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
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
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
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