A Wizard of Earthsea

"It’s also a central theme also in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin, the beginning of her great sequence of fantasy tales. I started looking for the sources of this and I remembered I was aware of one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales , which is also retold in Appalachia. I like the title that it’s given in the American South, which is “The Boy That Never Seen A Fraid,” as if ‘a fraid’ were a noun. The Grimm title is “The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear.” When I started scouting around for comments about that story, or just information about it, I discovered it was a core example for Soren Kierkegaard in The Nature of Anxiety , in which he was trying to take a complex philosophical look at fear and distinguish it from dread and awe and all of these things. And what did he turn to? He turned to a folktale. Because the narrative works you through all those stages, from the boy who doesn’t know what fear is, and therefore can walk into horrific situations with ghosts, monsters, terrible death-dealing entities, completely unafraid, to someone who becomes more knowledgeable. Finally, after he gets through all of his tests and challenges and wins his bride, he discovers she’s a very clever princess. She says to him, ‘Okay, you need to know what fear is.’ So she pours a bucket of minnows over him and makes him shudder. And that’s how he learns what fear is. “A fantasy goes beyond that point where the horror story would stop and makes you work out the implications” I don’t think Kierkegaard had an expansive sense of humour, but he might have been amused by that. He uses it as an illustration of the difference between the unknowing and the knowing, which is the distinction between simple fear versus the more complex mode of dread. So I went off into reading all of this stuff, and I don’t claim to really understand all Kierkegaard or be a philosopher, but it seemed to me significant that the narrative itself was one of the ways of understanding the force in the world around us. I use that then to examine some of the other examples I thought of besides Eddison. The other thing about The Worm Ourobouros is it has a poem in it, which Eddison did not write. He liked to quote poems even though he’s writing about a fantasy world, a world in which evidently they have access to our publishing system because he quotes from John Donne and others such as William Dunbar , a 15th-century Scottish poet who wrote “Lament for the Makaris” (which means for the makers or poets). It has a repeated line at the end of every stanza which reads “Timor Mortis Conturbat Me.” It’s a line from one of the Latin offices for the dead and it’s usually translated as ‘ fear of death disturbs me.’ If ‘conturbat’ existed in modern English, it would be ‘conturbs me,’ which I really like because it’s a word that shows up for a while in English and then disappears. It suggests the way something can block you from moving forward. ‘Conturbat me’ is exactly what Eddison, Le Guin, and many of the other examples I found, keep coming back to. Yes, an absolutely Baroque style."

"Not all. Let’s do Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea next. It was published in 1968 and it was a revelation for fantasy readers, and possibly a revolution. In Le Guin’s work you can see a predominantly Christian, patriarchal, English tradition reinvented by a writer who was not only an American woman but a Taoist-atheist. (I like to think of the map of the archipelagic Earthsea as an image of a Middle Earth without a middle, as if it had been dropped and shattered.) Both Tolkien and Lewis were devout Christians, but Le Guin brought fantasy back to its pagan roots. She used as the foundations of her magic system and her story the building blocks of nature and sex and language."

"It has a personal connection for me as well. I spent a lot of time on an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. We spent many of our holidays there because my dad was a birdwatcher and, in fact, chairman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . It was part of an island archipelago, so the archipelagos of The Wizard of Earthsea absolutely resonated with me on a personal level. The school on Roke, a school for magic where you can learn how to be a wizard, was such a glorious idea. Sparrowhawk is a fallible character who you love and he’s courageous. He has lessons to learn and I love that idea. Well, it was that he wasn’t a golden hero, he has an arrogance when he releases this big spell and he has to spend the rest of the books trying to put it right. I think I was a bit older when I read it, 16 or maybe 17. I’m still very moved by it, and it’s so clever, the ideas in it. The idea that you can’t lie in another language. You can’t lie to a dragon. That stayed with me for years. The dragons feature more in The Farthest Shore rather than Wizard of Earthsea , but the dragons were a real influence for my dragons. They are splendid, those dragons – standing above nature at the same time as being part of it. What all of the books share is that, in their different ways, they make the magic feel relevant and possible to the reader – even though they each approach magic in very different ways. What I tried to do in Wizards of Once was to take sprites which were inspired by Shakespeare, like Mustard Seed and Ariel, as well as Arthur Rackham ’s fairies, and make them modern, original and relevant. I also looked at fashion designer Alexander McQueen and the Punk scene. Alexander McQueen did a lot of insect-inspired designs. I also looked at Matthew Bourne’s reinterpretation of Swan Lake , in which the swans are played by boys rather than girls. What I’m trying to do is re-imagine magic for a child in 2017. I employ a range of inspirations – as well as all these wonderful children’s stories that I adored when I was child. But that takes a lot of research, that means going back and reading wonderful books including a wonderful book called Leechdoms, Wartcunning and Starcraft of Early Eng land (1864), which describes three different varieties of magic. Modern medicine would have come out of Leechdom. Wartcunning included charms, spells and curses and Starcraft, of course, would have been concerned with looking at the stars. Researching these old stories is wonderful fun – and, along with seeking out inspiration from the culture and world all around, I think it gives you ideas and makes the magic richer. It makes it feel real."