Song

[nightdog_barks]

Creation of Éa

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.

- Ursula K. LeGuin, from A Wizard of Earthsea

Someone posted this somewhere else tonight. I read A Wizard of Earthsea when I was about ten years old, in 1968, and it was among the number of books that I can count on one hand that I remember from that era (Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is another).

And ... that's it.

Comments

[silverjackal]

I love A Wizard of Earthsea. It was one of the first books where I really grasped the lyrical nature of the writing in English, and the theme is very much the sort of thing I enjoy. It is remarkable how some authors can build a world, and tell just one tale from it, but the world itself shows vast and clear in the background. Tolkien is this way too, but to me LeGuin writes even more beautifully, and I suppose it says something either about me or about the book that I was able to enjoy it so much even though I was technically too old for the story when I first read it.

[nightdog_barks]

I read Wizard of Earthsea when I was a kid, probably when I was about ten, and it fed my imagination in a way nothing else had before. I must have drawn a ton of maps of imaginary lands and made up names of people and places.

It was almost like ... I'd been waiting for this book. Like it was a key into a perfect Earthsea-shaped slot that I didn't even know was there. :D

I didn't find anything else like it until I was in college, when I read Tolkien.

Some of this is copied from my LJ, but only because it's all true. *g*

[silverjackal]

For me it's that the book rang *true*. The story was real, it actually happened, only we aren't in Earthsea ourselves. It is an astonishing work that accomplishes this -- many books are very enjoyable and satisfying and even great reads-of-a-lifetime but do not manage it. For that matter the sequels did not have the same quality for me as much as I enjoyed them.

Have you read Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master Trilogy? It is not as masterful as either LeGuin or Tolkien but has a very similar quality. I'm currently in the midst of rereading it, and enjoying it enormously.

In spring, three things came invariably to the house of the King of An: the year's first shipment of Herun wine, the lords of the Three Portions for the spring council, and an argument.

So begins the second book Heir of Sea and Fire, and for me it has echoes of The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast sea, is a land famous for its wizards. Hooked, completely hooked! :D It is a less mature work than either Tolkien or LeGuin, and for me the main conflict is that I care less about the main character (and his angst) than I do about the side characters. I would know much, much more about them than is ever touched on, much to my regret. I'm still enjoying it, though.

[nightdog_barks]

I have not read any Patricia McKillip! But I think I will now, because I like that quote a lot. :D

[silverjackal]

She has a gift for lyrical writing. I was also puzzling over some small details in the books this afternoon when I thought of it. Many elements are drawn from Welsh mythology (specifically the Mabinogion) and many of the names are puns or hints -- the Three Portions of An, for example, contain many restless dead. They are Hel, Anuin, and Aum, complete with the requisite magical prophetic swine. Hel is obvious, and Anuin sounds the same as Annwn, but I don't know which underworld/otherworld Aum could be drawn from. The lord of Hel is named Raith (Wraith)... and so on and so forth. If one doesn't like to play hunt-the-allusion the stories are still excellent in their own right, but I like that sort of thing.