This week begins our summer book club on A Wizard of Earthsea. I’ll post a thread each Wednesday for discussion of that week’s chapter. We begin at the beginning, Chapter 1: Warriors in the Mist.
Two things that stood out to me:
We get three names for our protagonist in the first page—Sparrowhawk, Ged, and Duny.
I really liked this passage where Duny uses magic for the first time.
Duny laughed and shouted it out again, the rhyme that gave him power over the goats. They came closer, crowding and pushing round him. All at once he felt afraid of their thick, ridged horns and their strange eyes and their strange silence. He tried to get free of them and to run away. The goats ran with him keeping in a knot around him, and so they came charging down into the village at last, all the goats going huddled together as if a rope were pulled tight round them, and the boy in the midst of them weeping and bellowing. Villagers ran from their houses to swear at the goats and laugh at the boy.
There’s no power he can take over the goats without giving them some kind of hold on him.
I am struck by the imagery of height and lowness that runs throughout the first chapter of The Wizard of Earthsea. Every description of Gont contrasts high and low, the land seeming almost vertical, full of dizzying heights and fearsome depths. Over and over, from scene to scene, it is high and low, high and low. Everything aligns in the same direction.
We are told that the boy will one day rise very high, but this is the tale of when he was low.
The goat jumps up and will not come down.
The goats charge down into the village with the boy.
He learns a spell for a snail and one for a falcon -- high and low.
Several times our eyes are drawn upward to birds of pray or downwards to the sea.
The kargs come upward. Ogion come downward.
The villagers flee upward from the Kargs.
The place name High Fall is repeated -- a name itself full of portent for the story to come.
The village is under the cliffs and over the riversprings.
The chapter ends with Ged following his master upward "through the steep slanting forests of the mountain aisle.
Everything in the chapter aligns upward and downward, the landscape, the action, the vocabulary, the direction of the eye, even the telling of Ged's career. Ged will rise and Ged will fall, and everything in the opening chapter trains the eye to look up and look down.
The whole exposition of the words of power is set in this vertical world. The words of power lift up and pull down, as they raise up the fog and pull the falcon from the sky. High and low, clarity and obfuscation, light and shadow, heaven and hell. All this is prefigured in the structure of the narrative of this chapter.
What stood out to me most were the indications that this is a Bronze Age society. Duny's father was the bronze-smith of the village - not a blacksmith, who works with iron. Bronze is what he repurposed into spear-points to defend against the Kargad Empire. The Kargs themselves "were armored with bronze helmets and greaves and breastplates of heavy leather and shields of wood and bronze, and armed with swords and the long Kargish lance."
If the worldbuilding is consistent, having access to bronze - as opposed to only softer metals like copper - tells me what to expect about the scale of its military conflicts, and even the relative status of women and men.
I recently read Riane Eisler's feminist archaeology classic The Chalice and the Blade in another book group led by Karen Tate. This book was one of several that popularized the archaeological theory that Neolithic Europe and the Middle East, from about 6500-3500 BCE, were more peaceful and matrifocal than the Bronze Age cultures that followed them, Minoan Crete being one of the last holdouts.
Copper and gold had long been used by Neolithic peoples for ornamentation, religious purposes, and tools. But bronze, a copper-tin alloy, was harder than copper and more durable than stone. Bronze was a much more lethally effective weapon than anything the world had known before.
Suffice to say that more effective weaponry rewarded more warlike cultures like the Kurgans, which spread. And then even previously peaceful cultures had to start enshrining a warrior's ethos in order to put up an adequate defense. This changed which sexed and gendered abilities were most valued, in both people and deities.
Archaeological evidence of statues etc. of the great Mother Goddess, honoring the female powers of gestation, birth, and breastfeeding, declined, after millennia of ubiquity. Religious motifs turned toward martial themes instead. Men and women, previously given equal burial honors, started to diverge into a patriarchal status hierarchy. And so on.
So it wasn't surprising to me when I came across this glimpse of sexism in A Wizard of Earthsea: "There is a saying on Gont, 'Weak as woman’s magic,' and there is another saying, 'Wicked as woman’s magic.'"
But that brings me to the issue of magic. Magic can be used as a weapon, as we see in this chapter. Depending on how scarce, difficult, or large-scale powerful it can be - which I don't know yet, having never read this book before - I expect that will change the equilibrium of martial incentives away from a purely Bronze-Age one. I'm excited to see how!
Additionally, given how mountainous and full of islands and small waterways Earthsea is, I'm excited to see how people make use of magic as well as technology to solve for its geopolitical equilibria. Horses are probably not going to be as big of a deal on Earthsea as they were in Eurasia's Bronze Age, nor Viking-style longboats meant for sailing up long flat rivers, and probably not English-style ocean-going fleets. Small boats for raiding and piracy, definitely yes, as we already see from the Kargad Empire. Small boats should also be the quickest way to send communication here, which determines the extent of territory you can keep in your empire, as in the Mediterranean. Unless magic communication is better…? Maybe we will see!