bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2021-11-28 04:56 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2021-11-28 04:56 pm
Dragons and shadows and birbs
A very long time ago I had a copy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and I’m not sure if I ever actually read the whole thing or not? I was very young, and I don’t know what happened to the book. But anyway, when my friend Kyle was weeding his book collection and gave people the chance to claim some, I put my name down for his copy so I could give it another go, having become much more of an Ursula K. LeGuin appreciator in the intervening 20 years or so.
A Wizard of Earthsea can be a little difficult to fully appreciate because it was published in 1968 and so some of the things that were quite fresh and revolutionary at the time have since become quite commonplace, like “writing fantasy novels specifically for teens” and “wizards: they had to have been young and learned how to wizard at some point, right?” Anyway this book is the coming-of-age story of a young boy who will eventually grow up to be a mighty wizard, but isn’t one yet. He starts off instead as a young boy who saves his fishing village from barbarian totally-not-Vikings and keeps getting into trouble by being very ambitious and overextending himself no matter how many grave and portentious-sounding warnings about the Equilibrium he gets from the older wizards. The main form of trouble that his pride gets him into is that he summons a dead spirit due to a stupid schoolboy rivalry and this lets something crawl out from the tear in reality that summoning the dead causes, and then the something hunts him for years until he figures out what it is and how to face it.
The magic in this universe is largely based on ordering things around by use of their true names. All the people have both true names, which are closely guarded secrets, and use-names, which are what are used in everyday life. Our protagonist’s true name is Ged and he is called Ged throughout most of the narration, but everybody calls him Sparrowhawk, because he likes ordering birds around, and occasionally shape-shifts into one. Ged is kind of an ass and a good part of his story arc is learning to be less of an ass, which is the true and correct story arc of all teenage protagonists.
Overall, I do wish I had actually gotten around to reading this book in its entirety when I was actually in my teens, as I probably would have had more capacity to then read the entire rest of the series, which I am now intending on doing but let’s be read, it might take a while.
A Wizard of Earthsea can be a little difficult to fully appreciate because it was published in 1968 and so some of the things that were quite fresh and revolutionary at the time have since become quite commonplace, like “writing fantasy novels specifically for teens” and “wizards: they had to have been young and learned how to wizard at some point, right?” Anyway this book is the coming-of-age story of a young boy who will eventually grow up to be a mighty wizard, but isn’t one yet. He starts off instead as a young boy who saves his fishing village from barbarian totally-not-Vikings and keeps getting into trouble by being very ambitious and overextending himself no matter how many grave and portentious-sounding warnings about the Equilibrium he gets from the older wizards. The main form of trouble that his pride gets him into is that he summons a dead spirit due to a stupid schoolboy rivalry and this lets something crawl out from the tear in reality that summoning the dead causes, and then the something hunts him for years until he figures out what it is and how to face it.
The magic in this universe is largely based on ordering things around by use of their true names. All the people have both true names, which are closely guarded secrets, and use-names, which are what are used in everyday life. Our protagonist’s true name is Ged and he is called Ged throughout most of the narration, but everybody calls him Sparrowhawk, because he likes ordering birds around, and occasionally shape-shifts into one. Ged is kind of an ass and a good part of his story arc is learning to be less of an ass, which is the true and correct story arc of all teenage protagonists.
Overall, I do wish I had actually gotten around to reading this book in its entirety when I was actually in my teens, as I probably would have had more capacity to then read the entire rest of the series, which I am now intending on doing but let’s be read, it might take a while.