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.
Jun 28, 2023·edited Jun 28, 2023Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
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!
Thank you. I really appreciate this lens when re-reading the story. I don't tend to think about technology and culture as analytically when I read fantasy, but I enjoy having my attention focused on them. This is one reason I love reading with others, everyone sees such different things.
The post title actually sums up the things that stood out to me in this chapter: names and power.
1) I love the concept of receiving a new name to mark one’s entrance to adulthood. Then the idea of a secret name is intriguing. I know of a couple different cultures where people had secret names, and in both cases, knowing the secret name was essential for affecting the person (positively or negatively) with magic. It seems like magic in Earthsea works the same way. In which case, Duny/Ged’s new master has enormous power over him: as the one who chose Ged’s secret name, he’s the only other person who knows it, and presumably he also knows plenty of spells he could work with it.
2) Duny likes that magic gives him power and he isn’t scared of magic’s power (he just laughs when his aunt binds his tongue). We’re also told that he has the potential to become a very powerful wizard. Combine that with the fact that he doesn’t want to share his knowledge with the other kids, and we have someone who’s eager for more power, has the capacity for it, and wants to keep it for himself. All of which sounds ominous, rather like the makings of a dark wizard if someone doesn’t teach him better.
Yes! I really wondered how the naming ceremony usually works — is it always one’s trade-teacher who gives the name? Or a parent, maybe? I would have assumed it was a father’s or relative’s right to give the name, but Ged’s father doesn’t seem to feel supplanted. (Of course, he’s also not a very involved dad, so maybe he just didn’t care who gave the name.)
Does anyone know if other Earthsea books give more details about the naming ceremony? I haven’t read any of them.
Comments have already touched on what I’d feature or quote (and also completely opened my eyes to things I’d never so much as noticed, like the Bronze Age setting) but since I enjoy the exercise of writing responses, here’s mine, too:
The chapter starts by noting the absence of examples of power Duny could have seen: his older brothers have left home and “there was no one to bring the child up in tenderness.” Not to twist words, but love is power, and therefore the power of tenderness, whether from friendship or familial care is an example of power visibly lacking without his mother or siblings or close peers (he likes to know what they don’t, not share in it) and with a “grim unspeaking” father.
There’s another absence worth noting: the lack of other characters’ names, and his father’s silence. There’s all this talk of naming and Duny learning the names of things but we don’t know the names of his parents, family members, or townsfolk.
Then there’s his father’s communication more through violence than language. Later, Ogion is positioned as a new father figure whose silence is different from his father’s because it is a silence dignified with power. The dignity or wisdom comes from the fact that he is freely choosing his silence whereas I get the sense that the bronze-smith’s silence is a reflex or habit born of work and a sense of limitation rather than freedom, and therefore not as dignified, not as powerful. Even in his violent outbursts towards his son, again he doesn’t seem powerful because he lacks control and understanding.
Early on Duny sees his own power and the reaction it causes and enjoys it. “As her sister’s son he had been nothing to him,” but when his aunt observes his power with magic she changes her relation to him and he gets “puffed up with her praise of his cleverness.” His aunt is powerful insofar as craft is a power over the environment but her power is one of action causing desired reaction in their world, not respect or praise. She can satisfy needs and has basic knowledge of names and understanding of the power magic can have, but she lacks true unifying knowledge of magic, and the story notes, “need spoke is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”
It’s subtle but the fact that his aunt sings Duny songs of great Deeds is notably the best examples of power outside himself Duny has in his childhood: from oral folk traditions.
There’s echoes of Adam and creation in the importance of names. “[H]is pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the power it gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these.”
I mostly see his own power as the example he received, which is why he’s said to grow wild as a weed. His power is great enough as a child in this first chapter to already be overspent. He’s witnessed an example in himself of overreaching power and suffered physically for it but with a positive, not negative, result: he saves his town, he is discovered by Ogion the Silent (again whose silence is another power different from his father’s silence, which is not necessarily characterized as wise like Ogion’s), identified for his singular skill, and named.
I just read this book! Such an incredible interrogation of power, nature, and the self.
<Question> This substack is a place "for women... to ask questions, find new allies, and strengthen projects." Should I excuse myself from adding to the comment section? (I am happy to continue to enjoy learning as a reader!)
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!
Thank you. I really appreciate this lens when re-reading the story. I don't tend to think about technology and culture as analytically when I read fantasy, but I enjoy having my attention focused on them. This is one reason I love reading with others, everyone sees such different things.
The post title actually sums up the things that stood out to me in this chapter: names and power.
1) I love the concept of receiving a new name to mark one’s entrance to adulthood. Then the idea of a secret name is intriguing. I know of a couple different cultures where people had secret names, and in both cases, knowing the secret name was essential for affecting the person (positively or negatively) with magic. It seems like magic in Earthsea works the same way. In which case, Duny/Ged’s new master has enormous power over him: as the one who chose Ged’s secret name, he’s the only other person who knows it, and presumably he also knows plenty of spells he could work with it.
2) Duny likes that magic gives him power and he isn’t scared of magic’s power (he just laughs when his aunt binds his tongue). We’re also told that he has the potential to become a very powerful wizard. Combine that with the fact that he doesn’t want to share his knowledge with the other kids, and we have someone who’s eager for more power, has the capacity for it, and wants to keep it for himself. All of which sounds ominous, rather like the makings of a dark wizard if someone doesn’t teach him better.
This also raises the question of who would have given him his name and had that power/intimacy with him if not for the wizard.
Yes! I really wondered how the naming ceremony usually works — is it always one’s trade-teacher who gives the name? Or a parent, maybe? I would have assumed it was a father’s or relative’s right to give the name, but Ged’s father doesn’t seem to feel supplanted. (Of course, he’s also not a very involved dad, so maybe he just didn’t care who gave the name.)
Does anyone know if other Earthsea books give more details about the naming ceremony? I haven’t read any of them.
Really interesting insight into his eagerness for power and his desire to keep it for himself being ominous. I totally missed that.
Comments have already touched on what I’d feature or quote (and also completely opened my eyes to things I’d never so much as noticed, like the Bronze Age setting) but since I enjoy the exercise of writing responses, here’s mine, too:
The chapter starts by noting the absence of examples of power Duny could have seen: his older brothers have left home and “there was no one to bring the child up in tenderness.” Not to twist words, but love is power, and therefore the power of tenderness, whether from friendship or familial care is an example of power visibly lacking without his mother or siblings or close peers (he likes to know what they don’t, not share in it) and with a “grim unspeaking” father.
There’s another absence worth noting: the lack of other characters’ names, and his father’s silence. There’s all this talk of naming and Duny learning the names of things but we don’t know the names of his parents, family members, or townsfolk.
Then there’s his father’s communication more through violence than language. Later, Ogion is positioned as a new father figure whose silence is different from his father’s because it is a silence dignified with power. The dignity or wisdom comes from the fact that he is freely choosing his silence whereas I get the sense that the bronze-smith’s silence is a reflex or habit born of work and a sense of limitation rather than freedom, and therefore not as dignified, not as powerful. Even in his violent outbursts towards his son, again he doesn’t seem powerful because he lacks control and understanding.
Early on Duny sees his own power and the reaction it causes and enjoys it. “As her sister’s son he had been nothing to him,” but when his aunt observes his power with magic she changes her relation to him and he gets “puffed up with her praise of his cleverness.” His aunt is powerful insofar as craft is a power over the environment but her power is one of action causing desired reaction in their world, not respect or praise. She can satisfy needs and has basic knowledge of names and understanding of the power magic can have, but she lacks true unifying knowledge of magic, and the story notes, “need spoke is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.”
It’s subtle but the fact that his aunt sings Duny songs of great Deeds is notably the best examples of power outside himself Duny has in his childhood: from oral folk traditions.
There’s echoes of Adam and creation in the importance of names. “[H]is pleasure in the art-magic was, childlike, the power it gave him over bird and beast, and the knowledge of these.”
I mostly see his own power as the example he received, which is why he’s said to grow wild as a weed. His power is great enough as a child in this first chapter to already be overspent. He’s witnessed an example in himself of overreaching power and suffered physically for it but with a positive, not negative, result: he saves his town, he is discovered by Ogion the Silent (again whose silence is another power different from his father’s silence, which is not necessarily characterized as wise like Ogion’s), identified for his singular skill, and named.
I hadn’t clocked the absence of other people’s names! It felt natural enough as it went on.
I just read this book! Such an incredible interrogation of power, nature, and the self.
<Question> This substack is a place "for women... to ask questions, find new allies, and strengthen projects." Should I excuse myself from adding to the comment section? (I am happy to continue to enjoy learning as a reader!)
You are most welcome here! The focus of the substack is women/feminisms but men who are fellow travelers are most welcome.