In this series, I’ll be working my way through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea works and analyzing her prose chapter by chapter. Spoilers follow.
Chapter 4: The Loosing of the Shadow
Length: 22 pages, 120 paragraphs
Setting: Roke
Characters introduced: Master Patterner, Master Summoner, Gensher
For such a momentous chapter, I don’t have much to say about this one. Ged unleashes the gebbeth and the real forward motion of the story begins.
I am again impressed by how well Le Guin captures the petty rivalries of youth and how they can escalate. If this had been a story about two teen horse jockeys and one of them trying to ride a wild horse, how much would really be different for the characters?
Ged and Jasper both seem real to me, and my impression of them is not that they’re bad but that they bring out the worst in each other like some teenagers do. I might be reading Jasper too generously, but I take him to be a well-meaning older student fighting against the biases of his upbringing who gives up that fight when the poor goatherd who was rude to him starts to outshine him.
Ged, for his part, is good at heart. We know that. He’s also ambitious, thin-skinned, and foul-tempered. A bad combination.
I give them both a break because I don’t think Vetch would be friends with anyone truly odious. I love Vetch. The moment he shares his true name with Ged is beautifully done, but I also love him floating around the courtyard eating roast chicken while the younger students try to pull him down.
I think the main feat of this chapter is the juxtaposition of the holiday festivities with the summoning gone wrong and its aftermath. The night spent in the courtyard playing at magic feels like a fond memory, and then it starts to go wrong, like a lot of bad memories do.
I think my favorite passage, just for rhythm and image is the Master Summoner’s vigil on Roke Knoll.
“All night long the Summoner stayed on Roke Knoll, keeping watch. Nothing stirred there on the hillside where the stuff of the world had been torn open. No shadow came crawling through moonlight seeking the rent through which it might clamber back into its own domain. It had fled from Nemmerle, and from the mighty spell-walls that surround and protect Roke Island, but it was in the world now. In the world, somewhere, it hid. If Ged had died that night it might have tried to find the doorway he had opened, and follow him into death’s realm, or slip back into whatever place it had come from; for this the Summoner waited on Roke Knoll. But Ged lived.”
That’s all for tonight.
Until next ime.
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