The surprising nature of Love in Ursula K. Le Guin

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Hollywood producers might not agree, but there are many ways to fall in love. The majority of our popular culture reserves love for only a few kinds of relationships. The most common is of course those boy-meets-girl stories, heterosexual romantic ooh la la love. But there are others. Parents and kids are popular pairings for the language of love. LGBTQ romantic relationships are becoming more common every year, a sign that our collective understanding of romance is shifting and that, straight or queer, love is love.

But there are still some loves that just don’t really find a place to thrive in popular culture.

I was thinking about this while reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, the third book in her Earthsea Cycle. The books follow the adventures of the Archmage Sparrowhawk, the most powerful wizard of Earthsea. In book 1, A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrohawk is a young man coming of age and into power, not yet the greatest wizard in the land. In book 2, The Tombs of Atuan, Sparrowhawk is a man, locked in an underground labyrinth, at the mercy of a priestess who becomes his friend and ally. In The Farthest Shore, age has caught up with the Archmage. He is old, and though his power remains, magic is now being pulled out of the world.

Each of these stories is, in their own way, a love story. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Sparrowhawk, an impetuous youth, must learn to love himself, and accept that he has both light and dark within him. In Tombs of Atuan, it is the priestess Tenar who is coming into adulthood; she and the wizard grow to trust and respect each other. Their relationship is never romantic, but their lives become wholly interdependent.

In The Farthest Shore, we get our clearest vision of love in the archipelago of Earthsea, as Le Guin provides a real, thriving love story. This is clear from the first scene of the book. The Archmage relaxes under a tree in the Court of the Fountain, a peaceful escape for the aging leader. Then comes Arren, a young noble, who seeks out the Archmage for aid. While Arren and Sparrowhawk discuss the problems that all of Earthsea are facing, the young Arren becomes enchanted by the man.

As their conversation comes to a close, Sparrowhawk places his hands on Arren’s back, gently leading the two out of the Court. ” He pushed Arren lightly between the shoulder blades,” Le Guin writes, “a familiarity no one had ever taken before, and which the young prince would have resented from anyone else; but he felt the Archmage’s touch as a thrill of glory. For Arren had fallen in love.”

Thus is Le Guin’s heartfelt story set: the 17-year old prince Arren and the old man Sparrowhawk, in love.

Le Guin portrays this scene in the language of the romance novel. As a child, Arren had “played at loving,” but had “never given himself entirely to anything.” Now, though, in Sparrowhawk’s presence, “the depths of him were wakened.” The author makes clear that the moment Arren falls in love is the moment that he becomes a man. “So the first step out of childhood is made all at once, without looking before or behind, without caution, and nothing held in reserve.”

So many sci-fi/fantasy authors conceive of complicated worlds, full of fascinating, challenging stories. But I think no SFF author conceives of more complicated vision of what it means to be human than Ursula K. Le Guin. Her imagination extends not only to the concepts and scenarios of SFF, but also to the conception of identity. What it means to enter into a relationship in a Le Guin story is always surprising. In her best work, race and gender and normative behaviors are almost non-existent.

The most obvious example of Le Guin’s imaginative turns on love and sex come in Left Hand of Darkness, where on the planet Winter distinctions between individual men and women are essentially non-existent. Each shifts their emotional and sexual identities, at times inseminating and at other times carrying offspring.

Where Left Hand goes for the deep dive, though, The Farthest Shore pulls back, exploring the subtleties of love not as sexual-there is almost no romantic love in The Earthsea Cycle-but as social, inter-generational, and unexpected. The language Le Guin uses to draw out the relationship of Sparrowhawk and Arren is passionate. They fight; Arren doubts his devotion, only to supplicate himself in apology for those doubts.

It is unqualified love between a young man and his mentor. And it makes reading Le Guin intriguing experience for those who undertake her work. Because in the midst of a fantasy series about wizards and dragons and lands of the dead, you just might come across an expression of love in science-fiction/fantasy that leaves you breathless.

Here, for example, when the companions have re-committed, and together reject the promise of eternal but empty life, in favor committing to travel together into death.

“Listen to me, Arren. You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself—safety forever? That is what they seek to do on Wathort and Lorbanery and elsewhere. That is the message that those who know how to hear have heard: By denying life you may deny death and live forever!—And this message I do not hear, Arren, for I will not hear it. I will not take the counsel of despair. I am deaf; I am blind. You are my guide. You in your innocence and your courage, in your unwisdom and your loyalty, you are my guide—the child I send before me into the dark. It is your fear, your pain, I follow. You have thought me harsh to you, Arren; you never knew how harsh I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps. And we must go on. We must go on. We must go all the way. We must come to the place where the sea runs dry and joy runs out, the place to which your motal terror draws you.”
“Where is it, my lord?”
“I do not know.”
“I cannot lead you there. But I will come with you.”

We must go all the way.

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The Backlist: Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea

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Ursula K. Le Guin introduced her fantasy island landscape Earthsea in 1964, with the short story “The Word of Unbinding.” But it was in 1968, when her novel A Wizard of Earthsea was published, that the Earthsea Cycle really set sail. Earthsea would become the setting for five novels, ending with The Other Wind in 2001, one short story collection, Tales of Earthsea, and several other short pieces (see the full list of Earthsea tiles here). Earthsea is an expansive and complete fantasy world; one that some argue rivals even the great literary fantasy creations of the 20th century: Tolkein’s Middle Earth, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, and Rowling’s wizarding world.

I say “even” here because, until recently, I knew almost nothing of Earthsea. Other than the awareness that it existed and that Goro Miyazaki adapted Tales for Studio Ghibli (about which, Le Guin told Miyazaki: “It is not my book. It is your movie. It is a good movie”.) Le Guin for me had always been primarily a writer of science fiction. I’ve read-and loved-The Left Hand of Darkness more than once. But of Earthsea, I was completely ignorant. Talking about Le Guin leads almost inevitably to Left Hand, and that, it turns out, is a shame.

So I finally read Earthsea. It’s not difficult to see in Le Guin’s story her predecessors, especially Tolkien, and the impact of myth, language, and magic. Nor is it hard to see how Le Guin has left her mark on the genre. The interaction of one story with another is one of genre fiction’s chief appeals. One sees, for example, clear shades of Hogwarts in the the school on Roke, where wizards are sent to receive their education from Masters in towers and woods. In fact, it seems unlikely any reader today could read a chapter title “The School for Wizards,” and not eagerly seek out the impact of Le Guin on Harry Potter’s education.

Unlike Harry Potter, however, school is only one part of many in A Wizard of Earthsea. A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of one boy’s adolescence: his childhood, his education, his arrogant wielding of power beyond his control, and his maturation in the face of what many young men must one day confront: a reckless youth.

The wizard in this story is a young man, known first as Sparrowhawk, and later, upon his naming, Ged. Ged will be the greatest wizard of Earthsea, readers learn from the start, with tales of his life to one day be recorded in the Deeds of Ged.

I mention Ged’s naming day because naming is the key to A WIzard of Earthsea; the central element of power within the story itself, as well as the thematic crux that gives the story its power almost 50 years later. The power of names in Earthsea is the power of magic; knowing the name of your friend is a sign of enduring love (a Wizard rarely uses their own name), the name of your enemy is key to victory over enemies.

Le Guin’s story thus surrounds a simple core that resonates strongly in all eras: the words we use are the power we hold. All things-physical and spiritual and intellectual-have a name in what Le Guin calls the True Speech. True Speech in Earthsea is the ancient language, predating all life. It is The Word, if you will. The language of True Speech is taught to wizards of a certain age in school, but a few words can be picked up here and there by the common folks, including a poor woman in the Sparrohawk’s hometown. She has a few words of True Speech, capable of small but helpful magics, and just a taste of the power that exists in the world. She picks up on the innate power of Sparrowhawk, and gives him what little lessons she can. With little knowledge the child performs great feats, and his existence becomes known the Wizard of his home Island. The boy is then set upon his path across the archipelago of Earthsea.

A small lesson is easily misunderstood, and just a taste of power can lead to devastating consequences. Therein is the plot of A Wizard of Earthsea. After being sent to the wizard school, Sparrowhawk spends the requisite time in the tower in the wilderness learning the true names of all things (a lesson he must undergo twice). Sparrowhawk’s youthful arrogance and pride in his power lead him to overconfidence. He undertakes the use of True Speech he cannot yet control and tries to raise a dead woman in an effort to best a rival student. Instead, he brings into the physical world an unknown creature from the realm of the dead. The shadow-creature is connected to Sparrowhawk but too ancient to hold a name. It haunts the young wizard’s life, the shadow of his existence he cannot escape, called into the world by a young man’s misuse of words.

Thus the story of Ged unfolds as he seeks a way to conquer the consequences of his arrogance. It is simple story built on simple themes, words and their power, but one that remains resonant.

I am reducing Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantastic novel to too fine a point. A Wizard of Earthsea is a joyful and exuberant experience of dragons and magic and evil princesses and wizards sailing off the edge of the map. It’s a blast to undertake, and I encourage readers to do so. But what makes Le Guin so special to me as a reader-in Earthsea as well as Left Hand of Darkness and elsewhere-is the constant presence, by the writer and within her stories, of the careful choice and value of words.

In this age of the internet, we seem to lack an awareness of so many words we use. We know what they are, what they mean, the actual letters strung together, and what each signifies. But we too often lose the value of what lies behind the words. So it seems to me. This is knowledge of great worth, it’s what keeps writers and philosophers and poets up at night. But it continues to lose value. Even while the literal sense of language is understood, we fail to recognize that the words we use rarely depend only on a literal sense.

Culture provides countless examples of how this power is wielded errantly. Todd Akin’s comments about ‘legitimate rape’ set off a firestorm he could not possibly have foreseen. Whatever those words meant to Mr. Akin, the reality of that phrase, that horrible notion, escaped him. And the consequences of speaking what he did not understand overtook his political career. More recently, the attribution of Seattle Seahawks player Richard Sherman as a ‘thug’ because his behavior deviated from the expected norms while engaging in a common activity (an interview). By breaking out of the expected role, commentators looked for an assignation that made sense, not knowing what it means to use the word to which they clung.

We see these words everyday and a myriad of others. And it seems no matter how much work the world takes to identify their actual effect, the lesson cannot be learned. These are words-rape, thug, etc-whose meaning in the True Speech carries far more significance than we realize. Their use comes too frequently with a lack of understanding. And that lack of understanding comes over us during important ritual we partake in every time we open our mouths or our blogs: naming.

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The Backlist features in-depth appreciations of classic books in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime genres. Click for more in the Backlist series.