Timothy S. Miller

Written not so long after "Tolkien mania" first gripped the United States in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin's novel A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) has long been recognized as a classic of the fantasy genre, and the series of Earthsea books that followed on it over the next several decades earned its author both considerable sales and critical accolades. This new introduction to the text will closely contextualize the original novel in relation to its heady decade of composition and publication — a momentous time for genre publishing — and also survey the half century and more of scholarship on Earthsea, which has shifted in direction and emphasis many times over the decades, just as surely as Le Guin frequently adjusted her own sails when composing later works set in the fantasy world. Above all, this book positions A Wizard of Earthsea as perhaps an "old text" that nevertheless belongs in a "new canon," a key novel in the author's career and the genre in which it participates, and one that at once looks back to Tolkien and his own antecedents in masculinist early fantasy; looks forward to Le Guin's own continuing feminist and progressive education; and anticipates and indeed helped to shape young adult literature in its contemporary form.

A Critical Companion

Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea"

loisesya

‘De Terrenon kent ieders geboorte en ieders dood, kent alle wezens voor en na hun dood, kent de ongeborenen en de onsterfelijken, de wereld van het licht en die van het duister; hij zal u die naam noemen.’

‘Slechts in zwijgen het woord, slechts in duisternis licht, slechts in sterven het leven: scherp staat de vlucht van de havik tegen de lege hemel.’ 

Phoemela Ballaran

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed, then you may learn its true name, knowing its being: which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?” Ogion went on a half mile or so, and said at last, “To hear, one must be silent.”

“…Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise.Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”

Bilge Ince

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!’

And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do …’

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.

‘I have no strength against the thing,’ Ged answered. Ogion shook his head but said no more for a time. At length, ‘Strange,’ he said: ‘You had strength enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had strength enough to stand up to a dragon.’ ‘It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength,’ Ged replied,

daniela

they are a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea" quotes

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