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 10: The Open Sea
Length: 16 pages, 76 paragraphs
Setting: The East Reach and beyond
Characters introduced: None named
Here in the final chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged and Vetch sail beyond Lastland into the open sea and eventually land on the shores of the land of the dead. I am not sure, at this point, if I am seeing parallels to the Lord of the Rings, only the ripples of heroic formula, or my own reflection, but it seems to me that Ged on the open sea is very close to Frodo in Mordor, and Vetch is his Sam, though a peer rather than a noble servant.
Ged, here at the most perilous place, does not fall short. Nor does he come to vanquish. As it turns out, the shadow he’s been running from all this time is his own. He wins the day by naming the darkness as his own, his own death.
There’s no volcano here, no ring to be cast into the pit whence it came, and erstwhile Gollum, the shadow-self, is embraced and made whole rather than doomed.
I understand Le Guin was a great admirer of Tolkien’s work, though I have not read her writing on him. I do not think this is deliberate critique, but rather a borrowing of pattern to build a more personal story with perhaps a different conclusion about goodness.
I do see shades of Gandalf and the balrog in Ged’s initial confrontation with the gebbeth in this chapter.
For comparison:
“Then the thing that faced him changed utterly, spreading out to either side as if it opened enormous thin wings, and it writhed, and swelled, and shrank again . . . At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness.”
from A Wizard of Earthsea
and
“The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings . . . At that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked.”
from The Fellowship of the Ring
My favorite passage is, in fact, Le Guin summing up the moral of the story from the perspective of Vetch.
“Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”
That’s all for tonight. There is an epilogue, a post-script really, but it’s more a promise of stories to come than a reflection on the story that proceeded it.
If all goes according to plan, we venture into the Tombs of Atuan tomorrow.
Until next time.
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