The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin – You Don’t Have to be Magic to be Magical
The Wizard of Earthsea is Ursula Le Guin’s 1968 novel about a young wizard.
We now know that young wizard stories grew up into a bit of a monster, but here we see the idea in its innocent infancy, and perhaps notice some revealing differences. Later versions saw the wizard world becoming a kind of elite, secret society, fed by a school seemingly modelled on Eton. I remember reading this kind of story with my daughter, feeling uneasy about the fact that most people are classified as boring and non-magical. Hang on a minute, I thought to myself, while wizards are flying around on broomsticks, ordinary, non-magical folk have worked out how to fly to the moon. Why present magic as something denied to most people?
The Wizard of Earthsea actually accommodates such reservations. Rather than taking a secret train to a clandestine school, Ged, a promising, young Earthsea wizard, takes the oars alongside non-magical crew on a boat, as he sails to a well known magic school on the island of Roke. After completing his education, he and his fellow students then go to various jobs around the Earthsea archipelago. Like GPs, school teachers, or vets, they are part of their communities, respected (usually) but not fundamentally different to other people. At one point Ged uses a spell to keep a shoddy boat together, but makes it clear a competent shipwright would do a better job of repairs.
This was an important aspect of a book which characteristically presents different elements of life, as complementary parts of a whole. Magic is about a balance. You can stop the wind by magic in one place, but that will make wind blow harder somewhere else – a bit like the real weather really, where you can’t have high pressure without a corresponding low. And the central struggle of the book is young Ged’s battle with the dark side of himself rather than with some external enemy.
I would suggest later versions of the young wizard story lost something when magical GPs, who used their particular skills to help humanity in general were replaced by wizards going to a secret school, divided into competing, self-regarding houses, educated to work for their own closed society. A sign of divided times perhaps, or at least authors with different outlooks. Similarly, Le Guin did not see her apparent children’s story as just for children. She didn’t really believe in such literary pigeon-holing. Since the 1960s, fiction writing has become highly fragmented into different categories of stories for different categories of people. However, in Earthsea, magical and non-magical people do not seem to have different songs or stories. The fact that a child or adult would have an equal chance of enjoying the Wizard of Earthsea is a reflection of what this book is about.
