A Wizard of Earthsea (23 page)

The magewind had borne them for only three days eastward, yet sixteen days they sailed westward to return. No men have ever returned from so far out on the Open Sea as did the young wizards Estarriol and Ged in the Fallows of winter in their open fishingboat. They met no great storms, and steered steadily enough by the compass and by the star Tolbegren, taking a course somewhat northward of their outbound way. Thus they did not come back to Astowell, but passing by Far Toly and Sneg without sighting them, first raised land off the southernmost cape of Koppish. Over the waves they saw cliffs of stone rise like a great fortress. Seabirds cried wheeling over the breakers, and smoke of the hearthfires of small villages drifted blue on the wind.

From there the voyage to Iffish was not long. They came in to Ismay harbor on a still, dark evening before snow. They tied up the boat
Lookfar
that had borne them to the coasts of death’s kingdom and back, and went up through the narrow streets to the wizard’s house. Their hearts were very light as they entered into the firelight and warmth under that roof; and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy.

O
NCE UPON A TIME, A
publisher asked me if I’d write a novel for teenagers. “Oh, no!” I said. “No, thanks very much, but I couldn’t!”

It was the idea of writing with a specific audience in mind or a specific age of reader that scared me off. I’d published fantasy and science fiction, but I was interested in the form itself, not in who read it or how old they were. But maybe my real problem was that I’d spent so many years writing novels, sending them to publishers, and having them come back with a dull thud on the doormat that I had trouble comprehending that an actual publisher had really asked me to write a book . . .

He was Herman Schein of Parnassus Press in Berkeley, the publisher of my mother’s books for children. 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.”

I thought about it. Slowly the idea sank in. Would writing for older kids be so different from just writing? Why? Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human. And some of them read as intensely and keenly as if their life depended on it. Sometimes maybe it does.

And fantasy—pure, old-fashioned fantasy, not mixed with science fiction—I liked the idea. All my life I’d been reading about wizards, dragons, magic spells . . .

Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. 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.

Well, not instantly, of course. A novel takes a while to write. This one went pretty quickly and easily, though. I didn’t have a plot outlined out when I started, but I knew what the story was. I knew who my Sparrowhawk was, and in a general way I knew where he was going—where he had to go, not only to learn to be a wizard, but to learn to be Ged. Then, as I wrote his story, what he did and said, where he went and the people he met, showed me and told me what he had to do and where he had to go next.

But
where
is as important in the realms of pure imagination as it is here in mundanity. Before I started to write the story, I got a big piece of posterboard and drew the map. I drew all the islands of Earthsea, the Archipelago, the Kargad Lands, the Reaches. And I named them: Havnor, the great island at the middle of the world; Selidor, far out in the west, and the Dragon’s Run, and Hur-at-Hur, and all the rest. But only as I sailed with Ged from Gont did I begin to know the islands, one by one. With him, I first came to Roke, and the Ninety Isles, and Osskil, and farther east even than Astowell. And with him I first went to the dark, dry country, the place across the wall where the dead must go. A voyage long enough, strange enough, great enough for one book.

***

F
ANTASY IS NOW A BRANCH
of the publishing industry, with many titles, many sequels, great expectations of monster successes and movie tie-ins. In 1967 it was pretty much nowhere. Kid stuff. The only adult fantasy novel most people had even heard of was
The Lord of the Rings
. There were others, some of them wonderful, but they mostly lurked in small secondhand bookshops smelling of cats and mildew. I miss those bookshops now, the cats, the mildew, the thrill of discovery. Fantasy as an assembly-line commodity leaves me cold.

But I rejoice when I see it written as what it always was—literature—and recognized as such.

When
A Wizard of Earthsea
came out, there had not been a book like it. It was original—something new. Yet it was also conventional enough not to frighten reviewers. It was well received. The Boston Globe–Horn Book Award helped it. And the fact that fantasy isn’t “for” a certain age but is a literature accessible to anybody who reads—that helped too. My wizard never got on the bestseller lists, but he kept on finding readers, year after year. The book has never been out of print.

The conventionality of the story, and its originality, reflect its existence within and partial subversion of an accepted, recognized tradition, one I grew up with. That is the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of Myth—a confluence of folk and fairy tale, classical epic, medieval and Renaissance and Eastern romance, romantic ballad, Victorian imaginative tale, and twentieth-century book of fantastic adventure such as T. H. White’s Arthurian cycle and Tolkien’s great book.

Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children. And kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.

The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the 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. Anyway, the stories weren’t about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.

It’s in this sense that
A Wizard
was perfectly conventional. The hero does what a man is supposed to do: he uses his strength, wits, and courage to rise from humble beginnings to great fame and power, in a world where women are secondary, a man’s world.

In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. 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 realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.

His people, the Archipelagans, are various shades of copper and brown, shading into black in the South and East Reaches. The light-skinned people among them have far-northern or Kargish ancestors. The Kargish raiders in the first chapter are white. Serret, who both as girl and woman betrays Ged, is white. Ged is copper-brown and his friend Vetch is black. I was bucking the racist tradition, “making a statement”—but I made it quietly, and it went almost unnoticed.

Alas, I had no power, at that time, to combat the flat refusal of many cover departments to put people of color on a book jacket. So, through many later, lily-white Geds, Ruth Robbins’s painting for the first edition—the fine, strong profile of a young man with copper-brown skin—was, to me, the book’s one true cover.

My story took off in its own direction, away from the tradition, also in the whole matter of what makes heroes and villains. Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins. This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted—“of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.

But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles. None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under the influence of fantasy war games, has become almost obligatory.

I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting—danger, risk, challenge, courage—to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

Or does might make right?

If war is the only game going, yes. Might makes right. Which is why I don’t play war games.

To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself. That requires not a war but a search and a discovery. The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

T
URN THE PAGE FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT
T
HE
T
OMBS
O
F
A
TUAN, THE NEXT ADVENTURE IN
T
HE
C
YCLE BY
U
RSULA
K. L
E
G
UIN
!

“C
OME HOME
, T
ENAR
! C
OME HOME
!”

In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.

By the corner of the hut, scraping clean an earth-clotted hoe, the father said, “Why do you let your heart hang on the child? They’re coming to take her away next month. For good. Might as well bury her and be done with it. What’s the good of clinging to one you’re bound to lose? She’s no good to us. If they’d pay for her when they took her, which would be something, but they won’t. They’ll take her and that’s an end of it.”