Mutterings and Musings

In memoriam

Three days ago the world, and literacy art in particular, lost a giant. I am of course referring to Ursula K. Le Guin. Author of, amongst many others, The Left Hand of Darkness, and, the Annals of the Western Shore, and my personal favourite, The Earthsea cycle.

A Wizard of Earthsea and the subsequent books* drew me in as a child and were read and re-read countless times as a young adult. It has been a few years since I re-visited Earthsea, but I think it is time to voyage back to this ancestor of Harry Potter and spend some time at the school on Roke.

One of the things that I loved most about Earthsea is the simple premise that 'normal' people don't have to be white. Growing up in an almost exclusively white part of Britain (in a school of 1,500 we had one Chinese family and two black) it was never really something that occurred to me, until I read a review on A Wizard of Earthsea and the review commented on how wonderful and validating it felt to have a main character who had red-brown skin. As a child, I had simply superimposed my world view on things and read the people of Earthsea as being very tanned, and the Kargs as perhaps Scandinavian.

As an adult reading George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) series amongst others, it is easy to see the majority of characters as white. In Hollywood foreigners are given black, yellow or brown skin to make them exotic (look at Lord of The Rings. What colour are the hobbits, elves and humans? What colour are the orcs and goblins?). In Earthsea living in the archipelago everyone is either "red-brown" or "black-brown," it is not until you get to the barbarous Kargish lands that "white" is an option. As an aside note, Earthsea introduced me to the word 'hoar' as in hoar frost, meaning greyish-white. The Kargs are nicknamed hoary people. I remember reading it for the first time and loving what, to me, was a completely upside-down world view. Even at that point - long before I wanted to be a writer myself - I applauded this ability to take (what to me was) the normal and invert to so thoroughly.

I still keep Earthsea on my 'special' bookcase. The one where all my favourite series live; Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld, JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence. I think it is long overdue to be pulled off the shelf and read again.

Farewell Ms Le Guin and thank you for all your work.



*The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales From Earthsea, The Other Wind. The Wind's Twelve Quarters collects more short stories including two that would later evolve into Earthsea itself.