Earthsea

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Earthsea is a series of illustrated fantasy books written by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin and the name of their setting, a world of islands surrounded by an uncharted ocean. Starting with a short story, "The Word of Unbinding" in 1964, there are five Earthsea books, beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968, and continuing with The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, and The Other Wind. There are eight short stories, all but "The Daughter of Odren" collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters and Tales from Earthsea. Illustrators include Pauline Ellison, Ruth Robbins, Anne Yvonne Gilbert, Gail Garraty, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, Kelly Nelson, Marion Wood Kolisch, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Cliff Nielsen.

Video Earthsea

Setting

The world of Earthsea is one of sea and islands: a vast archipelago of hundreds of islands surrounded by mostly uncharted ocean. Earthsea contains no large continents, with the archipelago resembling Indonesia or the Philippines. The largest island, Havnor, at approximately 380 miles across, is about the size of Great Britain. The cultures of Earthsea are not direct analogues of those of our world, but are literate non-industrial civilizations. Technologically, Earthsea is an early Iron Age society, with bronze used in places where iron is scarce. Weapons also include the use of wood and other hard but easily crafted metals. The overall climate of Earthsea is temperate, comparable to the mid-latitudes (over a distance of about 1800 miles) of the Northern hemisphere. There is a yearly transition from warm summers to cold and snowy winters, especially in northern islands like Gont and Osskil. In the southern regions of Earthsea it can be much warmer.

Most of the people of Earthsea are described as having brown skin. In the Archipelago "red-brown" skin is typical, while the people of the East Reach have darker "black-brown" complexions . The people of Osskil in the north are described as having lighter, sallow complexions , while the Kargs of the Kargad Lands are "white-skinned" and often "yellow-haired". Le Guin has criticized what she describes as the general assumption in fantasy that characters should be white and the society should resemble the Middle Ages.

Magic is a central part of life in most of Earthsea, with the exception of the Kargish lands, where it is banned. There are weather workers on ships, fixers who repair boats and buildings, entertainers, and court sorcerers. Magic is an inborn talent which can be developed with training. The most gifted are sent to the school on Roke, where, if their skill and their discipline prove sufficient, they can become staff-carrying wizards. A strong theme of the stories is the connection between power and responsibility. There is often a Taoist message: "good" wizardry tries to be in harmony with the world, while "bad" wizardry, such as necromancy, can lead to an upsetting of the "balance" and threaten catastrophe. While the dragons are more powerful, they act instinctively to preserve the balance. Only humans pose a threat to it.

The Dry Land is where the people of the archipelago and reaches of Earthsea go when they die. It is a realm of shadow and dust, of eternal night where the stars are fixed in the sky, and nothing changes. The souls who live there have an empty, dreary existence, and even "lovers pass each other in silence". Le Guin has stated that the idea of the Dry Land came from the "Greco-Roman idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante Alighieri's work, and from one of Rainer Maria Rilke's Elegies."

Maps Earthsea

Series

Short stories

As of mid-2015, Le Guin has published eight short stories of Earthsea. Seven appear in two collections of her work (and some have been reissued elsewhere). Two early stories were originally published in 1964, and were collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (Harper & Row, 1975). These helped to define the setting of Earthsea. Five much later stories were collected in Tales from Earthsea (Harcourt, 2001) (Illustrated by Kelly Nelson, Marion Wood Kolisch, and Ursula K. Le Guin), where three were original. In October 2014 a new novella set in Earthsea was published as a stand-alone, "The Daughter of Odren".

Tales from Earthsea also includes about thirty pages of fictional reference material titled "A Description of Earthsea" (2001) and cataloged as short fiction by ISFDB.

• "The Word of Unbinding", Fantastic Stories of Imagination, January 1964 ^+Q
• "The Rule of Names", Fantastic Stories of Imagination, April 1964 ^+Q
• "Dragonfly", Legends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy, Tor Books, 1998 ^+T
• "Darkrose and Diamond", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct-Nov 1999 ^+T
• "The Bones of the Earth" (2001) ^T
• "The Finder" (2001) ^T
• "On The High Marsh" (2001) ^T
• "The Daughter of Odren" (2014)

Notes:

^+Q Also collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters

^+T Also collected in Tales from Earthsea

^T   Original to Tales from Earthsea

Novels

• A Wizard of Earthsea (Parnassus Press, 1968) (Illustrated by Ruth Robbins, and Anne Yvonne Gilbert in 1984)
• The Tombs of Atuan (Atheneum Books, 1971) (Illustrated by Gail Garraty, and Anne Yvonne Gilbert in 1984)
• The Farthest Shore (Atheneum Books, 1972) (Illustrated by Gail Garraty, and Anne Yvonne Gilbert in 1984)
• Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (Atheneum Books, 1990) (Illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine)
• The Other Wind (Harcourt, 2001) (Illustrated by Cliff Nielsen and Ursula K. Le Guin)

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Awards

Each novel in the series has received a literary award, including

• A Wizard of Earthsea:
  • the 1969 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction
  • the 1979 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
• The Tombs of Atuan: a 1972 Newbery Honor
• The Farthest Shore: the 1973 National Book Award for Children's Books
• Tehanu: the 1990 Nebula Award for Best Novel
• The Other Wind: the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

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Adaptations

Audiobooks

There have been a number of audiobook readings by different narrators and publishers. In the early 1990s, Robert Inglis narrated the first three books of the series for Recorded Books.

Radio

A BBC-produced two-hour radio dramatization of A Wizard of Earthsea was originally broadcast on Radio 4 on December 26, 1996. This adaptation was narrated by Dame Judi Dench, with Michael Maloney as Ged, and used a wide range of actors with different regional and social accents to emphasize the origins of the Earthsea characters (for instance, Estarriol and others from the East Reach were played by actors with Southern Welsh accents). The adaptation was subsequently released on audio cassette.

In April and May 2015, BBC Radio 4 aired a new, six-part dramatization of the Earthsea works, encompassing the storylines and motifs of the novels A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. The first of the six 30 minute-long episodes premiered on April 27 and the last on May 5. The characters of Ged and Tenar were portrayed by three different actors at different stages in their lives (Kasper Hilton-Hille, James McArdle and Shaun Dooley as Ged; Nishi Malde, Aysha Kala and Vineeta Rishi as Tenar). The radio drama was adapted by Judith Adams, directed by Sasha Yevtushenko and featured original music composed by Jon Nicholls. Following the premiere radio broadcast, each of the episodes were made available for online streaming on BBC Radio 4 Extra for a month, via the BBC iPlayer service. The adaptation was created and aired as part of a thematic month centered on the life and works of Ursula Le Guin, in commemoration of her then-recent 85th birthday. In addition to the Earthsea radio drama, the thematic month included the airing of a two-part radio adaptation of The Left Hand of Darkness earlier in April, as well as exclusive interviews with Le Guin and some of the writers she inspired.

Television

The U.S.-based Sci Fi Channel broadcast in December 2004 a three-hour loose adaptation for television of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, entitled Legend of Earthsea (later, simply Earthsea). It was broadcast in two parts on Channel 4 in the UK at Easter 2005. Sci Fi Channel had angered Le Guin and fans of the Earthsea novels with its announcement that Ged and the vast majority of the other characters would be played by Caucasians and with the dramatis personæ posted on an official website. The latter revealed several original characters - such as "The Archmagus" and "King Tygath", "Diana", "Penelope", and "Marion" - and it referred to "Kargide" characters rather than Kargad, Karg, or Kargish. The religious practices of Atuan were portrayed differently in the adaptation, and the celibacy of Earthsea wizards overlooked as Ged and Tenar become sexually involved.

One month before the U.S. broadcast, Le Guin posted on her website "A Reply to Some Statements Made by the Film-Makers" published in the December 2004 issue of Sci Fi Magazine. She opened with the observation, "I've tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they're based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions." (Director Robert Lieberman, too, had stated that she was not involved.)

"That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth." Le Guin disavowed some specific interpretations both by Lieberman and by executive director Robert Halmi Sr., and concluded (quoting Lieberman):

I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien "intended ..."[,] would people think they'd been "very, very honest to the books"?

Anime

Studio Ghibli's 2006 film, Tales from Earthsea, is loosely based in the Earthsea mythology. It was directed by Gor? Miyazaki, the son of Hayao Miyazaki. In the past, Le Guin had rejected Hayao Miyazaki's offer to create a film based on the series, but due to her love of his films, Le Guin granted Studio Ghibli the rights. The story is based mainly on elements of the third and fourth novels of Earthsea. Le Guin has stated that she found the adaptation "disappointing" and "entirely different" from her creation.

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Notes

References

Citations

External links

• Le Guin's homepage - her own map of Earthsea, truncated
• Earthsea series listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The World of Earthsea - with Le Guin's own map and published illustrations including maps
• "Ursula Le Guin's Magical World of Earthsea" by Jan M. Griffin, The ALAN Review 23.2 (Spring 1996)
• The Isolate Tower: An Earthsea Compendium - fan encyclopedia or companion book
• "To Light A Candle: An Unofficial Earthsea Companion" - fan encyclopedia or companion book

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