The love of power and the power of love
Dec. 14th, 2022 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileWhile sick this weekend I worked my way through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea, the fifth book in her Earthsea series (sextet? Do we use that term?). This one is a little different from the other books in the series in that it’s not a novel; it’s a collection of novellas and short stories, plus some notes. It seems like it ought to be a sort of History of Middle-Earth type publication only for big Earthsea geeks–a companion/supplementary materials book, more scholarly and harder to read–but it isn’t at all: it’s very much the fifth installment of the series, and you need to read these stories in order to understand what’s going to happen in the sixth book. (I am about halfway through the sixth book.)
The novella, “The Finder,” is an ancient bit of Earthsea history, telling the story of the founding of the magic school on Roke. More precisely, it is the story of the hero Otter, whose adventures culminate in helping found the magic school on Roke and becoming its first Doorkeeper. This was in many ways a really fun trip into Earthsea’s past, five hundred years before the “present” of Ged’s lifetime, but it’s also pretty dark–the school on Roke was founded in an attempt to fight back against longstanding societal instability.
The short stories are all just really well crafted. We get one of Ged’s adventures from when he was Archmage, told from the point of view of a very normal woman whose lodger is the runaway wizard Ged is seeking. We also get the story of Irian, a strange woman from a ruined house who, in defiance of centuries of tradition, goes to the school on Roke to find out who she is. “Darkrose and Diamond” doesn’t have any of the characters we knew, but it’s still a fascinating little philosophical story about identity and relationality, which happens to be set in Earthsea and uses its now-well-established frameworks around wizardry to explore these themes. “The Bones of the Earth” is mostly just a cute little backstory about Ogion and his master, but it was nice to have that background and the history of the Old Mage’s house.
Overall this was just a really lovely, solid collection of Earthsea tales and it was nice to read it in basically one day, and then jump immediately into the next one.
The novella, “The Finder,” is an ancient bit of Earthsea history, telling the story of the founding of the magic school on Roke. More precisely, it is the story of the hero Otter, whose adventures culminate in helping found the magic school on Roke and becoming its first Doorkeeper. This was in many ways a really fun trip into Earthsea’s past, five hundred years before the “present” of Ged’s lifetime, but it’s also pretty dark–the school on Roke was founded in an attempt to fight back against longstanding societal instability.
The short stories are all just really well crafted. We get one of Ged’s adventures from when he was Archmage, told from the point of view of a very normal woman whose lodger is the runaway wizard Ged is seeking. We also get the story of Irian, a strange woman from a ruined house who, in defiance of centuries of tradition, goes to the school on Roke to find out who she is. “Darkrose and Diamond” doesn’t have any of the characters we knew, but it’s still a fascinating little philosophical story about identity and relationality, which happens to be set in Earthsea and uses its now-well-established frameworks around wizardry to explore these themes. “The Bones of the Earth” is mostly just a cute little backstory about Ogion and his master, but it was nice to have that background and the history of the Old Mage’s house.
Overall this was just a really lovely, solid collection of Earthsea tales and it was nice to read it in basically one day, and then jump immediately into the next one.