The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

The Tombs of Atuan, cover by David Smee

The Tombs of Atuan, cover by David Smee

However much I like A Wizard of Earthsea, I love The Tombs of Atuan. I suspect this is down to the accessibility of the central character. Though we follow Ged in the first book from childhood to adulthood, and through all his struggles against the darkest and most personal of enemies, there’s always something unreachable about him. The main character of the second book in Le Guin’s Earthsea series, on the other hand, is far more relatable, though much of her story is similar to Ged’s. Separated from her family at an even younger age than Ged was, five-year-old Tenar is taken to the Place of the Tombs of Atuan because she was born on the night the previous First Priestess, Arha, died, and so is declared to be her reincarnation. There, young Tenar has her name eaten by the Nameless Ones, and becomes ‘their servant and their voice and their hands’. Henceforward, she is not Tenar but Arha, the Eaten One:

‘All human beings were forever reborn, but only she, Arha, was reborn forever as herself.’

Thus begins a Gormenghast in miniature. Although, like Titus Groan in Peake’s novels, Arha is in a position of apparent power, the reality is that her life is stifled by meaningless rituals, and by the petty power-battles of her fellow priestesses, who are older, wiser, and more bitterly ingrained in the very limited life of the Place — most notably Kossill, who, though High Priestess of the GodKing, in reality holds ‘nothing sacred but power.’

Tombs of Atuan cover 02Part of the success of the book, for me, is that it’s almost all set in one small, well-defined location (and eventually moves to an even more limited sub-area of that location). Ged’s story takes him all over the Earthsea Archipelago, but Tenar’s takes place in the bounds of a single, walled compound in an out-of-the-way Kargish desert. Once at the centre of that Empire’s religious culture, the Place of the Tombs is now honoured only by being sent occasional human sacrifices — nobles who, by defying the GodKing, have earned deaths of as much political as religious value.

But this boundedness, this confinement, is the point of the tale. If the moral of Ged’s story was ‘you can run but you can’t hide’, particularly if the thing you’re running from is yourself, The Tombs of Atuan’s is ‘Alone, no one wins freedom.’ It’s about solitude, about entrapment within the bounds of one’s own self. Young Ged has to learn to turn and face the thing that pursues him; Arha, trapped not just in this life but in every life she has ever lived and ever will, has to learn to break out of the ‘labyrinth of her own self’. But, unlike the fearsome shadow-thing that pursued Ged, Arha’s relationship with her personal darkness has, at first, advantages. A little girl hemmed in by age-old ritual and priestly politics, she at first finds her only freedom in the darkness beneath the temples and tombs, in the one place that, as the First Priestess of the Nameless Ones, is truly and only hers:

‘She did not go far into it that first time, but far enough that the strange, bitter, yet pleasurable certainty of her utter solitude and independence there grew strong in her, and led her back, and back again, and each time farther.’

And then, one day, she finds a wizard wandering in that labyrinth, illuminating its sacred, ancient darkness with sorcerous light. At first incensed by this blasphemy, Arha’s reaction becomes increasingly complex. She’s fascinated with this stranger who is everything that she does not know — a foreigner, a mage, a man.

In her essay, ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (in The Language of the Night), Le Guin says:

‘The subject of The Tombs of Atuan is, if I had to put it in one word, sex. There’s a lot of symbolism in the book…’

Atuan_HBTo me, the book is about a far more fundamental aspect of human relationships: the moment when someone opens the essential solitude of their inner life (‘it was close, it was still, it was safe’) and for the first time learns to trust another human being. Arha, as Arha, ‘the one who has been devoured’, can’t trust anyone, because she’s not herself. She’s the servant of the Nameless Ones, and is meant to play her part; in addition, she’s surrounded only by other servants of other gods, whose only interest in life is retaining the status quo, and scoring points in meaningless power games. But the wizard Ged calls her by her true name, Tenar, the name she had as a child, and thus recalls her to her true, human individuality once more. The only way out of the dark labyrinth of her servitude to the Nameless Ones is to learn to trust another human being, but she can only do that by first being trusted, and this is what Ged does.

At the end of the book, freed from her old world, Tenar is not so much reborn as reset, back to how she was when she was last Tenar, the five-year-old girl who loved to run among her parents’ apple orchards. She is, at the end, not come of age, as Ged was at the end of A Wizard of Earthsea, but ‘like a child coming home’ — reset on the path of being able to relate to others, rather than being clasped in the silence, and the dark, of the ‘useless evil’ of the Nameless Ones who ‘are dark and undying, and they hate the light: the brief, bright light of our mortality.’ It is, as Ged points out to her, human relationships that make one fully human, and these are always two-way exchanges:

‘You could keep me a slave, and be a slave; or set me free, and come free with me.’

A Wizard of Earthsea feels, to me, like the story of a hero — the tale of a mage learning the wisdom necessary to wield the extraordinary power he was born with. The Tombs of Atuan, on the other hand, is the story of a human being learning to be more fully human, a process that means shucking off the pretences of power, and the protection of darkness. Ged, in this book, remains an interesting, living character, but also distant, because of his power and his wisdom. Tenar/Arha, with her occasional spitefulness, her pridefulness and fear, but also her innocence and her longing to be herself, and to be free, is a far more relatable character. By the end of the book, you feel you know her in a way you can never know Ged. It’s just as wise a book as A Wizard of Earthsea, but a little more human.

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A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

A Wizard of Earthsea, cover by David Smee

A Wizard of Earthsea, cover by David Smee

I love a well-done wizard. Just as much, I hate a badly-done one. For me, ‘badly-done’ means the wizard is exactly like any other person, she or he just happens to be able to fling bolts of magic. (Usually, such fling-around-bolts-of-magic wizards are also kick-ass and cool, and I hate kick-ass and cool, too.) A wizard, as far as I’m concerned, must have been changed by their path to wizardhood, and changed deeply. I want to read about that change — about its depth, not its surface glitz. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by A Wizard of Earthsea, which must be one of the earliest fantasy books I read (so long ago, I can’t remember a time when I hadn’t read it — in fact, my earliest memory relating to the book is going into a library, wanting to read it again, and being thrilled to find there were two more in the series). It’s one I keep coming back to, and it’s one that repays every re-read by constantly deepening its truths. It’s that rare, rare thing: a childhood read that remains as relevant to the adult as it was to the child.

The book came about when Le Guin was asked to write something for ‘older children’ (what would now be called YA, but which didn’t exist as a separate category back then). Wondering ‘How did kids get to be old wizards?’, she wrote a tale about ‘a child gifted with an essentially unlimited power who needs — urgently needs — to learn how to know and control such power’. The child is Duny, later to be named Ged, but mostly known as Sparrowhawk. Names in Earthsea are important, for to know the true name of a thing is to have power over it. (And so it’s a world in which wizards must hide their true names, telling them only to those they most trust; and it’s a world in which only dragons, to whom it’s a native tongue, can lie or deceive in the Old Speech of magic.)

illustration by Ruth Robbins

illustration by Ruth Robbins

After showing early magical ability (summoning a fog to help defeat raiders), Ged is taken under the wing of just the sort of over-wise wizard designed to test a young would-be-mage to breaking point. Ogion is more interested in teaching Ged the names of useless herbs than any of the flashy, impressive magic the boy wants to learn (and, let’s face it, the reader wants to see). One day, having been sent to gather more useless herbs, Ged meets a young, somewhat sorcerous temptress, who beguiles him into boasting about abilities he doesn’t have. Returning to Ogion’s house, Ged sneaks a look in his master’s books of magic so he’ll have something to impress the lady:

‘He looked for a spell of self-transformation, but being slow to read the runes yet and understanding little of what he read, he could not find what he sought. These books were very ancient, Ogion having them from his own master Heleth Farseer, and Heleth from his master the Mage of Perregal, and so back into the times of myth. Small and strange was the writing, overwritten and interlined by many hands, and all those hands were dust now.’

Earthsea_Robbins_02

illustration by Ruth Robbins

One spell draws his eyes, and soon he’s not so much speaking it, as it is speaking through him. It summons a shadow, a nameless, baleful thing beyond his, or any other mage’s ability to understand or control. And so begins Ged’s true lesson in wizardry. For this shadow-thing wants nothing more than to make him a ‘gebbeth’, a puppet-man whose sorcerous power will be its own to use. And it’s a very personal battle: this shadow-thing is born from Ged’s weakness — his pride, his boastfulness, his need to demonstrate his power — and so is rooted in the very facility with magic that makes him who he is. But because the shadow is, being nameless, beyond the power of magic, the only way to defeat it is to go beyond magic, beyond spells, to forge an entirely new path, and thus learn wisdom the only way wisdom can be learned — from experience, not rote learning, a process that’s inseparable from Ged’s own coming of age, his becoming 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.’

The story is similar to the Hans Christian Andersen story Le Guin outlines in her essay, ‘The Child and the Shadow’ (in The Language of the Night), about a young man who, afraid to cross the road to speak to a young woman he sees in the garden opposite, jokingly sends his shadow instead — and it goes. Le Guin reads the story in Jungian terms, with the shadow as the repressed, ignored or feared aspects of oneself, which must be mastered and absorbed before one can become a whole human being. This, to me, has always seemed like a good reading of A Wizard of Earthsea, too (the main difference being that, in Andersen’s tale, the shadow wins the eventual power struggle, and the young man fails to individuate). As an example, at one point in Ged’s story, the young wizard realises that ‘the shadow had tricked him with his own trick’; in Four Archetypes, Jung writes: ‘A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps.’

illustration by David Smee

illustration by David Smee

Elsewhere in The Language of the Night, Le Guin says that fantasy gets its power by speaking ‘from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious’, and I have to say that the fantasy books that have most affected me have usually done so through the power of their stories first of all, not how I later come to understand those stories. The initial impact is unconscious. A Wizard of Earthsea is a primal tale, of coming into selfhood, of the battle with one’s darker side, but it works without you having to know that’s what it is. The reason the book repays every re-read is, I think, not that I understand it more each time, but that I understand my understanding more — I find myself nodding at what, before, I was completely carried away by. But the wisdom it contains is right there in the story — delivered whole and intact like a jewel — which is how it should be, with fantasy.

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The Gods of Pegana by Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany by MJEIn 1903, at the age of 25, four years into his title, Lord Dunsany went to see a play called The Darling of the Gods, written by David Belasco and John Luther Long. Long’s 1898 story, “Madame Butterfly”, had made use of his sister’s stay in Japan as the wife of a missionary (though apparently it bears too many similarities to an 1887 French novel, Madame Chrysanthème, for this to be the entire inspiration), and had been adapted by Belasco for the stage in 1900. The Darling of the Gods, a success in New York and newly transplanted to the London stage (where it was produced by the wonderfully-named Beerbohm Tree, and starred Lena Ashwell as Princess Yo-San), was also set in Japan, or, rather, a fantasticated version of Japan that was the sort of place an early-20th century Western audience wanted it to be — a storyland of escape, exoticism and picturesque tragedy, an embodiment of all the lingering dreams of the Decadent and Arts & Crafts movements of the late 19th century, that had so fallen in love with the aesthetics of imported Japanese prints and lacquered wood. In a further act of what Harold Bloom might have called a ‘creative misreading’, Dunsany, watching the play, was overtaken by the poetic possibilities of creating a pantheon of gods, and the result was his first published (and only self-funded) book, The Gods of Pegāna, brought out in 1905. (Online text here.)

OrientalStories1932

cover to Oriental Stories, Winter 1932

This is a situation that recurs throughout the history of fantasy: one culture, encountering another, becomes overwhelmed by fantasies of that distant place and creates its own version of it, a version that becomes increasingly stylised and storyfied, till it enters the realm of pure invention. At the start of the 18th century in France, for instance, the first translations of The Thousand and One Nights were followed by increasingly creative ‘translations’ of other, obscure, ‘newly-discovered’ collections of Eastern tales, footnoted to varying degrees of veracity, till finally the whole thing becomes a convention and people openly pen invented ‘Oriental Tales’ using all the pre-existing backdrops, props and costumes of this imagined version of a distant culture, with no relation to the facts at all. (And when William Beckford wrote Vathek, he was doing the same thing at a double remove: he wrote his mock-Oriental Gothic tale in French, as though it were a ‘genuine’ French imitation Oriental tale, rather than a poor English one.) A similar thing happened in the 19th century, with a different meeting of cultures, this time when the Brothers Grimm began to investigate the folk tales of the peasant classes. Which is why, when Victorian England fell in love with fairy tales, they pictured their heroes and heroines in Germanic peasant dress and dark, endless forests.

Lord Dunsany’s Pegāna, then, is mock-mock Oriental. But it’s also, thanks to its prose style, mock Biblical, and perhaps it’s by being pulled in two separate directions that it breaks free from any definite cultural associations and starts to seem like a wholly new thing. Which is why it’s regarded as one of the first books of truly modern fantasy. Pegāna, though, is not a separate, invented world. The name refers to a sort of Olympus, a dwelling place for Dunsany’s invented gods, though one that exists ‘Before there stood gods on Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah’.

Before our world was created, two forces, Fate and Chance (like Moorcock’s Law and Chaos) cast lots ‘to decide whose the Game should be’. Nobody knows which of these two won, only that the winner went to the primal creator, MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ (whose name is always shouted like that), and told him to create the gods.

In the Land of Time by Lord Dunsany (Penguin Classics)Dunsany’s world is founded on the fact that Man can never know the answer to the important questions. Whichever one it was who won that initial casting of the lots — Fate or Chance — as far as we’re concerned, our fate is decided: Man was created by Kib, and each man will be killed, in time, when Mung (Death) makes ‘the sign of Mung’ to him, and between those points he must follow the path set out for him by Dorozhand (Destiny), who alone knows the ‘reason and purpose of the Worlds’. In the face of this, all a man can do (and it is ‘man’, because there are no women in Dunsany’s first book) is distract himself in the works of Limpang-Tung, ‘the God of Mirth and Melodious Minstrels’. The gods, meanwhile, enjoy nothing more than to laugh at their creation, all the while knowing that, when their own maker MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ wakes from this sleep (which will end the world), he will laugh at them for their pettiness in creating it.

We poor humans, meanwhile, have nothing but fatalism for our solace:

‘All that is is so because it was to be. Rail not, therefore, against what is, for it was all to be.’

Dunsany has a lot to say about ‘Prophets’. There are prophets who speak the truth, and there are those who lie. Those who speak the truth speak the one and only truth any honest man can: that he knows nothing of the gods, and has no influence over them. This sort of prophet is not very popular. The people would rather have a prophet who gives them a comforting lie, and The Gods of Pegāna has its fair share of such false prophets: Yug, who claims to know all things, but dies all the same; Alhireth-hotep, who claims to speak with Mung (Death), so Mung comes calling; Kabok, who goes so far as to say he advises Mung, but does a runner when Mung starts lurking in his garden at night; and Yun-Ilara, who genuinely does not fear Mung, to the point that he spends his days in a high tower shouting insults at the god of Death… Only, in his weary latter years, to regret this, and instead spend his time begging for Mung to visit.

"Mung and the Beast of Mung", by Sidney Sime

“Mung and the Beast of Mung”, by Sidney Sime

Most of these tiny tales are poetic parables mocking false hope and the empty promises of religion. Dunsany’s invented names — one of the hallmarks of his writings — are at first of two types. There are the brutal-sounding single syllables, which he gives to most of his gods: Skarl, Kib, Sish and Mung. And there are the overblown, overlong names, like MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ, or Yoharneth-Lahai. I get the feeling these names started off as basically comic: the short names are meant to emphasise the primitive, nonsensical nature of some of the gods of Pegāna; the long names emphasise the over-grand nature of others. In a similar way, the mock-Biblical language is used to satirise religious writing with its entirely tautological way of enforcing belief:

‘Kib is Kib. Kib is he and no other… Because this is written, believe! For is it not written, or are you greater than Kib?’

But a sort of poetry creeps in, both into the invented names, and into the prose:

‘Then Mung went down into a waste of Afrik, and came upon the drought Umbool as he sat in the desert upon iron rocks, clawing with miserly grasp at the bones of men and breathing hot.’

The first section to really read like modern fantasy — evoking wonder for wonder’s sake — is ‘The Eye in the Waste’:

There lie seven deserts beyond Bodraháhn, which is the city of the caravans’ end. None goeth beyond. In the first desert lie the tracks of mighty travellers outward from Bodraháhn, and some returning. And in the second lie only outward tracks, and none return.

The third is a desert untrodden by the feet of men.

The fourth is the desert of sand, and the fifth is the desert of dust, and the sixth is the desert of stones, and the seventh is the Desert of Deserts.

In the midst of the last of the deserts that lie beyond Bodraháhn, in the centre of the Desert of Deserts, standeth the image that hath been hewn of old out of the living hill whose name is Rānorāda — the eye in the waste.

About the base of Rānorāda is carved in mystic letters that are vaster than the beds of streams these words:

To the god who knows.

Now, beyond the second desert are no tracks, and there is no water in all the seven deserts that lie beyond Bodraháhn. Therefore came no man thither to hew that statue from the living hills, and Rānorāda was wrought by the hands of gods…

The penultimate chapter, ‘The River’, is perhaps Dunsany’s best prose-poem in the book, about silence, sleep, dreams, and the end of all things:

‘It hath been said that when Skarl ceases to drum, and MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ awakes, and the gods of Pegāna know that it is the End, that then the gods will enter galleons of gold, and with dream-born rowers glide down Imrana (who knows whither or why?) till they come where the River enters the Silent Sea, and shall there be gods of nothing, where nothing is, and never a sound shall come. And far away upon the River’s banks shall bay their old hound Time, that shall seek to rend his masters; while MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ shall think some other plan concerning gods and worlds.’

Le Guin, The Language Of The NightIt’s strange to think that, in her 1973 essay ‘From Elfland to Poughkeepsie’, Ursula Le Guin would call Dunsany ‘the most imitated’ writer of fantasy, whose archaic prose style, and mode of poetic invention through fantastic names evoking distant, story-misty cities and hinted-at magics, made him ‘the First Terrible Fate that Awaiteth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy’. This style of fantasy, heavy on magic and imaginative invention, can be found in, for instance, Michael Moorcock’s method of writing Elric books with a list of fantastic-poetic concepts like ‘The City of Screaming Statues’ by his side. But nowadays (and things may have come to an end starting with Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara), the dominant mode of fantasy, as typified by George R R Martin, is at the opposite extreme: minimal magic, minimal poetry, maximal grit. But perhaps the outlook on life is basically the same: both share a cynicism about the promises of religion, and an insistence on the inevitability of death (not to say Death working overtime, in Game of Thrones).

The final word, as ever, belongs to Mung, who will always have the final word:

And Mung said: ‘Were the forty million years before thy coming intolerable to thee?’

And Mung said: ‘Not less tolerable to thee shall be the forty million years to come.’

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