English 240 - Literature for Younger Readers
Dr. Wally Hastings - Northern State University

Ursula K. LeGuin
(1929- )

Life:
       LeGuin was born October 21, 1929, the fourth child and only daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a noted anthropologist, and Theodora Kroeber, a psychologist and writer who collected Native American folktales and wrote the biography of a primitive individual plunged into the modern world.  The Kroebers had one son together and two sons by Theodora’s first marriage, in addition to Ursula.
      LeGuin was influenced by her childhood exposure to anthropological ideas.  She became acquainted with many important anthropologists in her parents’ circle.  Part of her childhood reading included Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, first in a children’s adaptation and then, from her father’s library, in the original.  Other significant childhood influences included Norse mythology and the pulp science fiction of the 1940s; at some point, she also discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, which provided her first recognition that “people were still creating myths.”
      She attended Radcliffe (BA 1951), and graduate school at Columbia, receiving an MA in French and Italian Renaissance literature in 1952.  LeGuin then began working on a Ph.D. but met her husband (Charles A. LeGuin) on a trip to France in 1953 and married him that December.  Charles took a Ph.D. in history and eventually (1959) they settled in Oregon, where he taught at Portland State University.
      LeGuin had begun writing as a child, and since 1951 had been submitting stories, poems, and novels for publication, with little success.  Many of the tales fit no genre known then, although they were finally published 20 years later in her Orsinian Tales .  In 1960, two significant events occurred: her father died, and she rediscovered science fiction, which finally gave her a way into print.  Her first sale came at age 32, a short story which appeared in Fantastic.  In 1964 she published the first stories set in Earthsea, and in 1966 published the first Hainish novels.
      LeGuin’s most intensive creative period came between 1966 and 1979.  During this period, she wrote 10 novels, along with numerous short stories, poems, and essays, including most of her best-known work and award winners.
      In 1967, she was asked by a book editor to write “a book for older children,” which was published in 1968 as A Wizard of Earthsea. The request for an adolescent novel led LeGuin to choose both the particular theme, coming-of-age, and the genre, fantasy, of A Wizard of Earthsea: “Fantasy is the medium best suited to a description of that journey [i.e., the journey “into the self”], 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.”  A Wizard of Earthsea won the 1969 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.
      The next year, she published Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best SF novel of the year.  Her second Earthsea novel, The Tombs of Atuan, came out in 1971 and received a Newbery Honor citation. The Farthest Shore won the National Book Award for children’s literature in 1972.  In 1974, she won Nebula and Hugo for The Dispossessed – the first writer to twice win both awards for the best novel of the year.

A Wizard of Earthsea:

A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of the making of a mage, the education and testing of a young man born with the power to work wonders but lacking the knowledge to bring this power to fruition and to control its destructive potential. (Scholes 37)
The theme of “Equilibrium”: A Wizard of Earthsea was written during the 1960s, when an increased awareness of ecological issues and the fragility of the balance of nature was beginning to emerge.  It is hard not to see much of the mages’ wisdom as concerned with exactly such issues, as when the Master Summoner explains to them that
      . . . the true wizard uses such spells [to control wind and water] only at need, since to summon up such earthly forces is to change the earth of which they are a part.  “Rain on Roke may be drouth in Osskil,” he said, “and a calm in the East Reach may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are about.” (54)
Similarly, the Master Hand tells his pupils, “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.” (44)
        Bittner says that all of LeGuin’s writing concerns characters needing to understand “the web of relationships in which they are a strand”; without such understanding, they produce unwanted consequences, and Cummins notes that the name “Earthsea” itself suggests the balance between land and sea in its people’s lives, though we might note that most of the people we encounter there live primarily on one or the other.
        The literary critic Robert Scholes makes the case for environmental awareness as the primary principle on which Earthsea’s belief system rests:
   Ursula LeGuin works not with a theology but with an ecology, a cosmology, a reverence for the universe as a self-regulating structure.  This seems to me more relevant to our needs than [C.S.] Lewis, but not simply because it is a more modern view – rather because it is a deeper view, closer to the great pre-Christian mythologies of this world and also closer to what three centuries of science have been able to discover about the nature of the universe. (37)
The great Taoist symbol of this equilibrium is the yin-yang, in which light and dark are inextricably mixed.  So, too, in Earthsea, the oldest song of all, the creation song of Ea, says, “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life. . .” The principle of equilibrium requires of all things that their opposite also be present.  Ged’s true understanding of this principle comes only when he realizes that too defeat the shadow, he must acknowledge it as part of himself and embrace it.

The theme of “coming-of-age”: LeGuin herself has said that A Wizard of Earthsea was written as an account of the wizard’s coming of age, and Elizabeth Cummins calls it the “most complete” account of this process in the trilogy. The novel’s adventure episodes initiate Ged into “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” (Cummins 35).  In this pattern, we have an archetypal quest, a journey in search of something which inevitably is the search for the self.
        Even before he begins his life as a wizard, Ged has reason to have learned caution, in the release of the shadow which almost kills him and does destroy the current archmage.  His first job as a wizard further teaches him the limits of power (e.g., he is unable to save Pechevarry’s son, although he wants to very much, and for all the right reasons) and the way to behave, to focus on the job at hand.  Lasseter argues that attempting to completely efface oneself, as Ged does in going to Low Torning, is just as much hubris as the boastful pride that led him to unleash the shadow.  Ged must be stirred to the proper use of his skill, as he goes to defeat the dragons and insure the safety of his fishermen before departing on his own quest, first to escape and then to defeat the dragon.
        Encountering the dragons, he is tempted to serve his own interests rather than those of the people he is supposed to protect; the dragon will tell him the true name of the shadow, thus giving Ged the power of mastery.  But to accept the offer would be to give up his leverage to force the dragon to remain on Pendor and leave the fishermen alone; so Ged passes on temptation.  He is tempted again, this time by power, at Osskil, where he is told that the stone of Terrenon has been waiting for him, the one destined to wield its power.  Again, he survives temptation, but again must flee, this time in the form of a hawk.
        After returning to Ogion, Ged’s quest changes – instead of running away from the shadow, now he is seeking to confront it.  There are fewer temptations in this portion of the quest, but several opportunities for him to show he has learned compassion for others, a quality that was lacking in the headstrong young apprentice.

The shadow:  The shadow is a powerful archetypal symbol – a representation of those parts of the individual’s personality or soul that he tries to repress.  Thus, the shadow has been a frequent figure in literature dealing with the (symbolic) progress of the soul, as well as with issues of good and evil – issues that Slusser sees as the “central theme” of the Earthsea books: “The shadow is formed of his own acts and choices, and in accepting it, he accepts responsibility for them.  For he, not Jasper or any other man or force, must bear the blame for what he does.” (Slusser 75)
        What is the shadow – is it death itself, or the fear of death?  In his battle with the shadow, Ged doesn’t either win or lose, but rather by recognizing it by his own name, he becomes whole.

SOURCES: James W. Bittner, Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. LeGuin,  Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984; Elizabeth Cummins, Understanding Ursula K. LeGuin,  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990; Joe DeBolt, “A LeGuin Biography,” in Joe DeBolt, Ed., Ursula K. LeGuin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979, 13-28; Rollin A. Lasseter, “Four Letters about LeGuin,” in DeBolt, 89-114; Robert Scholes, “The Good Witch of the West,” in Harold Bloom, Ed., Ursula K. LeGuin, New York: Chelsea House, 1986, 35-45; George E. Slusser, “The Earthsea Trilogy,”  In Bloom,  71-83.

A. Waller Hastings
Professor of English
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401

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