What Makes Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle Series a Great Fantasy Read
I only recently discovered Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle series, the first of which was written in 1968. I read The Wizard of Earthsea quickly, since it was a beautifully written book, and I was immediately hooked on the story of Ged, who is a wizard chasing a darkness he unleashed when he was a foolhardy boy with only a limited knowledge of magic. So last month I picked up the second in the series, The Tombs of Atuan, which was written in 1970.
The Tombs of Atuan follows the story of Tenar, a young girl who is taken from her family because she is chosen to become high priestess to the nameless Powers of the Earth. She loses her family, her possessions, her name, becoming, now, Arha. She lives alone in a drafty house near the dark tombs, where no light is allowed. She forgets beauty and hope and identify for the sake of serving the Powers of Earth.
But then her story collides with the wizard Ged, who has entered the labyrinth of her tombs to steal its greatest treasure—the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. He introduces her to light and magic and urges her to reach for freedom.
This story was not only a fantastic, spell-binding tale, but it was also one of the most beautifully written fantasy stories. I knew it would be, because A Wizard of Earthsea was much the same.
Take this passage, for example:
“Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat.”
LeGuin has such a poetic way of describing things. Here, the image of boredom rising like terror is something we’ve felt but never really thought about. We are afraid we will always be bored. Tenar is afraid she will always be bored. And that fear grabs her by the throat. It’s a great image.
Imagery is something that comes easily for LeGuin in The Tombs of Atuan. She showcases her skill in passages like:
“‘Here we must be beneath the Stones,’ the girl said, whispering, and her whisper ran out into the hollow blackness and frayed into threads of sound as fine as spiderweb that clung to the hearing for a long time.”
The idea that it’s a spiderweb of sound, and that it clings to the ear—I think of the way it feels to walk through a spiderweb you didn’t see, and how you can’t really shake it off. It’s a fantastic image, like the sound was something that could not be shaken off but remained, like a ghost, like a presence.
“Touch was one’s whole guidance; one could not see the way, but held it in one’s hands.”
No light is allowed in the tombs Tenar must guard. So she moves through them by touch. I loved the way LeGuin spelled it out here—that one held the way in one’s hands, as if there is a deeper meaning to this holding than what Tenar will at first understand. When one cannot see the way with one’s eyes, one can be assured the hands hold it. It’s an interesting life-commentary and also a great image for a place that is so dark there is no seeing at all.
LeGuin is also a master of description. When she is describing the place where Tenar and the other girls live, she says this:
“They learned how to spin and weave the wool of their blocks, and how to plant and harvest and prepare the food they always ate: lentils, buckwheat ground to a coarse meal for porridge or a fine flour for unleavened bread, onions, cabbages, goat-cheese, apples, and honey.
“The best thing that could happen was to be allowed to go fishing in the murky green river that flowed through the desert a half mile northeast of the Place; to take along an apple or a cold buckwheat bannock for lunch and sit all day in the dry sunlight among the reeds, watching the slow green water run and the cloud-shadows change closely on the mountains.”
Though this world is entirely imagined by LeGuin, she describes it so that her reader can fully imagine it. We know what the girls eat and how they spend their time and what the landscape looks like and what kinds of things they enjoy doing. It is a perfect picture of a day in the life of a young priestess. We see the color and the sunlight and the way shadows change over the mountains.
This descriptive passage took up a space in my imagination in a beautifully haunting way:
“The barren land was just past its flowering. All the small desert blossoms, yellow and rose and white, low-growing and quick-flowering, were going to seed, scattering tiny plumes and parasols of ash white on the wind, dropping their hooked, ingenious burrs. The ground under the apple trees of the orchard was a drift of bruised white and pink. The branches were green, the only green trees within miles of the Place. Everything else, from horizon to horizon, was a dully, tawny, desert color, except that the mountains had a silvery bluish tinge…”
We get the idea that the place where Tenar and the other girls stay is a bit barren, but out, beyond the mountains, there is the hope of life. It is symbolic of what is to come.
A characteristic of LeGuin’s writing is also the symbolic life commentary she often throws in as the thoughts or words of her characters. Here Tenar is reflecting on the world:
“She had not realized how very different people were, how differently they saw life. 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 gods did not matter.”
She is a little girl, and she is growing up, understanding what it really means to live in a world that is big and different and wide and largely unknown. It is a whole new world for her.
“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”
Tenar is just discovering this world, having been kept in a place without light and human interaction beyond the other girls chosen as priestesses. Hers is a profound statement about a child’s passage into the adult world. It is much greater and stranger than anything we will ever do.
LeGuin is both skillful in her story telling and creative in her word choice, and the combination is a style that is unmatched in its poetic resonance. Here, Tenar is finding her way out of the labyrinth:
“There was a weariness in that tracing of the vast, meaningless web of ways; the legs got tired and the mind got bored, forever reckoning up the turnings and the passages behind and to come.”
It feels almost like that is a commentary on life, because there are twists and turnings and passages, and sometimes our legs get tired and the mind gets bored at the endless traveling. I love the poetic flow of “web of ways,” and the image it strikes up of a web, one thing leading to another, is simply brilliant. It is such a maze that the mind gets bored, because the mind must know it backward and forward. Those passages are endless, and they are sticky and they are difficult.
“Echoes died away, quarreling, down the corridor behind her.”
This image of echoes quarreling with one another is fantastic. One can imagine what it would sound like in a cave, with those echoes disappearing into the distances as if an argument were chasing the wind.
“The dead silence closed in upon her whisper, ate it.”
Sometimes there is a silence that can be louder than sound, and I love this image of a silence eating a whisper.
Some of the images invoked feeling of nostalgia when reading, reminding me of the days of my youth when I would lie on grass and stare up at the sky:
“Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world.”
Others used description in metaphorical terms that were too lovely to loose from memory:
“Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did not understand.”
“The sun beat in her eyes like a hammer of gold.”
And still others haunted me with their beauty and truth:
“He did not move. He was still as the rocks themselves. Stillness spread out from him, like rings from a stone dropped in water. His silence became not absence of speech, but a thing in itself, like the silence of the desert.”
“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 toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
Ultimately, this is a story about dark and light, about a girl who wakes up to a world she has never known existed, of a passage into hope and joy and freedom.
“You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light,” Ged tells Tenar as they escape from the tombs.”
Simply beautiful.
