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 9: The Ring of Erreth-Akbe
Length: 11 pages, 97 paragraphs
Setting: The Place of the Tombs
Characters introduced: None
I was wrong about the Nameless Ones, Ged informs us. They are not gods, are not worthy of worship, cannot create, only take and destroy, but they are a threat. It is Sparrowhawk who has been keeping them mostly at bay all this time.
Kossil has violated the Undertomb in her quest for vengeance against Tenar. I think it is easy to read the Place of the Tombs, and indeed this whole book, as critique of organized religion. I wouldn’t say it isn’t, but I think it goes beyond that, taps something a little more universal. Le Guin doesn’t seem one for blunt instruments in that way.
Kossil, the wielder of the cruelty and keeper of the order of the Place of the Tombs, is a person who loves power and is loyal to the institutions that give her power until she doesn’t need them anymore. She will employ whatever rhetorical devices she needs, use whatever philosophy as a bludgeon to keep the world in line to her benefit. There are no rules inviolate, no oaths too sacred to break. There is power.
And I’ll be damned if that’s not painfully familiar. Kossil needn’t be a priestess to a fictional Godking using that faith as her weapon. She could be a teacher using her duty to instill structure as an excuse to abuse her pupils. She could be a gossip columnist claiming that the public’s right to know gives her every reason to ruin people’s lives. She could be an elected official claiming that the protection of democracy demands that she strip some people of their right to vote.
There are lots of Kossils in our world. There are lots of Tenars, too.
Tenar wakes up in the dark. She has, over the course of a few days and a few conversations in the dark, the revelation that many of us have. The things we’ve been raised to believe, the powers we’ve dedicated ourselves to, are not what they appeared. And now we’ve got to find our way out of the dark when those same powers get jealous.
This would be an excellent place to leave this post, but I did want to talk a bit about how Le Guin does all this. Mainly, there’s a shift here in this chapter in how The Tombs of Atuan is written. A Wizard of Earthsea uses third person limited perspective, we get some insights into Ged and drips and drops of other folk, but there is an additional bit of distance at play. Much of the book happens in summary with a very oral rhythm, tales told round a campfire transcribed into prose. (Often we’re told that a conversation happened, given its high points and a couple of quotes from a bird’s eye view rather than watching it play out on the page.)
The Tombs of Atuan has kept to third person limited, but the prose is more modern, more bookish, though not in a bad way. In fact, I feel much more connected to Tenar for it. She is a character in a novel rather than a mythic figure from a legend handed down in song and transcribed into prose.
We’ve had some time skips all along, but our dips down into the world have always been from Tenar’s eyes and no major events in her life have happened without us present in some capacity. At the end of the last chapter, Tenar slips down into the Undertomb.
At the beginning of this chapter, we slip for just a couple of paragraphs into third person omniscience. We look in on Ged, inert in the treasury of the Nameless Ones just before Tenar opens the door. In the following paragraphs we learn that Tenar has had an adventure without us. She found Kossil with a lantern in the Undertomb, and she slipped past her into the Labyrinth and fled through it feeling pursued.
We get all this from Tenar’s dialogue with Ged. They are on surprisingly equal footing now as characters.
I suspect this was in part a means to keep up the momentum of the previous chapter. More sneaking in the dark before this meeting would have changed the emotional trajectory, better to hear it breathless from Tenar.
But it also tells us we’re hitting the peak of the rollercoaster and are about to be in freefall.
Until next time!
chasetriesagain.com 