Ursula K Le Guin

The works of

Ursula K. Le Guin

...have been important to me for many years.
She is one of the West Coast writers
I came upon some twenty-five years ago,
who had a formative influence on my thinking.
(The poet Gary Snyder is the best- known of the others.)
She is the daughter of the famous anthropologist
A. L. Kroeber, and his wife Theodora.

She wrote the story of Ishi,
whom the Kroebers studied and befriended,
the lone survivor of a tribe wiped out
in the extermination of the native peoples of California.

Ursula Le Guin is a Taoist,
an anarchist (non-violent, of course), and a Green.
All of these philosophies have had a major part
in shaping my view of things, as well.

Ursula K. Le Guin's New Homepage

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Here's one of the pages created by and for lovers of Le Guin's works:
The Ekumen

You can also sign up there for the Ekumen listserv.

When I was a young eco-anarchist,
The Dispossessed : An Ambiguous Utopia
was the most important of her books to me and my friends.

Nowadays, the deep issues explored in them
and the great beauty of her writing
make the last three books of the Earthsea series -- Tehanu,
Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind -- my favorites.
(Keep going for my review of The Other Wind, relating it
to Tolkien's Middle Earth.)

Tehanu

Tales from Earthsea

A good review of Tales from Earthsea,
by Christopher Cobb

Another by Kathy Weissman

Read our two excerpts from Tales from Earthsea's
novella, "The Finder":

"The Women of the Hand"

"One Night on the Isle of Roke"

The Other Wind

An amazing denouement to the Earthsea series.

Anyone who had imagined that the relationship
of J.R.R. Tolkien's work to Le Guin's
was only one of influence on the formative stages
of a younger Le Guin's work
by that master of epic fantasy, will be in for a surprise.

The Other Wind reimagines the great questions
of life on earth, mortality and the otherworld
expressed in a core theme of Tolkien's vision
which had originally been inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

He tells of a great change
in an earlier age of Middle Earth:
The Fall of Númenor.
At that time, the Gods caused
the 'Straight Path' to Valinor
to be bent,
". . so that no matter how far a man should sail
he could never again reach the true West . . ."¹

- A break making direct
travel between the worlds impossible
as a consequence of the hubris and rebellion
of the Númenóreans, who yearned for immortality,
rejecting Eru's gift of mortality.

Where once, traveling by sea or air, one could have
come directly to the very land of the Gods,
after the separation one would only
follow the curving surface of the Earth,
never reaching the ethereal air of Ilmen, the starry realm
–Tolkien's equivalent of the Other Wind.

To read more about it, see The Lost Road (1987).

In The Other Wind
we discover that the earliest mages of Earthsea
had wanted to 'have their cake and eat it too,'
using their magic to try to create an escape from death,
in a place beyond the West
instead of accepting the boundaries
that balance the privileges of being human.

Like the Númenóreans, they rebelled
against the order of the cosmos
as their hubris led them to believe that they could
conquer paradise
and stake out their own claim on immortality.

As the story plays out, Tehanu's destiny is revealed;
along with her dragon-sister Irian,
she plays a central role in what must be done
to right the long-denied balance of things.

Le Guin offers her position in answer to Tolkien's
view of human fate.

In Middle Earth, he says,
"Some . . knew that the fate of Men was not bound by the
round path of the world,
. . the fate of Men, they said, . . is not within the world. ² "
He believed in a transcendent life in the hereafter.

Le Guin presents a strongly contrasting vision
of reunion with the Earth as humans' authentic fate.
For her, true immortality is not escape
from the Earth and death,
or the conquest of a paradisiacal realm, but rather
the rebirth of one's body, energies and spirit
in all that lives on Earth after us.

As we -- in Washington, in the United States,
in western civilization --
live in the world's center of hubris,
there is much for us to think on in these stories!
Can pride without wisdom lead a people on forever,
or will the dragons, the Fates, or the Gods themselves,
one day arise and say, "Enough!" ?
How then will the balance be righted?

For a few more lucid thoughts on this
from other great writers, see
"The West beyond the West –
. . . the Conquest of Paradise"

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"All the patterns, clues, and oppositions set up over
thirty years in five other books, come to fruition
and are worked out in The Other Wind."

– from an outstanding review of these Earthsea books,
by Meredith Tax:
"In the Year of Harry Potter, Enter the Dragon,"
in The Nation's January 28, 2002 issue.
But unless The Nation makes changes in its current system, that review won't become available online!
Find it in your local library.

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Got feedback on my views of The Other Wind
or other ideas about Le Guin?
Send them to Luchnos!

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1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings: Language and Legend before the Lord of the Rings. Ballantine, New York, 1987, p. 17.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road, p. 19.

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