and science fiction except the
adventures of white people in white worlds. Those letters have been a tre-
mendous reward and true joy to me. (“A Whitewashed Earthsea”)
Black sf/f fan Pam Noles has written just such a reflection on Earthsea’s
place in her life: “Le Guin’s racial choices in ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ mat-
tered because her decision said to the wide white world: You Are Not The
Whole Of The Universe. For many fans of genre, no matter where they fell
on the spectrum of pale, this was the first time such a truth was made alive
for them within the pages of the magical worlds they loved” (“Shame”).
This decentering of whiteness, although achieved mainly through the pre-
cision of the novel’s language, remains at the heart of Earthsea‘s world-
building project.
Le Guin’s comments on the worldbuilding behind A Wizard of the
Earthsea repeatedly affirm her desire to upend fantasy’s conventional
racialization of evil as darker-skinned, for example in her 2012 afterword
to the novel positioning her own approach against early genre fantasy’s
raced hierarchies: “[T]he hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people
were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive
object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women
(dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy” (128). Le Guin
goes on to describe her “subversive” challenge to this precedent as “delib-
erately sneaky”: “A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to
accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t
make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you real-
ize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white. […] I was bucking
the racist tradition, ‘making a statement’—but I made it quietly, and it
went almost unnoticed” (129). The thoroughly whitewashed history of
3
Thomas also sounds a note of optimism: “Working toward a fantastic that is restorative,
transformative, and emancipatory has the power to remake our world” (13).
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may not be definite. Examine shoots that grow on the under side of
dense tree tops or in other partially lighted positions.
Suggestions.—55. The pupil should match leaves to determine whether any
two are alike. Why? Compare leaves from the same plant in size, shape, colour,
form of margin, length of petiole, venation, texture (as to thickness or thinness),
stage of maturity, smoothness or hairiness. 56. Let the pupil take an average leaf
from each of the first ten different kinds of plants that he meets and compare them
as to the above points (in Exercise 55), and also name the shapes. Determine how
the various leaves resemble and differ. 57. Describe the stipules of rose, apple, fig,
willow, violet, pea, or others. 58. In what part of the world are parallel-veined
leaves the more common? 59. Do you know of parallel-veined leaves that have
lobed or dentate margins? 60. What becomes of dead leaves? 61. Why is there no
grass or other undergrowth under pine and spruce trees? 62. Name several leaves
that are useful for decorations. Why are they useful? 63. What trees in your vicinity
are most esteemed as shade trees? What is the character of their foliage? 64.
Why are the internodes so long in water-sprouts and suckers? 65. How do foliage
characters in corn or sorghum differ when the plants are grown in rows or
broadcast? Why? 66. Why may removal of half the plants increase the yield of
cotton or sugar-beets or lettuce? 67. How do leaves curl when they wither? Do
different leaves behave differently in this respect? 68. What kinds of leaves do you
know to be eaten by insects? By cattle? By horses? What kinds are used for
human food? 69. How would you describe the shape of leaf of peach? apple?
elm? hackberry? maple? sweet-gum? corn? wheat? cotton? hickory? cowpea?
strawberry? chrysanthemum? rose? carnation? 70. Are any of the fore-going
leaves compound? How do you describe the shape of a compound leaf? 71. How
many sizes of leaves do you find on the bush or tree nearest the schoolroom
door? 72. How many colours or shades? 73. How many lengths of petioles? 74.
Bring in all the shapes of leaves that you can find.
Fig. 112.—Cowpea. Describe the leaves. For
what is the plant used?
CHAPTER XII
LEAVES—STRUCTURE OR ANATOMY
Besides the framework, or system of veins found in blades of all

leaves, there is a soft cellular tissue called mesophyll, or leaf
parenchyma, and an epidermis or skin that covers the entire
outside part.
Mesophyll.—The
mesophyll is not all alike or
homogeneous. The upper
layer is composed of
elongated cells placed
perpendicular to the
surface of the leaf. These
are called palisade cells.
These cells are usually
Fig. 113.—Section of a Leaf, showing the air- filled with green bodies
spaces.
Breathing-pore or stoma at a. The palisade cells which chiefly called chlorophyll grains.
contain the chlorophyll are at b. Epidermal cells at c. The grain contains a great
number of chlorophyll
drops imbedded in the protoplasm. Below the palisade cells is the
spongy parenchyma, composed of cells more or less spherical in
shape, irregularly arranged, and provided with many intercellular air
cavities (Fig. 113). In leaves of some plants exposed to strong light
there may be more than one layer of palisade cells, as in the India-
rubber plant and the oleander. Ivy when grown in bright light will
develop two such layers of cells, but in shaded places it may be
found with only one. Such plants as iris and compass plant, which
have both surfaces of the leaf equally exposed to sunlight, usually
have a palisade layer beneath each epidermis.
Epidermis.—The outer or epidermal cells of leaves do not bear
chlorophyll, but are usually so transparent that the green mesophyll
can be seen through them. They often become very thick-walled,
and are in most plants devoid of all protoplasm except a thin layer
lining the walls, the cavities being filled with cell sap. This sap is
sometimes coloured, as in the under epidermis of begonia leaves. It
is not common to find more than one layer of epidermal cells forming
each surface of a leaf. The epidermis serves to retain moisture in the
leaf and as a general protective covering. In desert plants the
epidermis, as a rule, is very thick and has a dense cuticle, thereby
preventing loss of water.
There are various outgrowths of the epidermis. Hairs are the chief
of these. They may be (1) simple, as on primula, geranium, nægelia;
(2) once branched, as on wall-flower; (3) compound, as on
verbascum or mullein; (4) disk-like, as on shepherdia; (5) stellate,
or star-shaped, as in certain crucifers. In some cases the hairs are
glandular, as in Chinese primrose of the greenhouses (Primula
Sinensis) and certain hairs of pumpkin flowers. The hairs often
protect the breathing-pores, or stomates, from dust and water.
Stomates (sometimes called breathing-pores) are small
openings or pores in the epidermis of leaves and soft stems that
allow the passage of air and other gases and vapours (stomate or
stoma, singular; stomates or stomata, plural). They are placed near
the large intercellular spaces of the mesophyll, usually in positions
least affected by direct sunlight. Fig. 114 shows the structure. There
are two guard-cells at the mouth of each stomate, which may in
most cases open or close the passage as the conditions of the
atmosphere may require. The guard-cells contain chlorophyll. In Fig.
115 is shown a case in which there are compound guard-cells, that
of ivy. On the margins of certain leaves, as of fuchsia, impatiens,
cabbage, are openings known as water-pores.
Stomates are very numerous, as will be seen from the numbers
showing the pores to each square inch of leaf surface:
Fig. 114.—Diagram of Stomate of Fig. 115.—Stomate of Ivy, showing
Iris (Osterhout). compound guard-cells.
Lower Upper
surface surface
Peony 13,790 None
Holly 63,600 None
Lilac 160,000 None
Mistletoe 200 200
Tradescantia 2,000 2,000
Garden Flag
11,572 11,572
(iris)
The arrangement of stomates on the leaf
differs with each kind of plant. Fig. 116 shows
stomates and also the outlines of contiguous
epidermal cells.
The function or work of the stomates is to
regulate the passage of gases into and out of
the plant. The directly active organs or parts are
Fig. 116.—Stomates ofguard-cells, on either side the opening. One
Geranium Leaf. method of opening is as follows: The thicker
walls of the guard-cells (Fig. 114) absorb water
from adjacent cells, these thick walls buckle or bend and part from
one another at their middles on either side the opening, causing the
stomate to open, when the air gases may be taken in and the leaf
gases may pass out. When moisture is reduced in the leaf tissue, the
guard-cells part with some of their contents, the thick walls
straighten, and the faces of the two opposite ones come together,
thus closing the stomate and preventing any water vapour
from passing out. When a leaf is actively at work making
new organic compounds, the stomates are usually open;
when unfavourable conditions arise, they are usually
closed. They also commonly close at night, when growth
(or the utilizing of the new materials) is most likely to be
active. It is sometimes safer to fumigate greenhouses and
window gardens at night, for the noxious vapours are less
likely to enter the leaf. Dust may clog or cover the
stomates. Rains benefit plants by washing the leaves as
well as by providing moisture to the roots.
Lenticels.—On the young woody twigs of many plants
(marked in osiers, cherry, birch) there are small corky
spots or elevations known as lenticels (Fig. 117). They
mark the location of some loose cork cells that function as
stomates, for green shoots, as well as leaves, take in and
discharge gases; that is, soft green twigs function as
leaves. Under some of these twig stomates, corky material
may form and the opening is torn and enlarged: the
lenticels are successors to the stomates. The stomates lie
in the epidermis, but as the twig ages the epidermis
perishes and the bark becomes the external layer. Gases
continue to pass in and out through the lenticels, until the
branch becomes heavily covered with thick, corky bark.
With the growth of the twig, the lenticel scars enlargeFig. 117.—
lengthwise or crosswise or assume other shapes, often Lenticel
s on
becoming characteristic markings. Young
Fibro-vascular Bundles.—We have studied the fibro- Shoot
of Red
vascular bundles of stems (Chap. X). These stem bundles Osier
continue into the leaves, ramifying into the veins, carrying (Cornus)
the soil water inwards and bringing, by diffusion, the .
elaborated food out through the sieve-cells. Cut across a
petiole and notice the hard spots or areas in it; strip these parts
lengthwise of the petiole. What are they?
Fall of the Leaf.—In most common deciduous plants, when the
season’s work for the leaf is ended, the nutritious matter may be
withdrawn, and a layer of corky cells is completed over the surface of
the stem where the leaf is attached. The leaf soon falls. It often falls
even before it is killed by frost. Deciduous leaves begin to show the
surface line of articulation in the early growing season. This
articulation may be observed at any time during the summer. The
area of the twig once covered by the petioles is called the leaf-scar
after the leaf has fallen. In Chap. XV are shown a number of leaf-
scars. In the plane tree (sycamore or buttonwood), the leaf-scar is in
the form of a ring surrounding the bud, for the bud is covered by the
hollowed end of the petiole; the leaf of sumac is similar. Examine
with a hand lens leaf-scars of several woody plants. Note the
number of bundle-scars in each leaf-scar. Sections may be cut
through a leaf-scar and examined with the microscope. Note the
character of cells that cover the leaf-scar surface.
Suggestions.—To study epidermal hairs: 75. For this study, use the leaves of
any hairy or woolly plant. A good hand lens will reveal the identity of many of the
coarser hairs. A dissecting microscope will show them still better. For the study of
the cell structure, a compound microscope is necessary. Cross-sections may be
made so as to bring hairs on the edge of the sections; or in some cases the hairs
may be peeled or scraped from the epidermis and placed in water on a slide. Make
sketches of the different kinds of hairs. 76. It is good practice for the pupil to
describe leaves in respect to their covering: Are they smooth on both surfaces? Or
hairy? Woolly? Thickly or thinly hairy? Hairs long or short? Standing straight out or
lying close to the surface of the leaf? Simple or branched? Attached to the veins or
to the plane surface? Colour? Most abundant on young leaves or old? 77. Place a
hairy or woolly leaf under water. Does the hairy surface appear silvery? Why?
Other questions: 78. Why is it good practice to wash the leaves of house plants?
79. Describe the leaf-scars on six kinds of plants: size, shape, colour, position with
reference to the bud, bundle-scars. 80. Do you find leaf-scars on
monocotyledonous plants—corn, cereal grains, lilies, canna, banana, palm,
bamboo, green brier? 81. Note the table on page 88. Can you suggest a reason
why there are equal numbers of stomates on both surfaces of leaves of
tradescantia and flag, and none on upper surface of other leaves? Suppose you
pick a leaf of lilac (or some larger leaf), seal the petiole with wax and then rub the
under surface with vaseline; on another leaf apply the vaseline to the upper
surface; which leaf withers first, and why? Make a similar experiment with iris or
blue flag. 82. Why do leaves and shoots of house plants turn towards the light?
What happens when the plants are turned around? 83. Note position of leaves of
beans, clover, oxalis, alfalfa, locust, at night.
CHAPTER XIII
LEAVES—FUNCTION OR WORK
We have discussed (in Chap. VIII) the work or function of roots

and also (in Chap. X) the function of stems. We are now ready to
complete the view of the main vital activities of plants by considering
the function of the green parts (leaves and young shoots).
Sources of Food.—The ordinary green plant has but two sources
from which to secure food,—the air and the soil. When a plant is
thoroughly dried in an oven, the water passes off; this water came
from the soil. The remaining part is called the dry substance or dry
matter. If the dry matter is burned in an ordinary fire, only the ash
remains; this ash came from the soil. The part that passed off as gas
in the burning contained the elements that came from the air; it also
contained some of those that came from the soil—all those (as
nitrogen, hydrogen, chlorine) that are transformed into gases by the
heat of a common fire. The part that comes from the soil (the ash) is
small in amount, being considerably less than 10 per cent and
sometimes less than 1 per cent. Water is the most abundant single
constituent or substance of plants. In a corn plant of the roasting-ear
stage, about 80 per cent of the substance is water. A fresh turnip is
over 90 per cent water. Fresh wood of the apple tree contains about
45 per cent of water.
Carbon.—Carbon enters abundantly into the composition of all
plants. Note what happens when a plant is burned without free
access of air, or smothered, as in a charcoal pit. A mass of charcoal
remains, almost as large as the body of the plant. Charcoal is almost
pure carbon, the ash present being so small in proportion to the
large amount of carbon that we look on the ash as an impurity.
Nearly half of the dry substance of a tree is carbon. Carbon goes off
as a gas when the plant is burned in air. It does not go off alone, but
in combination with oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide gas, CO2.
The green plant secures its carbon from the air. In other words,
much of the solid matter of the plant comes from one of the gases of
the air. By volume, carbon dioxide forms only a small fraction of 1
per cent. of the air. It would be very disastrous to animal life,
however, if this percentage were much increased, for it excludes the
life-giving oxygen. Carbon dioxide is often called “foul gas.” It may
accumulate in old wells, and an experienced person will not descend
into such wells until they have been tested with a torch. If the air in
the well will not support combustion,—that is, if the torch is
extinguished,—it usually means that carbon dioxide has drained into
the place. The air of a closed schoolroom often contains far too
much of this gas, along with little solid particles of waste matters.
Carbon dioxide is often known as carbonic acid gas.
Appropriation of the Carbon.—The carbon dioxide of the air
readily diffuses itself into the leaves and other green parts of the
plant. The leaf is delicate in texture, and when very young the air can
diffuse directly into the tissues. The stomates, however, are the
special inlets adapted for the admission of gases into the leaves and
other green parts. Through these stomates, or diffusion-pores, the
outside air enters into the air-spaces of the plant, and is finally
absorbed by the little cells containing the living matter.
Chlorophyll (“leaf green”) is the agent that secures the energy by
means of which carbon dioxide is utilized. This material is contained
in the leaf cells in the form of grains (p. 86); the grains themselves
are protoplasm, only the colouring matter being chlorophyll. The
chlorophyll bodies or grains are often most abundant near the upper
surface of the leaf, where they can secure the greatest amount of
light. Without this green colouring matter, there would be no reason
for the large flat surfaces which the leaves possess, and no reason
for the fact that the leaves are borne most abundantly at the ends of
branches, where the light is most available. Plants with coloured
leaves as coleus, have chlorophyll, but it is masked by other
colouring matter. This other colouring matter is usually soluble in hot
water: boil a coleus leaf and notice that it becomes green and the
water becomes coloured.
Plants grown in darkness are yellow and slender, and do not reach
maturity. Compare the potato sprouts that have grown from a tuber
lying in a dark cellar with those that have grown normally in the
bright light. The shoots have become slender, and are devoid of
chlorophyll; and when the food that is stored in the tuber is
exhausted these shoots will have lived useless lives. A plant that has
been grown in darkness from the seed will soon die, although for a
time the little seedling will grow very tall and slender. Why? Light
favours the production of chlorophyll, and the chlorophyll is the agent
in the making of the organic carbon compounds. Sometimes
chlorophyll is found in buds and seeds, but in most cases these
places are not perfectly dark. Notice how potato tubers develop
chlorophyll, or become green, when exposed to light.
Photosynthesis.—Carbon dioxide diffuses into the leaf; during
sunlight it is used, and oxygen is given off. How the carbon dioxide
which is thus absorbed may be used in making an organic food is a
complex question, and need not be studied here; but it may be
stated that carbon dioxide and water are the constituents. Complex
compounds are built up out of simpler ones.
Chlorophyll absorbs certain light rays, and the energy thus directly
or indirectly obtained is used by the living matter in uniting the
carbon dioxide absorbed from the air with some of the water brought
up from the roots. The ultimate result usually is starch. The process
is obscure, but sugar is generally one step; and our first definite
knowledge of the product begins when starch is deposited in the
leaves. The process of using the carbon dioxide of the air has been
known as carbon assimilation, but the term now most used is
photosynthesis (from two Greek words meaning light and placing
together.)
Starch and Sugar.—All starch is composed of carbon, hydrogen,
and oxygen (C6H10O5)n. The sugars and the substance of cell walls
are very similar to it in composition. All these substances are called
carbohydrates. In making fruit sugar from the carbon and oxygen of
carbon dioxide and from the hydrogen and oxygen of the water,
there is a surplus of oxygen (6 parts CO2 + 6 parts H2O = C6H12O6 +
6 O2). It is this oxygen that is given off into the air during sunlight.
Digestion.—Starch is in the form of insoluble granules. When
such food material is carried from one part of the plant to another for
purposes of growth or storage, it is made soluble before it can be
transported. When this starchy material is transferred from place to
place, it is usually changed into sugar by the action of a diastase.
This is a process of digestion. It is much like the change of starchy
foodstuffs to sugary foods effected by the saliva.
Distribution of the Digested Food.—
After being changed to the soluble form, this
material is ready to be used in growth, either
in the leaf, in the stem, or in the roots. With
other more complex products it is then
distributed throughout all the growing parts
of the plant; and when passing down to the
root, it seems to pass more readily through
the inner bark, in plants which have a
definite bark. This gradual downward
diffusion through the inner bark of materials
suitable for growth is the process referred to
when the “descent of sap” is mentioned.
Starch and other products are often stored in
one growing season to be used in the next
season. If a tree is constricted or strangled
by a wire around its trunk (Fig. 118), the
Fig. 118.—Trunk Girdled digested food cannot readily pass down and
by a Wire. See Fig. 85. it is stored above the girdle, causing an
enlargement.
Assimilation.—The food from the air and that from the soil unite
in the living tissues. The “sap” that passes upwards from the roots in
the growing season is made up largely of the soil water and the salts
which have been absorbed in the diluted solutions (p. 67). This
upward-moving water is conducted largely through certain tubular
canals of the young wood. These cells are never continuous tubes
from root to leaf; but the water passes readily from one cell or canal
to another in its upward course.
The upward-moving water gradually passes to the growing parts,
and everywhere in the living tissues, it is, of course, in the most
intimate contact with the soluble carbohydrates and products of
photosynthesis. In the building up or reconstructive and other
processes it is therefore available. We may properly conceive of
certain of the simpler organic molecules as passing through a series
of changes, gradually increasing in complexity. There will be formed
substances containing nitrogen in addition to carbon, hydrogen, and
oxygen. Others will contain also sulphur and phosphorus, and the
various processes may be thought of as culminating in protoplasm.
Protoplasm is the living matter in plants. It is in the cells, and is
usually semi-fluid. Starch is not living matter. The complex process
of building up the protoplasm is called assimilation.
Respiration.—Plants need oxygen for respiration, as animals do.
We have seen that plants need the carbon dioxide of the air. To most
plants the nitrogen of the air is inert, and serves only to dilute the
other elements; but the oxygen is necessary for all life. We know that
all animals need this oxygen in order to breathe or respire. In fact,
they have become accustomed to it in just the proportions found in
the air; and this is now best for them. When animals breathe the air
once, they make it foul, because they use some of the oxygen and
give off carbon dioxide. Likewise, all living parts of the plant must
have a constant supply of oxygen. Roots also need it, for they
respire. Air goes in and out of the soil by diffusion, and as the soil is
heated and cooled, causing the air to expand and contract.
The oxygen passes into the air-spaces and is absorbed by the
moist cell membranes. In the living cells it makes possible the
formation of simpler compounds by which energy is released. This
energy enables the plant to work and grow, and the final products of
this action are carbon dioxide and water. As a result of the use of
this oxygen by night and by day, plants give off carbon dioxide.
Plants respire; but since they are stationary, and more or less
inactive, they do not need so much oxygen as animals do, and they
do not give off so much carbon dioxide. A few plants in a sleeping
room need not disturb one more than a family of mice. It should be
noted, however, that germinating seeds respire vigorously, hence
they consume much oxygen; and opening buds and flowers are
likewise active.
Transpiration.—Much more water is absorbed by the roots than is
used in growth, and this surplus water passes from the leaves into
the atmosphere by an evaporation process known as transpiration.
Transpiration takes place more abundantly from the under surfaces
of leaves, and through the pores or stomates. A sunflower plant of
the height of a man, during an active period of growth, gives off a
quart of water per day. A large oak tree may transpire 150 gallons
per day during the summer. For every ounce of dry matter produced,
it is estimated that 15 to 25 pounds of water usually passes through
the plant.
When the roots fail to supply to the plant sufficient water to
equalize that transpired by the leaves, the plant wilts. Transpiration
from the leaves and delicate shoots is increased by all the conditions
which increase evaporation, such as higher temperature, dry air, or
wind. The stomata open and close, tending to regulate transpiration
as the varying conditions of the atmosphere affect the moisture
content of the plant. However, in periods of drought or of very hot
weather, and especially during a hot wind, the closing of these
stomates cannot sufficiently prevent evaporation. The roots may be
very active and yet fail to absorb sufficient moisture to equalize that
given off by the leaves. The plant shows the effect (how?). On a hot
dry day, note how the leaves of corn “roll” towards afternoon. Note
how fresh and vigorous the same leaves appear early the following
morning. Any injury to the roots, such as a bruise, or exposure to
heat, drought, or cold may cause the plant to wilt.
Water is forced up by root pressure or sap pressure. (Exercise
99.) Some of the dew on the grass in the morning may be the water
forced up by the roots; some of it is the condensed vapour of the air.
The wilting of a plant is due to the loss of water from the cells. The
cell walls are soft, and collapse. A toy balloon will not stand alone
until it is inflated with air or liquid. In the woody parts of the plant the
cell walls may be stiff enough to support themselves, even though
the cell is empty. Measure the contraction due to wilting and drying
by tracing a fresh leaf on page of notebook, and then tracing the
same leaf after it has been dried between papers. The softer the
leaf, the greater will be the contraction.
Storage.—We have said that starch may be stored in twigs to be
used the following year. The very early flowers on fruit trees,
especially those that come before the leaves, and those that come
from bulbs, as crocuses and tulips, are supported by the starch or
other food that was organized the year before. Some plants have
very special storage reservoirs, as the potato, in this case being a
thickened stem although growing underground. (Why a thickened
stem? p. 84.) It is well to make the starch test on winter twigs and on
all kinds of thickened parts, as tubers and bulbs.
Carnivorous Plants.—Certain plants capture insects and other
very small animals and utilize them to some extent as food. Such are
the sundew, which has on the leaves sticky hairs that close over the
insect; the Venus’s fly-trap of the Southern States, in which the
halves of the leaves close over the prey like the jaws of a steel trap;
and the various kinds of pitcher plants that collect insects and other
organic matter in deep, water-filled, flask-like leaf pouches (Fig. 119).
The sundew and the Venus’s fly-trap are sensitive to contact.
Other plants are sensitive to the touch without being insectivorous.
The common cultivated sensitive plant is an example. This is readily
grown from seeds (sold by seedsmen) in a warm place. Related wild
plants in the south are sensitive. The utility of this sensitiveness is
not understood.
Parts that Simulate Leaves.—We have
learned that leaves are endlessly modified to
suit the conditions in which the plant is
placed. The most marked modifications are
in adaptation to light. On the other hand,
other organs often perform the functions of
leaves. Green shoots function as leaves.
These shoots may look like leaves, in which
case they are called cladophylla. The foliage
of common asparagus is made up of fine
branches: the real morphological leaves are
the minute dry functionless scales at the
bases of these branchlets. (What reason is
there for calling them leaves?) The broad
Fig. 119.—The Common “leaves” of the florist’s smilax are
Pitcher Plant cladophylla. Where are the leaves on this
(Sarracenia purpurea)
showing the tubular plant? In most of the cacti, the entire plant
leaves and the odd, long- body performs the functions of leaves until
stalked flowers. the parts become cork-bound.
Leaves are sometimes modified to
perform other functions than the vital processes: they may be
tendrils, as the terminal leaflets of pea and sweet pea; or spines, as
in barberry. Not all spines and thorns, however, represent modified
leaves: some of them (as of hawthorns, osage orange, honey locust)
are branches.
Suggestions.—To test for chlorophyll. 84. Purchase about a gill of wood
alcohol. Secure a leaf of geranium, clover, or other plant that has been exposed to
sunlight for a few hours, and, after dipping it for a minute in boiling water, put it in a
white cup with sufficient alcohol to cover. Place the cup in a shallow pan of hot
water on the stove where it is not hot enough for the alcohol to take fire. After a
time the chlorophyll is dissolved by the alcohol which has become an intense
green. Save this leaf for the starch experiment (Exercise 85). Without chlorophyll,
the plant cannot appropriate the carbon dioxide of the air. Starch and
photosynthesis. 85. Starch is present in the green leaves which have been
exposed to sunlight; but in the dark no starch can be formed from carbon dioxide.
Apply iodine to the leaf from which the chlorophyll was dissolved in the previous
experiment. Note that the leaf is coloured purplish-brown throughout. The leaf
contains starch.86. Secure a leaf from a plant which has been in the dark for about
two days. Dissolve the chlorophyll as before, and attempt to stain this leaf with
iodine. No purplish-brown colour is produced. This shows that the starch
manufactured in the leaf may be entirely removed during darkness.
Fig. 120.—Excluding Light and

Fig. 121.—The Result.
CO2 from Part of a Leaf.
87. Secure a plant which has been kept in darkness for twenty-four hours or
more. Split a small cork and pin the two halves on opposite sides of one of the
leaves, as shown in Fig. 120. Place the plant in the sunlight again. After a morning
of bright sunshine dissolve the chlorophyll in this leaf with alcohol; then stain the
leaf with the iodine. Notice that the leaf is stained deeply except where the cork
was; there sunlight and carbon dioxide were excluded, Fig. 121. There is no starch
in the covered area. 88. Plants or parts of plants that have developed no
chlorophyll can form no starch. Secure a variegated leaf of coleus, ribbon grass,
geranium, or of any plant showing both white and green areas. On a day of bright
sunshine, test one of these leaves by the alcohol and iodine method for the
presence of starch. Observe that the parts devoid of green colour have formed no
starch. However, after starch has once been formed in the leaves, it may be
changed into soluble substances and removed, to be again converted into starch
in certain other parts of the living tissues. To test the giving off of oxygen by day.
89. Make the experiment illustrated in Fig. 122.
Under a funnel in a deep glass jar containing fresh
spring or stream water place fresh pieces of the
common waterweed elodea (or anacharis). Have the
funnel considerably smaller than the vessel, and
support the funnel well up from the bottom so that the
plant can more readily get all the carbon dioxide
available in the water. Why would boiled water be
undesirable in this experiment? For a home-made
glass funnel, crack the bottom off a narrow-necked
bottle by pressing a red-hot poker or iron rod against
it and leading the crack around the bottle. Invert a
test-tube over the stem of the funnel. In sunlight
bubbles of oxygen will arise and collect in the test-
tube. If a sufficient quantity of oxygen has collected, a
lighted taper inserted in the tube will glow with a
brighter flame, showing the presence of oxygen in
greater quantity than in the air. Shade the vessel. Are
bubbles given off? For many reasons it is
impracticable to continue this experiment longer than
a few hours. 90. A simpler experiment may be made
Fig. 122.—To show the if one of the waterweeds Cabomba (water-lily family)
Escape of Oxygen. is available. Tie a number of branches together so
that the basal ends shall make a small bundle. Place
these in a large vessel of spring water, and insert a
test-tube of water as before over the bundle. The bubbles will arise from the cut
surfaces. Observe the bubbles on pond scum and waterweeds on a bright day. To
illustrate the results of respiration (CO2).
91. In a jar of germinating seeds (Fig. 123) place carefully a small dish of
limewater and cover tightly. Put a similar dish in another jar of about the same air
space. After a few hours compare the cloudiness or precipitate in the two vessels
of limewater. 92. Or, place a growing plant in a deep covered jar away from the
light, and after a few hours insert a lighted candle or splinter. 93. Or, perform a
similar experiment with fresh roots of beets or turnips (Fig. 124) from which the
leaves are mostly removed. In this case, the jar need not be kept dark; why? To
test transpiration.
94. Cut a succulent shoot of any plant, thrust the end of it through a hole in a
cork, and stand it in a small bottle of water. Invert over this a fruit jar, and observe
that a mist soon accumulates on the inside of the glass. In time drops of water
form. 95. The experiment may be varied as shown in Fig. 125. 96. Or, invert the
fruit jar over an entire plant, as shown in Fig. 126, taking care to cover the soil with
oiled paper or rubber cloth to prevent evaporation from the soil.
97. The test may also be made by
placing the pot, properly protected, on
balances, and the loss of weight will be
noticed (Fig. 127). 98. Cut a winter twig,
seal the severed end with wax, and allow
the twig to lie several days. It shrivels.
There must be some upward movement
of water even in winter, else plants would
shrivel and die. 99. To illustrate sap
pressure. The upward movement of sap
water often takes place under
considerable force. The cause of this
force, known as root pressure, is not well
understood. The pressure varies with
Fig. 123.—To
different plants and under different
illustrate a
conditions. To illustrate: cut off a strong-
Product of
growing small plant near the ground. By
Respiration.
means of a bit of rubber tube attach aFig. 124.—
glass tube with a bore of approximately Respiration of
the diameter of the stem. Pour in a little water. Observe the Thick Roots.
rise of the water due to the pressure from below (Fig 128).
Some plants yield a large amount of water under a pressure sufficient to raise a
column several feet; others force out little, but under considerable pressure (less
easily demonstrated). The vital processes (i.e., the life processes). 100. The pupil
having studied roots, stems, and leaves, should now be able to describe the main
vital functions of plants: what is the root function? stem function? leaf function?
101. What is meant by the “sap”? 102. Where and how does the plant secure its
water? oxygen? carbon? hydrogen? nitrogen? sulphur? potassium? calcium? iron?
phosphorus? 103. Where is all the starch in the world made? What does a starch-
factory establishment do? Where are the real starch factories? 104. In what part of
the twenty-four hours do plants grow most rapidly in length? When is food formed
and stored most rapidly? 105. Why does corn or cotton turn yellow in a long rainy
spell? 106. If stubble, corn stalks, or cotton stalks are burned in the field, is as
much plant-food returned to the soil as when they are ploughed under? 107. What
process of plants is roughly analogous to perspiration of animals? 108. What part
of the organic world uses raw mineral for food? 109. Why is earth banked over
celery to blanch it? 110. Is the amount of water transpired equal to the amount
absorbed?
Fig. 125.—To illustrate Transpiration.
Fig. 129.—Before and after Pruning.

111. Give some reasons why plants very close to a house may not thrive or may
even die. 112. Why are fruit trees pruned or thinned out as in Fig. 129? Proper
balance between top and root. 113. We have learned that the leaf parts and the
root parts work together. They may be said to balance each other in activities, the
root supplying the top and the top supplying the root (how?). If half the roots were
cut from a tree, we should expect to reduce the top also, particularly if the tree is

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Ursula K.

Le Guin’s "A Wizard of

The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction,

Design Computing and Cognition’22 John S. Gero

Wiley's 22 Years' JEE Advanced - Wiley Editorial.pdf

The Sacred Depths of Nature Ursula Goodenough

Principles of International Investment Law 3rd Edition

Reclaiming Eden David S -K Ting

Le carrousel infernal Joe Hill

Skills in Mathematics Algebra for IIT JEE Main and

ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic)

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

SFF studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like

Haifa, Israel; Ann Arbor, MI Keren Omry

Timothy S. Miller teaches both medieval literature and contemporary

The Boy Wizard and the Young Grand

Abstract This chapter describes the trajectory of Le Guin’s early writing

Keywords Fantasy • Ursula K. Le Guin • Young adult literature •

Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea has long been regarded as a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

five novels, a short story collection, a few additional uncollected short

woman’s magic, and there is another saying, Wicked as woman’s magic”

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the

A Wizard of Earthsea, with its emphasis on psychological self-examination

recognizable—and financially lucrative—publishing categories.10

Tolkien, a traditionalist English Catholic notorious for resisting Vatican

various intellectual circles from a young age, bouncing between a summer

peoples of California meant that Le Guin had a proximity to Native people

My purpose in making most of the people of Earthsea [nonwhite], and the

Fulbright Fellowships in France.15 Le Guin was thus equipped to draw

goats to himself using an overheard charm that he cannot then suspend;

Bernardo, Susan M. and Graham J. Murphy. Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical

Russell, Anna. “Margaret Atwood Chooses ‘A Wizard of Earthsea.’” The Wall

Between Children’s Literature and “Adult

Abstract This chapter first positions A Wizard of Earthsea in relation to

Keywords J. R. R. Tolkien • T. H. White • Fantasy maps • Fantasy

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Old King Arthur: Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea begins with a map, and then a place:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

19).3 If Le Guin ultimately demonstrates very different theological and

While, as Le Guin jokes about self-deprecatingly in “On Despising

Earthsea Pedagogies: Learning to Live

“Might isn’t Right, is it, Merlyn?”

Several chapters later, Arthur summons a council to explain what he has

The “Nunc Dimittis” or “Canticle of Simeon” is a liturgical reference to

Gensher’s seemingly rhetorical question—“Has a shadow a name?”—is

Fantasy and the Weight of Whiteness: Racial

Abstract This chapter emphasizes the historical and present importance

Keywords Race • Whitewashing • Whiteness • Adaptation • The

A Wizard of Earthsea in Black and White:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

more important interventions, an attempt early in the genre’s history to

Besides the framework, or system of veins found in blades of all

We have discussed (in Chap. VIII) the work or function of roots

Fig. 120.—Excluding Light and

Fig. 129.—Before and after Pruning.

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Haifa, Israel; Ann Arbor, MI Keren Omry