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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
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
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
xiii
CHAPTER 1
1
See Kerridge, “The Fantasy that Inspired David Mitchell,” and Russell, “Margaret
Atwood Chooses ‘A Wizard of Earthsea.’”
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
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.
1 THE BOY WIZARD AND THE YOUNG GRAND MASTER 5
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).
1 THE BOY WIZARD AND THE YOUNG GRAND MASTER 7
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”:
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
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).
Another random document with
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szabaeusok földjére Maribáig, ahol Belkisz királyné élt, Sába
királynője! s ahová Aelius Gallus óta, vagyis Krisztus előtt 24 óta,
európai ember még nem tette be a lábát.
Nemény nevetett.
– Goldziher szerette az ilyet, – jegyezte meg, találomra való
tájékozottsággal és fajközi elragadtatással.
– Igen, – hagyta helyben Tardy Pál. – De csak Abessziniába
mentem, a fekete arcbőrű falasa-zsidókhoz, amolyan egyszerű kis
majálisra, amilyet Pali bácsi festett.
– No mondja csak! Még súlyosabb! – jegyezte meg a bankvezér,
érdeklődve.
– Oh Istenem! – felelt, a vállát vonogatva. – Ezek harcias komák,
ezek a falasa-zsidók, nagy fütykösbotokkal s akik
foglalkozásszerűen űzik a mindenféle atrocitást. Mint aki nem
vagyok zsidó, ellehettem készűlve rá, hogy beverik a fejemet.
– Megfordított világ! – mondotta Nemény, elepedve.
– Szóval mint ál-zsidó kudszi, azaz szentföldi ál-zsidó, halálos
transzokban éltem. Éjnek idején, nem egyszer, mikor holtra fáradtan
a sivatagban, egy zsályabokor tövében megvonultam, hogy egy
kicsit elszunnyadjak, sohasem tudhattam, kié az a két zöld szem,
ami mereven rámtűzött a sötétben, egy pumáé-e vagy egy zsidóé? –
igazán nem tudtam! De azért talán, ki tudja, még ma is ott volnék
Ethiopiában, ha kedvenc tevém, a könyveimmel, jegyzeteimmel s
egy rakomány elefántcsonttal a két púpja közt, le nem tapossa
véletlenűl, a jobb lábamról mind az öt ujjamat.
– Nem láttam, hogy sántítna, – szólott Nemény, a fiatalember
megjelenésére emlékezvén.
– Egy csöppet sem, – felelte hiúság nélkül, – elmult, alig van
nyoma e balesetnek a lábamon. Pár héttel később már táncolhattam
volna akár a dervisekkel Egyiptomban.
Igy beszélt Tardy Pál. De micsoda mély férfiasság zengett itt,
micsoda keserű dallamosság a szavából! Oly erősnek tűnt az egész
ember, és mégis, ki tudja, mi titka élt itt, mint a seb, a lelke mélyén,
finom redőkbe rejtve! Mert amint beszélt, elmosolyodva, s átszűrte
iróniákon nagy életét a szenvedésben, hirtelen úgy látszott
összetörtnek egy-egy pillanatra, így daliásan összetörtnek, mint egy
úszóbajnok aki jön, még délcegen a szerencsétlen, miután átúszott
egy tengert!
Egy harmadik cigaretta után nyúlt, a vezér tárcájában. S akkor,
amíg rágyújtott, a szivarka s a gyufa lángja közé, Nemény gyorsan
beékelte magát, bankvezéri stratégiával.
– Rendben van! Rendben van! – mondta szaporán – mindezt
tudtam is nagyjában, amit ön itt elmondott nekem. Holnap lemegy az
osztályba s átveszi hivatalát. Minden elő van készítve ottan.
Maradna a már jelzett részlet, ha megengedi, Szalánczy Marietta!
Remélem, ezt is kiheverte.
S most már nem engedett, hangban, hangsúlyban, intenciókban,
nem! Most már szinte leszögelte a fiatalembert, egyenes ostromával,
könyörtelen makacsságához. Mohón szítta a levegőt, két
golyószeme kéken s elepedten nézett a homloka bolthajtásából, az
asztrakán süveg alatt, mely féloldalt fordult a fején, mintegy Mekka
irányában. S úgy tűnt, hogy elszorult tüdejével a lelke is elfullad,
asztmatikusan, egy női lidérc után, akit ki tudja, hol ismert meg, hol
látott, hol szagolt meg, micsoda bankvezéri lakomán, micsoda
páholy mélyén, vagy jazz-band mulatságon, térdig érő szoknyában
és rövid frizurásan s amit nem tudott elfelejteni, szipákoló
kívánságában!
– Mondja! Mondja! – ismételgette, – mondja! Szalánczy Marietta,
mondja!
– Mit mondjak? – kérdezte a másik rezignáltan.
Mert itt már nem lehetett kitérni többé, – úgy érezte ezt,
elborúltan, nem lehetett! S ez itt mind hiába volt idáig, a sok beszéd
és tudomány, jó Horeb tanár, Pericles politikája, a nevető Democritos
s ami csak tetszik, ez mind hiába volt s Goldziher is a zsidó álmával,
a sábai dinasztiáig, ez mind hiába, amint ragyogó ködökben, ott
kettőjük közt, a Szalánczy Marietta karcsú fantomja megjelent!
– Azt mondja, – folytatta a vezér mohón – azt mondja, igaz, hogy
maga elvette ezt a démont s hat hónapig élt vele?
– Igaz, – felelte.
– No nem lehet! Egy félévig csak?! Meg se kottyant, mondja! ez
sem?! nem?!
– Oh az más, Marietta, az egészen más, – felelte Tardy Pál,
egyszerűen. – Hogy meg se kottyant? Nem tudom, nem
mondhatnám, – vallotta be.
És csendesen, csak levette a kalapját, szép zöld kalapját, csak
amúgy szórakozottan, mintha nem is ide gondolna, szerencsétlen! A
feje, a haja, tiszta ősz volt.
S akkor sokáig hallgattak mindaketten.
A MIKÓI PÜSPÖK.