The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

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The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition Page 130

by Ursula K. Le Guin


  Oh, they say, what a shame. Le Guin has politicized her delightful fantasy world. Earthsea will never be the same.

  I’ll say it won’t. The politics were there all along—the hidden politics of the hero-tale, the spell you don’t know you’re living under till you cast it off. At this conference, Jan Mark made the very simple and profound statement that the world apart of a fantasy inevitably refers back to this world. All the moral weight of it is real weight. The politics of fairyland are ours.

  With her wild eye, Myra sees the wilderness as well as the human realm as her true home. Therru, blinded, sees with the eye of the spirit as well as the eye of the flesh. Where does she see her home?

  For a long time, we’ve been seeing with only one eye. We’ve blinded the woman’s eye, said it doesn’t see anything worth seeing, said all it can see is kids and cooking, said it’s weak, short-sighted, said it’s wicked, the evil eye. A woman’s gaze is a fearful thing. It looks at a man, and he swells up “twice his natural size,” and thinks he did it all himself. But then again, the woman’s eye looks at a hero, and he shrinks. He shrinks right down to human size, man size, a fellow being, a brother, a lover, a father, a husband, a son. The woman looks at a dragon and the dragon looks right back. The free woman and the wild thing look at each other, and neither one wants to tame the other or own the other. Their eyes meet, they say each other’s name.

  I understand the mythology of Tehanu in this way: the child irreparably wronged, whose human inheritance has been taken from her—so many children in our world, all over our world now—that child is our guide.

  The dragon is the stranger, the Other, the not-human: a wild spirit, dangerous, winged, which escapes and destroys the artificial order of oppression. The dragon is the familiar also—our own imagining, a speaking spirit, wise, winged, which imagines a new order of freedom.

  The child who is our care, the child we have betrayed, is our guide. She leads us to the dragon. She is the dragon.

  While I was writing Tehanu, I didn’t know where the story was going. I held on, held my breath, closed both eyes, sure I was falling. But wings upheld me, and when I dared look, I saw a new world, or maybe only gulfs of sunlit air. The book insisted that it be written outdoors, in the sunlight and the open air. When autumn came and it wasn’t done, still it would be written out of doors, so I sat in a coat and scarf, and the rain dripped off the verandah roof, and I flew. If some of the wild freedom of that flight is in the book, that’s enough; that’s how I wanted, as an old woman, to leave my beloved islands of Earthsea. I didn’t want to leave Ged and Tenar and their dragon-child safe. I wanted to leave them free.

  ARTIST’S NOTE

  I want to thank Ursula for graciously allowing me to slip into her memories and to delve there in the treasure trove of details of how she built and populated her world of Earthsea. I could not have drawn these pictures without those insights and her guidance. We shared four splendid years of collaboration and a growing friendship making this book. I already miss her very much.

  —Charles Vess, 2018

  Abingdon, Virginia

  ALSO BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

  NOVELS

  A Wizard of Earthsea

  The Tombs of Atuan

  The Farthest Shore

  Tehanu

  Tales from Earthsea

  The Other Wind

  NOVELS OF THE EKUMEN

  Worlds of Exile and Illusion: City of Illusions, Planet of Exile, and Rocannon’s World

  The Left Hand of Darkness

  The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

  The Word for World Is Forest

  The Telling

  THE ANNALS OF THE WESTERN SHORE

  Powers

  Voices

  Gifts

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Lathe of Heaven

  Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

  Malafrena

  The Beginning Place

  The Eye of Heron

  Always Coming Home

  Lavinia

  The Complete Orsinia: Malafrena/Stories and Songs

  POETRY

  Wild Angels

  Hard Words and Other Poems

  Wild Oats and Fireweed

  POETRY

  Blue Moon over Thurman Street

  Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems

  Sixty Odd

  Incredible Good Fortune

  Finding My Elegy

  Late in the Day

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

  Orsinian Tales

  The Compass Rose

  Buffalo Gals

  Searoad

  A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

  Four Ways to Forgiveness

  Unlocking the Air

  The Birthday of the World

  Changing Planes

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume One: Where on Earth

  The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands

  TRANSLATIONS

  Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

  The Twins, the Dreams/Las Gemelas, El Sueño (with Diana Bellessi)

  Kalpa Imperial

  Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

  CRITICISM

  Dancing at the Edge of the World

  The Language of the Night

  The Wave in the Mind

  Cheek by Jowl

  Steering the Craft

  Words Are My Matter

  Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing (with David Naimon)

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Gollancz

  an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  Collection copyright © Ursula K. Le Guin 2018

  Introduction copyright © Ursula K. Le Guin 2018

  A Wizard of Earthsea copyright © 1968 by Ursula K. Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Tombs of Atuan copyright © 1970, 1971 by Ursula K. Le Guin, copyright renewed © 1998, 1999 by Ursula K.

  Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Farthest Shore copyright © 1972, copyright renewed © 2000 by

  Ursula K. Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Tehanu copyright © 1990 by Ursula K. Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Tales from Earthsea copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘Darkrose and Diamond’ copyright © 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin; originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

  ‘Dragonfly’ copyright © 1997 by Ursula K. Le Guin; originally appeared in Legends

  The Other Wind copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin; afterword copyright © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘A Description of Earthsea’ copyright © 2001 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘The Word of Unbinding’ copyright © 1964 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘The Rule of Names’ copyright © 1964 by Ursula K. Le Guin; originally appeared in Fantastic

  ‘The Daughter of Odren’ copyright © 2014 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘Firelight’ copyright © 2018 by The Inter-Vivos Trust of the Le Guin Children; originally appeared in 2018 in The Paris Review

  ‘Earthsea Revisioned: Children, Women, Men, and Dragons’ copyright © 1993 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Illustrations, unless otherwise credited, copyright © 2018 by Charles Vess

  Earthsea world map on pp. vi–vii copyright © 1968 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Tombs of Atuan maps on pp. 136–137 copyright © 1970, 1971 by Ursula K. Le Guin, copyright renewed © 1998, 1999 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Earthsea™ is a trademark of The Inter-Vivos Trust for the Le Guin Children.

  The moral right of Ursula K. Le Guin to be identified as the author, and Charles Vess
to be identified as the illustrator, of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 473 22354 7

  ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 22355 4

  www.gollancz.co.uk

 

 

 


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