SOURCE: Cummins, Elizabeth. “Earthsea.” In Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, pp. 22-64. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

The impetus for the Earthsea series was Le Guin's invitation in 1967 from Herbert Schein, publisher of Parnassus Press, to write a book for an adolescent audience. That audience, Le Guin explains in her essay “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” (1973), led to her choosing the main theme of coming of age and the genre of fantasy. “Coming of age,” she writes, “is a process that took me many years; I finished it, so far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it. So do most adolescents. It's their main occupation, in fact.”¹ In the trilogy Le Guin narrates the coming-of-age process as a journey into the self. In the same essay she says, “Fantasy is the medium best suited to a description of that journey, its perils and rewards. The events of a voyage into the unconscious are not describable in the language of rational daily life: only the symbolic language of the deeper psyche will fit them without trivializing them.”² (Le Guin's comments and the discussion in this chapter refer to the trilogy; the fourth novel, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, is scheduled for release in 1990.)

Fantasy, in other words, like myth and dream, assumes the existence of a world of being beyond or underneath perceived, empirical reality; and it reproduces that other world by means of symbol and literary archetype. Wizards, shadows, dragons, a labyrinth, ring, dragon, and sword are some of the symbols and archetypes that reverberate with ethical, emotional, and aesthetic meaning in Le Guin's fantasy trilogy.

These archetypes and symbols can carry such meaning because, as she relates in her essay “The Child and the Shadow” (1975), “we all have the same general tendencies and configurations in our psyche.”³ The idea of shared psychic roots is based on Carl Gustav Jung's psychology. Jung argued that beyond the conscious mind there lay two other mental activities—the individual unconscious, which is unique to each person, and the collective unconscious, which is shared by all people. The symbols and archetypes that are common to myths throughout the world are the manifestations of the collective unconscious. The myths were stories that connected the unconscious and the conscious, stories that used symbols and images to connect the desires and fears and hopes and creativity of the unconscious to the conscious mind.

Such a connection is made during that journey into the unconscious which is part of the adolescent's coming of age. Le Guin believes that a primary characteristic of such a journey is that it is “not only a psychic one, but a moral one,” one that “contain[s] a very strong, striking moral dialectic”⁴ between the potential for good and for evil within the self. The goal of this psychic and moral journey is, in Le Guin's words, the hope that the journeyer “will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what he sees, when he must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear.”⁵

This kind of fantasy exemplifies what Francis J. Molson calls “ethical fantasy.” It is a fiction that both delights and instructs its audience. Specifically, Molson asserts, it

dramatizes several interrelated propositions whose continuing validity is taken for granted: making ethical choices, whether deliberate or not, is central in the lives of young people; actions do bear consequences not only for oneself but for society … ; maturity involves accepting responsibility for one's actions; and character bespeaks destiny. Ethical fantasy, moreover, is a symbolization of these propositions which does not usually endorse or reflect explicitly any particular religion, sect, or ideology.⁶

A Wizard of Earthsea was written as a single novel; apart from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, trilogies were not common in fantasy and science fiction. The loose ends of the first novel, Le Guin records, led her to write The Tombs of Atuan. Another year, more thought, and she published a third novel, The Farthest Shore.⁷ The coming-of-age story was so central to her use of fantasy that each of the other two novels also features a young protagonist who crosses the threshold into adulthood. But as her imagination kept returning to Earthsea, two additional subjects emerged. One was the complete life story of Ged, the only character who appears in all three novels. Embedded in his story was the other subject, artistry, “the creative experience, the creative process.”⁸

Le Guin first used Earthsea as a fictional setting in two short stories published in 1964, “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names,” and in an unpublished story written in 1965 or 1966.⁹ Earthsea is an archipelago populated by people, wizards, and dragons; it is a place where magic works. Although Earthsea is a kingdom, its islands are separated and different enough in resources and climate that each has a sense of independence and an awareness that some independence must be sacrificed to make a unified kingdom. Beyond this dynamic relationship between individual island and aggregate kingdom is the dynamism of natural forces suggested in the archipelago's name, Earthsea. The balance of the powers of the physical landscape is a manifestation of still another level of balanced forces, a cosmic balance which the people of Earthsea call the Equilibrium. They speak of the world as being “in balance”; the act of creation is described as a “balancing of the dark and the light”; and they look to the Archmage, the highest ranking wizard to “watch the Equilibrium.”¹⁰

A world, then, is not just the tangible elements of place, nature, humankind, culture; it is also a process, a creative relationship among all things that exist—physical and spiritual, natural and human. Le Guin's concept of a world exhibits ideas compatible with those of both twentieth-century anthropologists and twentieth-century physicists. Much of her father's early field work among Native Americans in California revealed stories that stress an intimate relationship between nature and human society. This relationship has also been expressed by Werner Heisenberg, who asserted that in modern physics “there appears above all the network of relationships between men and nature, of the connections through which we as physical beings are dependent parts of nature and at the same time, as human beings, make them the object of our thought and actions.”¹¹ This “network of relationships” is a metaphor Le Guin suggests in her choice of earth and sea as the world of her fantasy trilogy.

The principle of balanced powers, the recognition that every act affects self, society, world, and cosmos, is both a physical and a moral principle of Le Guin's fantasy world. The people of Earthsea honor the Equilibrium in their dances, songs, and rituals performed at the winter and summer solstices when the sun appears to change direction. They believe that their participation assists the movements of the cosmos and ensures the sun's return. The people with magic powers, from archmage to village witch, can directly influence the Equilibrium if they know the “true” name of that which they wish to change. Naming is the key to magic; to know the true name of anything is to know its essence and thus be able to control it. Humans honor the acquisition of names. When each girl or boy reaches puberty, part of the passage ceremony is being given a true name, which is told only to the most trusted friends. The creative power of naming in wizardry is analogous to the creative power of word use in the art of fiction.

A wizard like Earthsea's protagonist Ged spends his life learning the words and spells, which can affect the balance, and learning the consequences of acting. As Ged explains to the young prince Arren:

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends.¹²

During the thirty or forty years covered by the trilogy Earthsea is a world which is out of balance. The kingdom has not had a king for some eight hundred years; disrespect for the mages, for the principle of balanced powers, and for the kingdom itself has grown on certain islands. The new king, it has been prophesied, will be he “who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day.”¹³

The world Le Guin discovered in her imagination is appropriate for the three subjects she wished to explore. This is not to suggest that she methodically worked out the details of the world to fit the themes she wanted to discuss. Given her insistence that in order to create fiction the writer also journeys into the unconscious, one can say only that the world, characters, and themes are all interwoven. The concept of the Equilibrium dramatizes the significance of the individual's coming of age, for knowledge of the self and of the potential to do good or evil is essential for protecting the delicate balance of cosmos, kingdom, and community—hence three coming-of-age stories. To restore balance to the kingdom requires a lengthy tale of a great hero—hence Ged's story from youth to old age. The power by which magicians can affect the world is activated by words—hence the magician doubles as the creative and transforming artist.

COMING-OF-AGE STORIES

Readers have documented the parallels between Earthsea's coming-of-age process and myths, fairy tales, and Jungian psychology. Margaret P. Esmonde, for example, argued that the “master pattern” for the trilogy is the psychological journey to selfhood as discussed by Jung. The adolescent has a frightening confrontation with the dark side of the self (imaged as the shadow), followed by experiences which culminate in a recognition scene that signals the achievement of an integrated personality.¹⁴ Richard F. Patteson delineates the parallels between the plot structure of the trilogy and fairy tales (testing of the hero, conflict, and victory) and argues, following Bruno Bettelheim, that “fairy tales help children work out feelings of helplessness and insecurity; they aid them in discovering their identity and developing their character; they teach them that life's inevitable conflicts can be overcome.”¹⁵ In her essays Le Guin explained the similarities among myths and fairy tales on the basis of their common source, the collective unconscious. Many of the best-known students of myth and archetype have relied on the same body of myths and tales; therefore a critic must be careful to offer substantial evidence when privileging one over the others in interpreting Le Guin's work. All are helpful to some degree: Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, Mircea Eliade, Sir James Frazer.

Although Le Guin used Jung to help explain the power of fantasy, she has asserted on several occasions that she had not read Jung until after she had published the Earthsea trilogy.¹⁶ Readers who are interested in the stories Le Guin read should look at fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm and myths told in Lady Frazer's Leaves from the Golden Bough, Padraic Colum's The Children of Odin, and Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough.¹⁷

Each of the three novels presents the process of coming of age for a different character, in a different context, and with different results. In A Wizard of Earthsea Ged must learn to discipline his innate power of magic and understand the need for discipline. His psychological journey is mirrored in his physical journey from the heart of Earthsea out to its western and eastern edges. In The Tombs of Atuan the young priestess Tenar must break free of the role imposed on her by her society and join the larger human community of Earthsea. Her trapped self is mirrored in the walled-in religious center where she lives. In The Farthest Shore the young prince Arren must achieve the courage, self-reliance, and self-knowledge to become the first king of Earthsea in eight hundred years. Arren's psychological journey is also a physical journey; he sails from the heart of Earthsea west into the uncharted sea and then enters the land of the dead.

A Wizard of Earthsea is, of the three novels, the most complete account of coming of age as a journey into the self; its protagonist is one of the kingdom's greatest wizards. So private is this journey it is not included in the public celebration of his life, the Deed of Ged. In his journey from adolescence to adulthood Ged acquires psychological and moral knowledge about his innate power of wizardry. The journey is intensified when, motivated by pride, he uses his powers to call up a spirit from the dead; the resulting crisis affects Ged and the safety of those who associate with him. For the straight-forward narrative of Ged's life, from about age seven to nineteen, Le Guin uses an omniscient point of view. This allows her to use the opening and closing paragraphs of the novel to establish a context for Ged's maturation. The reader learns not only that Ged's quest is successful, but that he eventually achieves the highest mage's rank, Archmage of Earthsea. A Wizard of Earthsea is in the tradition of the apprenticeship novel (Bildungsroman), which traces the development of a young person's awareness of self, society, and nature. Particularly the novel is a male Bildungsroman, for Ged achieves a socially sanctioned and acclaimed role.

Like the early life of the mythic hero Ged's childhood includes revelations of his extraordinary power. Ged learns that he has the potential to control both himself and the external world. All he needs to learn, he believes, is the how—the words, runes, spells, and gestures. After successfully weaving a fog which hides and protects his village from the warriors of Kargad, however, Ged is unable to resume his daily life. Ogion restores Ged and names him: he identifies him as a “mageborn,” and at the ceremony of passage he gives Ged his true name.

As he begins his apprenticeship with Ogion, Ged exhibits the universal desire of the adolescent to control self and environment for self-gratification:

Ged had thought that as the prentice of a great mage he would enter at once into the mystery and mastery of power. He would understand the language of the beasts and the speech of the leaves of the forest, he thought, and sway the winds with his word, and learn to change himself into any shape he wished. Maybe he and his master would run together as stags, or fly to Re Albi over the mountain on the wings of eagles.¹⁸

Self-transformation means an external shape change; and Ged imagines that if he could change his shape, he would thereby be part of a world in which he is freer or more powerful or more admired. As his actions under Ogion's tutelage bear out, Ged has not recognized that the most significant self-development will come from knowing his internal self—his desires, his capability for evil and for good, his pride.

At the School for Wizards on Roke, Ged learns of the nature and ethics of power. He is warned by Master Hand:

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

(44)

Such warnings do not speak as loudly to Ged as his own inner voice of pride does; he thinks, “But surely a wizard … was powerful enough to do what he pleased, and balance the world as seemed best to him, and drive back darkness with his own light” (44).

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow” is a metaphor for the idea that opposites are actually complementary. To explain fantasy's frequent use of light and darkness as symbols of good and evil, Le Guin uses the yang-yin symbol, an ancient Chinese pictograph of the integration of opposites […]:

Evil, then, appears in the fairy tale not as something diametrically opposed to good, but as inextricably involved with it, as in the yang-yin symbol. Neither is greater than the other, nor can human reason and virtue separate one from the other and choose between them. The hero or heroine is the one who sees what is appropriate to be done, because he or she sees the whole, which is greater than either evil or good. Their heroism is, in fact, their certainty. They do not act by rules; they simply know the way to go.¹⁹

The yang-yin symbol is common to Taoism (the only religion Le Guin has admitted to) and other ancient Chinese philosophies. Yin and yang are the primal forces out of whose interaction arises the world of being. The symbol expresses the operations of Tao, the inexhaustible, self-creating principle of the universe. As the two halves appear to be in unstable balance, the symbol expresses the Taoist belief that all existence is in a state of change, flux, and transformation. But the symbol also suggests unity because both are held within the circle's boundary and in each is contained the germ of the other. All existence, from the cosmic to the personal, is seen as consisting of complementary opposites, such as being and becoming, duration and creation, essence and change, male and female.

In Western thought light and dark are often regarded as symbols of the dualistic, warring powers of good and evil. Such dualism suggests that the world consists of hierarchical relationships and that self and other (defined as that which is different; e.g., in culture, race, sex, religion) is always a relationship of competition and power.

Ged misuses his power in the duel with Jasper because he is more interested in demonstrating his personal power than he is in respecting the interrelationship of light and darkness. Not fully understanding what he sought nor the effect of his powers, Ged allowed his conscious mind to call up Elfarren while his unconscious mind simultaneously attracted the shadow. The shadow, a common image in fairy tales, is a literary archetype for that integral part of the self which the immature individual tries to deny. So important is one's confrontation with the shadow to the process of growing up that Jung, Le Guin notes in “The Child and the Shadow,” identified it as the guide for the journey into the self. The shadow is “all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used.”²⁰ The shadow symbolizes Ged's unrecognized pride, desire for power and control, and fear of his own death.

Although the shadow is Ged's personal adversary, its emergence and disappearance have far-reaching consequences. The remaining two-thirds of the novel tells the story of Ged's quest to avoid the shadow and then to find and name it. The episodes test his wizardry and initiate him into his socially approved role as one of Earthsea's greatest mages. Specifically, Ged's initiation includes knowledge of the trust and betrayal in human society; of evil and death; of the wisdom and power of nature; and of his own arrogance, denial, fear, and despair.

At Low Torning, for example, Ged's reentry into Earthsea society is fortunately eased by the boatmaker Pechvarry, who offers Ged friendship; Ged weaves some protective spells for Pechvarry's boats and Pechvarry gives Ged sailing lessons. The exchange of gifts is a manifestation of the trust that makes human community possible; Ged's participation in the act testifies to his growing awareness of his social role. Conversely, Ged witnesses the betrayal in human society when he finds the old couple on the desert island; he sees the consequences, this time in the political sphere, of misused power.

Ged learns of the reality of death and of evil in the world. When he gives in to the temptation to bring Pechvarry's son back from the land of the dead and when he faces the temptation of the Terrenon, Ged learns that neither death nor evil can be eliminated, but that he is free to choose how he deals with each. He chooses to stop denying death and chooses not to serve evil.

In rejecting the power and information which Terrenon and the dragon Yevaud offer Ged, he is choosing to protect the human community and the Equilibrium rather than enhance his own power. Le Guin's dragon, more Oriental than Occidental, seems to be an archetype for the forces of nature which are powerful and wise, yet neither malevolent nor benevolent toward humankind. Ged earns the title “dragonlord” not because he slays the dragon but because he converses with it; he accepts its coexistence with humankind. Likewise, he accepts the wisdom of the silent, less obtrusive elements of nature, such as the otak.

In his schooling with Ogion and on Roke, Ged's arrogance kept him from hearing the truth in his mentors' lessons. However, after experiencing despair, death, the temptations for increased power, Ged can finally listen to advice. Seeking home and Ogion, his mentor-father who named him, Ged is counseled to “turn clear round, and seek the very source, and that which lies before the source. There lies your hope of strength” (128). Ged learns that the most important knowledge is of one's being (“the source”) and one's beginning (“that which lies before the source”), the realities of his own psyche. The shadow acts out of the very power that Ged has refused to recognize in himself, primarily the desire to control.

In the recognition scene which is also the climax of the novel, Ged meets the shadow for the last time. They lay hold of each other and speak the same name, “Ged.” Light and shadow mingle, and there are no longer two beings but only one. Ged has acknowledged the dark side of his self, such characteristics as arrogance, ignorance, fear of death, the desire to control and to master. His friend and fellow sorcerer, Vetch, understands the significance of the act:

that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

(180-81)

Ged has acknowledged the presence of good and evil in himself and transformed himself psychologically to fit into the world. He has learned through experience what his mages and masters sought to teach him at Roke, that a wizard's power “must follow knowledge, and serve need” (44). He must act out of knowledge of the myriad powers and must act only when there is a clear need to assist the Equilibrium or the human community. To participate, not to change; to act appropriately, not to master—these become Ged's ethical principles.

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow” brings together the imagery of the novel and the lessons Ged has learned. He must proceed with caution, for uncertainty is perhaps the one certain thing he knows about the world; an increase in knowledge (light) is accompanied by the realization of further ignorance. Furthermore, every act (“to light”) has consequences for which the actor is responsible; all existence is interconnected; therefore, the individual must exercise freedom carefully. Apparent opposites such as light and dark are actually complementarities; knowledge of one leads to knowledge of the other, and one must learn to cope with their presence—life and death, good and evil, pleasure and pain. The central imagery is used in the five-line poem which begins the novel:

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.

Life is accompanied by mortality (“empty sky”); knowledge of one's vulnerability and brevity gives one the opportunity to act meaningfully.

The novel ends with the successful completion of Ged's journey into himself and his attainment of adulthood. Ged's journey, which can be traced on Le Guin's map of Earthsea in the novel, is in the pattern of an unclosed circle or spiral. The pattern, seen in other Le Guin novels, suggests that a journey into the self does not end with the return to the beginning place. The successful completion of the journey means the hero has been changed. Further, the unfinished circle, coming at the end of the novel, suggests that one's life is a series of changes or transformations. Thus, although the novel began as a single volume and has a sense of an ending, its image of the open circle suggests the possibility of further narratives.

In The Tombs of Atuan Le Guin examines the coming-of-age story under different circumstances. The protagonist is a young woman, Tenar, and she lives on the margin rather than at the center of Earthsea. Second, unlike Ged, whose development was a result of his own choices, Tenar has had an identity forced upon her just as surely as her black clothing has been woven and put upon her. Further, Tenar's acts and eventual quest are more public than Ged's. Ged's quest was private, a confrontation with the realities of his psyche. Tenar's decisions, however, have immediate sociopolitical consequences. A Wizard of Earthsea focused on the journey inward to knowledge of the self; The Tombs of Atuan focuses on the journey outward to knowledge of the relationship between self and human community.

Le Guin again uses the omniscient point of view for the narrative, but she lets A Wizard of Earthsea establish the context for the second novel. Ged appears as a character midway in the novel; the crisis is caused by the threat to the Equilibrium's balance by the Dark Powers and the threat to Earthsea's political harmony by the Kargad Empire.

Both of these powers are preventing Tenar's normal psychological development into selfhood and womanhood. This active opposition to Tenar's coming of age places Le Guin's novel in the tradition of the female Bildungsroman. Annis Pratt, in her study Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction, writes of this tradition:

The novel of development portrays a world in which the young woman hero is destined for disappointment. The vitality and hopefulness characterizing the adolescent hero's attitude toward her future here meet and conflict with the expectations and dictates of the surrounding society. Every element of her desired world—freedom to come and go, allegiance to nature, meaningful work, exercise of the intellect, and use of her own erotic capabilities—inevitably clashes with patriarchal norms.²¹

What the adolescent needs for her development into an adult is not what society needs her to have. The adolescent woman experiences, Pratt writes, a “collision between the hero's evolving self and society's imposed identity.”²²The Tombs of Atuan and other similar stories use images of suffocation, entrapment, and madness to portray the woman's plight. By contrast, the male Bildungsroman usually shows the adolescent achieving the characteristics of an adult which are those society needs him to have, as illustrated in A Wizard of Earthsea. By setting Tenar's struggle in the Kargad Empire, Le Guin can portray Tenar's rebellion against the patriarchal empire and then have her escape into a different society where she will have the freedom to define herself and to learn to choose and act responsibly.

The Kargad Empire (the four islands of Atuan, Karego-At, Atnini, and Hur-at-Hur) is a theocracy; its divine monarch, the Godking, claims to be the human representative of the Nameless Ones, sometimes called the Dark Powers. Older than the human race, they are the “powers of the dark, of ruin, of madness”;²³ their greatest stronghold is in the desert on the island of Atuan, where they dwell in a below-ground labyrinth. On this site are ancient Kargish temples to the Godkings and to the Dark Powers. Rejecting the concept of the Equilibrium, the Godkings' primary interests are keeping the empire together and keeping themselves in power; their society is militant and patriarchal. It is doubtful whether the kings and aristocracy even believe in the Dark Powers any longer; but the leaders need a symbol of their power base, particularly they need the One Priestess as a figurehead. The child chosen to become the Priestess is, then, their ultimate human sacrifice, symbolic of their devotion to destruction.

The Tombs of Atuan tells the story of this titular head of the Kargish religion. As part of her initiation she is given a new name (Arha, which means “the Eaten One”) and, as her special domain, a man-made underground labyrinth which has “no beginning, and no end … no center” (68). Tenar is trapped. Psychologically her development is arrested between being a child and becoming a woman. Politically she is trapped into carrying out the bidding of the monarch and his religious representative at Atuan, although ostensibly she holds the position of supreme power. Socially she is trapped in the identity of the One Priestess; she is “the new body of the Priestess who died” (10). Tenar's knowledge is as narrow as the dark labyrinth which she paces and memorizes. Like Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea she must “turn clear round,” see into herself, and so be forever changed. It is a mistake to say that Ged “saves” Tenar; she saves herself, but Ged functions as the mid-wife in her rebirth.

Le Guin once wrote that the subject of The Tombs of Atuan was sex, by which she apparently meant not only the physical maturity but also the recognition of and potential for intimate interaction with that which is different. Rollo May identified such maturation as eros; his definition is helpful in describing what Tenar must learn:

a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand … the drive toward union with significant other persons in our world in relation to whom we discover our own self-fulfillment. Eros is the yearning in man which leads him to dedicate himself to seeking arête, the noble and good life.²⁴

The Place mirrors female experience in Kargish society. Ostensibly protected by its walls and guards and eunuchs, the women are actually imprisoned. Ostensibly honored by their society, they are actually punished by being isolated, perhaps a reflection of the male fear of the female principle. Ostensibly powerful in their roles as religious leaders, they are actually functionaries who have internalized male standards and enforce them. The women have become their own prison guards, figuratively speaking. Kossil is the epitome of the woman who is imprisoned and imprisoning; she is cruel, hateful, unable to nurture anyone, obsessed with the desire for power.

The labyrinth symbolizes the women's imprisonment. Deep underground, changeless and dark, it is a closed circle; one door leads in but not out, and the other door leads in and then out into the Temple of the Nameless Ones. It is a tomb for the meaningful lives these women might have led and for the kind of society Kargad could have become. The labyrinth also symbolizes Arha, the dark side of Tenar's self; her passage into adulthood must involve a confrontation with the light just as traumatic as was Ged's confrontation with the dark. The extent of her darkness is evident in her thinking of the labyrinth as a “safe” place (57) and in her choosing to spend hours exploring it. She becomes a good priestess by choosing to repress rather than to explore her self. Although there are many hints that Arha is not completely satisfied with her life at the Place, it is not until she must deal with her first political prisoners that she begins the self-struggle toward rebirth.

When Tenar kills the three political prisoners, she has become like Kossil. However, her illness and nightmares suggest that her entire self was not “eaten” when she was consecrated as the One Priestess. Her respect for life finds expression through her unconscious. During her recovery a conversation with Penthe makes Tenar conscious of different knowledge of the world. Penthe rejects the divinity of the Atuan monarch, and although Arha is initially shocked by this “unfaith,” she begins to see the world differently: “she felt as if she had looked up and suddenly seen a whole new planet hanging huge and populous right outside the window, an entirely strange world, one in which the gods did not matter” (41).

The stimulus which leads to Arha's new sense of self, however, is Ged, who comes into the labyrinth searching for the missing half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. Ged's presence and his knowledge contradict what Arha knows about herself, the empire, other Earthsea people, and the powers of darkness. Ged is wholly different from her in sex, skin color, place of origin, religion. The symbol of his otherness is light; his wizardly staff lights the Undertomb and she sees, for the first time in her life, its beauty. To suddenly find light in the place of darkness, life instead of death, beauty instead of blackness, shocks her.

But her own actions also begin to shock her. To continue to keep Ged alive in the labyrinth is to defy all her religious teachings and to defy the evil powers she serves. To sacrifice him is to defy her respect for life and her need to know more about the world, about the other. This dilemma is a classic battle between the social persona and the real self. All that she needs and desires to become an adult woman clashes with what the god-kings need her to be—obedient and dependent.

Nearly one-third of the novel details Arha's dilemma as she painfully tries to turn clear around to encounter her repressed self or, just as painfully, tries to deny the new knowledge that Ged has brought to light. After Ged calls her by the name her parents gave her, she confronts her dual selves, and she dreams of struggling in a grave in which she has been buried alive. Such an image of suffocation is common in the female Bildungsroman, as is her approach to madness when she cries out alternately, “I am Tenar” (96), “Who am I?” (99), “I am not Tenar. I am not Arha” (104). At this turning point of her life Ged clarifies her choices: she must either sacrifice him and resume her identity as Arha, or she must “unlock the door” and become Tenar in the larger world of Earthsea.

At their last meeting in the Treasure Room they exchange gifts, a manifestation of the bond between them, that which makes possible human community. Its essential elements are nurturance, trust, cooperation, respect for the other. The symbol of the bond is the rejoined ring; it reveals the Bond-Rune needed by a king to bring unity to Earthsea. Tenar's rune, then, symbolizes unity; the ring, Tenar's self, the islands of Earthsea are all joined.

Together, with Ged's magery to hold off the Dark Powers and with Tenar's knowledge of the labyrinth, they escape Ged's physical grave and Tenar's psychological one. Tenar's release is imaged as a birth, and Ged assists her like a midwife, appealing to her sense of commitment and responsibility and to her true being to perform the act that is a natural step in her maturation. Wearing the bond-ring, she steps out. As they flee, the Nameless Ones level the Place in an earthquake; their anger destroys themselves, the same fate that had awaited Arha.

Tenar now begins the physical journey that represents her coming of age, and the novel ends with that journey barely started. She is so scarred by her belief in the powers of destruction and has so little knowledge of the outside world that she contemplates extreme acts of murder and martyrdom. That she would think of these as solutions indicates how strongly the powers of darkness hold her. Her desire to kill Ged is a desire to destroy the other which she momentarily blames for her own pain. Her desire for martyrdom is equally destructive. What she must accept, as Ged helps her to realize, is her guilt. She has done evil; she did not choose to serve the evil, but she can now choose not to. She learns that: “freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it” (141).

Just as Ged will always have the physical scars of his battle with his shadow, so Tenar will always have the psychological scars of her battle with external and internal evil. Ged's image of her vulnerability, consistent with the novel's light-and-dark imagery, is of a newly lit lamp which needs to “burn out of the wind awhile” (145). From Ged's suggestions at the end of this novel and brief references in The Farthest Shore the reader knows that Tenar went to Gont, to continue her healing under the care of Ogion, and that she became known and honored throughout Earthsea as the White Lady of Gont, Tenar of the Ring. Le Guin has thus provided a glimpse of a life which continues to be heroic. Having given birth to herself, destroyed the power base of the Kargad Empire and its official religion, and restored the ring of unity to Earthsea, Tenar chooses the independent life which will allow her the freedom to continue to define herself and to learn about the world.

Tenar is actually more of a revolutionist than either Ged or Arren. She has had to rebel against and break free of the society that nurtured her; Ged and Arren mature so as to fit into their home societies. Thus, “coming home,” the image on both the first and last pages of the novel, is problematic for her. Although the people of Havnor welcome her, she chooses a less populated place—the mountains of Gont with Ogion. She will have one of the most celebrated mages in Earthsea as her teacher, the only man who could cure Ged when he stayed too long in the shape of a hawk. Tenar, at fifteen, has been trapped too long in the shape of the One Priestess of the Nameless Ones. Further, she will be connected to the world of nature on Gont, to the cycles of death and rebirth in the seasons of the year.

Tenar's new knowledge that brings her across the threshold of adulthood is, like Ged's, knowledge of power. On the broadest level she has learned that the cosmos is not under the sole influence of the power of darkness but of the power of light, too. Ged's lesson on the nature of these balanced powers is clear: The Dark Powers

should not be denied nor forgotten, but neither should they be worshiped. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes. And where men worship these things and abase themselves before them, there evil breeds.

(106-07)

She also begins to put the power of the empire into perspective. In contrast to Earthsea, Kargad is small and destructive. On the personal level she learns that her own power is not that which she was given as the reincarnated priestess, but that which she acquired in choosing to leave the labyrinth. It is the power of dealing with the other, making choices for herself, and accepting the consequences of her choices. Power on all these levels, Tenar learns, is not only force, mastery, authority, and enslavement; power is also cooperation, trust, creating new relationships, acting within the network of the human and cosmic community. Because acknowledgment of the other is so crucial to Tenar's successful transition from adolescent to adult, she can be thought of as the spirit of human community; she has achieved bonding through both love and pain, gain and loss.

The coming-of-age story which Le Guin tells in The Farthest Shore is more like Ged's than Tenar's. Not only is the adolescent again a male, but the process is symbolized by a spiral journey out to distant islands, across open sea, and back to the Inner Lands. Furthermore, Arren is not trapped in an identity as Tenar was. However, like Tenar he has no wizardly powers; his power, he must discover, is the ability to lead and to govern.

The novel presents yet a third variation of the coming-of-age narrative; it is the story of the hero who is tested before he becomes king. The adolescent hero, Arren, born into the oldest royal house, has the potential to become the king for which the people of Earthsea have been waiting eight hundred years. The sequence of events is close to the paradigm of the testing of the mythic hero. For example, using the Greek stories Northrop Frye lists seven features of the paradigm: “Mysterious birth, oracular prophecies about the future contortions of the plot, foster parents, adventures which involve capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine.”²⁵ Le Guin includes all but the first and the last in her account of several months in Arren's life.

Of greater importance, however, are two other differences between this novel and the previous two. First, the consequences of the characters' actions are shown in the largest political context. In the novel the Dark Mage has broken the Equilibrium, is turning all of Earthsea into a wasteland, and has challenged the authority of both Roke and Havnor. Second, the success of this quest depends on the bond relationship of Ged and Arren. Arren and Ged begin and end a long journey together; and Arren moves from a naïve, unquestioned fealty to Ged, through despair and alienation from him, to a mature acceptance of himself and Ged. The final act of fealty is that which Ged swears to Arren, the long-awaited King of Earthsea.

Although Le Guin shows Arren's courage and heroism, as one would expect in a traditional account of the testing of the hero-king, she examines in detail the process by which these traits are acquired. To discuss the stages of Arren's transformation the language of anthropology is especially helpful. Noting analogues in literature and myth and history, Victor Turner has projected the three stages of the initiation rites in African tribes into all social situations of transition. These three stages are “separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation.” He briefly defines them as follows:

The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this … he is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social position in a system of such positions.²⁶

In the opening three chapters Le Guin shows that Arren and Ged are aware that they are considering a significant separation from homeland, known associates, and social roles. Arren offers to accompany Ged, and Ged chooses him as a “fit companion,” acknowledging that he “never needed help before.”²⁷ Arren's initial concern is that he will fail Ged. Upon leaving Roke in Ged's sailboat Lookfar, they begin “an unsafe journey to an unknown end” (28) by entering liminality, the second phase of the physical and psychological journey.

On their journey, cut off from associates and the need to function in their customary roles, Arren has only Ged as a representative of human community. The social bond, the most elemental feature which makes human society possible, is what Turner calls communitas, a “communion of equal individuals,”²⁸ a bonding outside of the structured sociopolitical system. Arren's coming of age is a journey toward both understanding the bond of trust and fealty with the other and understanding himself, for unless he “turns clear round” and looks at the very desires he tries to repress, he cannot have a mature, honest relationship with the other.

Arren tries to repress his desire for immortality. Like Tenar, however, his dreams and nightmares pressure him toward self-awareness. Just as Tenar dreamed of suffocating when she felt the pressure to be Arha, so Arren dreams of being chained or being wrapped in cobwebs when he feels the pressure to deny the dark side of himself. That Arren is tempted by the desire for immortality is first revealed in Hort Town. While Ged tries to stay with Hare in his trance, Arren suddenly breaks through to that which Hare seeks: “There, in the vast, dry darkness, there one stood beckoning. Come, he said, the tall lord of shadows. In his hand he held a tiny flame no larger than a pearl, held it out to Arren, offering life. Slowly Arren took one step toward him, following” (54-55).

This step is as much a step into adulthood as was the step Arren took to get into Ged's boat and begin the journey. No longer functioning as the dependent child to father-Ged, he steps out toward something he wants. It is a step toward that which he must admit and confront, the dark side of himself, his potential for evil—in this case his desire for something which violates nature.

When Arren represses thoughts of his desires, his dreams are affected. Although the dreams foreshadow his experience in the land of death, they also suggest Arren's powerlessness as long as he continues to deny his own potential for evil. The fear and repression are intensified by Sopli's presence; his fears of death and desire for immortality echo Arren's inmost thoughts. When Ged is wounded, Arren is so overcome with the presence and fear of death that he cannot think or act. Unwilling to examine himself, he blames Ged for all that has happened; despairing, he sees Ged with “no power left in him, no wizardry, no strength, not even youth, nothing” (108). Having denied his own potential for evil, he has essentially been fostering and believing in a false self; when it crumbles, there is nothing for Arren to get hold of to help him solve the problems. He is without hope.

Rescued from near death by the raft people, Arren recovers as he reestablishes the bond of trust and love with Ged and as he thinks critically about the social bond of the raft people. Arren confronts his dishonesty about himself and about his bond with the other when he courageously confesses to Ged the depths of his despair. The ensuing conversation is similar to those between Ogion and Ged when Ogion told Ged he must look into himself, and between Ged and Tenar when Ged told her what her name was. In all three psychological healing begins when the problem and solution can be named, when the admission of weakness becomes strength. The society of the raft people challenges the idea of a commitment to the larger society of Earthsea. In contrast to the chief's refusal to accept any responsibility for that larger society, Arren includes the raft people in his commitment, as indicated when he sings in the dawn and celebrates the creation of all of Earthsea.

In addition to this new knowledge about himself and society Arren also learns more about his participation in the Equilibrium. This interdependence of nature and humans is represented in the reciprocal relationship of dragon and man. In Earthsea, instead of suggesting the destructiveness of nature, Le Guin's dragon suggests the ancient, wise, enigmatic aspect of nature which will always be different from human life but affected by it.

Arren's experiences in the land of the dead strengthen his commitments. He encounters the dead who have lost themselves and the communitas bond with others. Void of reason, feeling, and the art of making anything, they are the shells of people once living; Arren has thus come to knowledge of the death he feared, and it no longer frightens him. Arren also discerns that Cob has lost his selfhood and communitas. Unable to experience love, he exists in isolation and alienation; existence has been reduced to the struggle for power. Symbolically, Cob's eye sockets are empty; he has sacrificed his self (“I”), his ability to see the power of light, his ability to see the natural environment and human community. Rejecting Cob's offer of immortality, Arren leads Ged to Cob so that Ged can restore the wholeness of the world.

Arren continues to be the leader as he chooses their way out to the shores of light. Crossing the mountains of pain symbolizes Arren's acceptance of pain and mortality as elements of the personal, social, and cosmic life he has come to understand. Their return to Roke on the back of the oldest dragon is dramatic, partly because this cooperation between human and nonhuman symbolizes the balance of apparent opposites that Ged and Arren have restored to Earthsea which makes possible the Equilibrium, the kingdom of Earthsea, and the integrated self. Ged kneels to Arren, acknowledging his acceptance of him as the next king of Earthsea and symbolizing the irrevocable changes which occurred for both of them in liminality.

LIFE STORY OF THE WIZARD

Each volume of the Earthsea trilogy tells a different story about the coming-of-age process. When viewed together, the completed trilogy provides Ged's life history, which is both a story of the epic hero who successfully deals with the forces that threaten the Equilibrium and the kingdom and a story of the epic hero as creative artist.

Each of the novels recounts a quest at a different stage in Ged's life. As a youth he hunted down the shadow which he released into the world; as a mature wizard he searched for the missing half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe whose Bond-Rune ensures the king's successful reign; and as an old man he tracked Cob, who opened a hole in the world and returned from the dead. Scholars have applied a number of different structures to his life story. Following Joseph Campbell's analysis of the archetypal journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Virginia White sees a “pattern of departure, initiation, and return” in the three quests. Following Jung's analysis of the psychological journey, Margaret P. Esmonde identifies the story as “a progression of an ego from uncertainty and self-doubt to assurance and fulfillment.” Charlotte Spivack summarizes the life as being the “paradigmatic career of the mythic hero … ; the divine signs of talent … [in] childhood, … trial and quest, periods of meditation and withdrawal, symbolic death and journey to the underworld, and, finally, rebirth and apotheosis.”²⁹

Le Guin has emphasized the psychological qualities of the story in her selection of the key events of Ged's life to narrate. The reader learns, for example, that Ged's most famous deeds are not featured in the three novels. Instead of focusing on the public deeds, the deeds that ensured his sociopolitical role in external society, Le Guin examines the deeds which show Ged's inner struggles and psychological growth. After all, as Ged tells Arren in The Farthest Shore, heroes are “the ones who seek to be themselves” (135).

As the life story of a wizard, the trilogy is also a story of the efficacy of art. In “Dreams Must Explain Themselves,” Le Guin discusses this meaning:

I said that to know the true name is to know the thing, for me, and for the wizards. This implies a good deal about the “meaning” of the trilogy, and about me. The trilogy is, in one aspect, about the artist. The artist as magician. The Trickster. Prospero. That is the only truly allegorical aspect it has of which I am conscious. … Wizardry is artistry. The trilogy is then, in this sense, about art, the creative experience, the creative process. There is always this circularity in fantasy. The snake devours its tail. Dreams must explain themselves.³⁰

Ged should not be regarded as a disguised Le Guin; he is more like a muse for her, a model for the artist to aspire to. Le Guin has called him her guide in Earthsea. The magic of Earthsea, sometimes called “artmagic,” depends, as does fiction, on the user's genius and knowledge of language. Like the work of art, the magic transforms reality. Patricia Dooley summarized the correspondences among magic, art, and the world: “Magic becomes a sophisticated metaphor for the ability of art to influence the experiential world through the insubstantial medium of the imagination.”³¹ The magician, trickster, and Prospero are all creator-destroyers who shock and delight and edify.

Just as the life of the epic hero is developed in stages from youth to old age, so the trilogy also depicts the life of the artist-wizard progressively from youth to maturity. In A Wizard of Earthsea Ged becomes aware of his innate power and learns from his masters, as an artist learns from mentors, how to discipline it. Discipline of the imagination, Le Guin has written, “does not mean to repress it, but to train it—to encourage it to grow, and act, and be fruitful.”³² Like Ged, the artist must have a fully developed knowledge of the self and will, in fact, find the journey into the self a creative connection between the conscious and the collective unconscious. Le Guin writes: “To reach the others, the artist goes into himself. Using reason, he deliberately enters the irrational. The farther he goes into himself, the closer he comes to the other.”³³ Ged learns to resist the easy roads to knowledge and power, the route of a Faustus or a formula novelist who barters away power or talent.

The artist-wizard, once sure of his talent, begins a lifelong search for names, the “right words,” by which he exercises his power. “For me,” Le Guin wrote, “as for the wizards, to know the name of an island or a character is to know the island or the person. Usually the name comes of itself, but sometimes one must be very careful: as I was with the protagonist, whose true name is Ged.”³⁴ In general, the power of language for the writer comes from the idea that if a thing can be named (be it an object, a theory, a tool, a psychological trait), then its existence can be dealt with, can be made a part of the reader's experience. The threat of the dragons of Pendor is solved when Ged can call Yevaud by its name; the threat of the shadow, of all that Ged fears and represses, is absolved into an acknowledged part of himself when he can name it, Ged. More specifically, in Le Guin's philosophy of life, the power of naming also lies in its ability to honor the thing which is being named. As T. A. Shippey has argued, Le Guin's emphasis on the word “is bound up with an attitude of respect for all parts of creation (even rocks), and a wary reluctance to operate on any of them without a total awareness of their distinct and individual nature.”³⁵ Shippey asserts that Le Guin thus critiques the modern attitudes of materialism and industrialization, which are anthropocentric. Shippey states that Le Guin puts the word above the thing, but it is more accurate to say that Le Guin regards them as equal.

A Wizard of Earthsea can be regarded as depicting the artist in apprenticeship, and The Tombs of Atuan depicts the mature artist confronting a hostile audience and gradually transforming that person's perception of reality. What Ged tells Tenar about the world outside the Place and the Kargad Empire is, to her, fiction in the sense that it is a very different world and one which she has never experienced. Her hostility toward his art is based on her false education and on fear. She is a disbeliever and sneers at his art as mere illusion. Le Guin wrote of such a hostile audience in “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” where she identified the “hardworking, over-thirty American male” in business as one who dismisses fiction, especially fantasy, because he has learned to repress his imagination.³⁶ Ged assists Tenar by showing her beauty, joy, and light; he assists her by the words which reveal a larger, more humane world and by the word for her other self, Tenar.

The Farthest Shore depicts the artist toward the end of his life, assisting an entire country in dealing with a crisis of language. His action for the prince, the king-born, is the same as that for Tenar; he gives assistance, offers stories of another kind of existence and a different system of values, and then allows the young prince to choose. All of Earthsea is threatened by the disbelief in artmagic; wizards are forgetting the true names of things and are losing their own true names, dragons lose the power of speech. The artist in his old age is the only one who can reestablish balance because, as Ged says of himself, “I desire nothing beyond my art” (133). He is not vulnerable to temptation.

Ged's belief that there is no escape from death is carried to its logical extension when he retires at the end of The Farthest Shore. Powerful as artistry is, it cannot provide a permanent escape to another world. Artist and reader alike must also deal with the consensus reality which surrounds them and with the limits of time and power. No artist's power is permanent, and one who is tempted to believe that it is goes the way of Cob or Faustus. No artist's role as aesthetic and moral guide for the people is permanent. An artist, Le Guin suggests in this novel, may uphold the standards when the ruling powers are deficient, but such is not the permanent role of the artist. Le Guin is conscious of her own lapses into didacticism, i.e., when the message overpowers the story, when the artist begins “to preach” rather than allowing people the freedom they need to be transformed.³⁷ So the trilogy ends with news of the coronation of Arren as King of Earthsea, and the reader's attention is focused on the social realm. Ged retires, satisfied and fulfilled. Given the difficulty with which he has learned the lesson of turning clear around, of always seeking to connect with his roots in his actions, the ending is—like all of his quest journeys—an open circle. He returns to his beginning, to Roke and to the life of contemplation which he had rejected as a young man. But he returns as a changed man. The creative process has also transformed the artist.

Notes

1. Le Guin, “Dreams Must Explain Themselves,” The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Wood (New York: Putnam's, 1979) 55.

2. Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow,” Language of the Night 65.

3. “The Child and the Shadow” 63.

4. “The Child and the Shadow” 65.

5. “The Child and the Shadow” 70.

6. Francis J. Molson, “The Earthsea Trilogy: Ethical Fantasy for Children,” Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979), 130.

7. Nicholas O'Connell, “Ursula K. Le Guin,” At the Field's End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers (Seattle: Madrona, 1987) 28.

8. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” 53.

9. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” 50.

10. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (New York: Bantam, 1975) 128, 15.

11. Werner Heisenberg, “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics,” The Discontinuous Universe, ed. Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord (New York: Basic Books, 1972) 134.

12. The Farthest Shore 66.

13. The Farthest Shore 17.

14. Margaret P. Esmonde, “The Master Pattern: The Psychological Journey in the Earthsea Trilogy,” Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1979) 15-35, 225.

15. Richard F. Patteson, “Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy: The Psychology of Fantasy,” The Scope of the Fantastic, ed. Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985) 240.

16. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue,” Science-Fiction Studies 3 (1976): 45. See also Thomas J. Remington and Robert Galbreath, “Lagniappe: An Informal Dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin,” Selected Proceedings of the 1978 Science Fiction Research Association National Conference (Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa, 1979) 270-71.

17. Le Guin, “A Citizen of Mondath,” Language of the Night 25; Remington and Galbreath 271.

18. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (New York: Bantam, 1975) 16. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.

19. “The Child and the Shadow” 66-67. Two of Le Guin's own sources on Taoism are Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), and Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).

20. “The Child and the Shadow” 64.

21. Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981) 29.

22. Pratt 29.

23. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan (New York: Bantam, 1975) 107. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.

24. Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969) 73-74; quoted Pratt 74.

25. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 4.

26. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969) 94-95.

27. The Farthest Shore 25. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.

28. Turner 96.

29. Virginia White, “Bright the Hawk's Flight: The Journey of the Hero in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy,” Ball State University Forum 20 (1979) 34; Esmonde 16; Charlotte Spivack, Ursula K. Le Guin (Boston: Twayne, 1984) 42.

30. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” 53.

31. Patricia Dooley, “Magic and Art in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy,” Children's Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press) 8: 103.

32. Le Guin, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” Language of the Night 41.

33. Le Guin, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” Language of the Night 78.

34. “Dreams Must Explain Themselves” 52.

35. T. A. Shippey, “The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words: Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy,” Mosaic 10 (1977): 152.

36. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” 40.

37. “Introduction to The Word for World Is Forest,” Language of the Night 151.