Upon revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, reading the graphic novel, I decided to revisit another story adapted by the same artist
– Fred Fordham. And so…
I turned to A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. No Tolkien world-building here. Her creation is made of earth and sea rather than a vast continent, and features a mighty wizard in the days
when he was not so mighty. It takes hard work to furnish a tale that’s an easy read. And I’d throw in the use of heavy thought to create a world as though made with a light touch.
It wasn’t made with a light touch. Ursula used sleight-of-pen to give the impression that it all came easily to her. There’s no Gandalf here, or any of that wizard’s
predecessors. No Merlin. And yet…
Ursula gave herself over to the notion of a very famous magician. What was he like, back when he wore short trousers? Merlin, the Boy Wizard. How do you tell adventures of Gandalf
the Kid? Do you just let the youngster magick his way around the world, or is there some mystical college you send these young enchanters to?
Her story is not a story of Gandalf. More of a question. Where do all these Gandalfs and Merlins and Väinämöinens come from? Earthsea is about getting away from the overly-familiar story of a powerful wizard, especially in using the basic building blocks of wizardy tales. The quest, in Ursula’s fiction, is internal.
Gandalf serves the rhythm of a mighty quest against relentless evil. And that’s a tale of Frodo’s exploits more than it is a tale of Gandalf’s. Merlin is a frequent
visitor to another character’s story: Arthur – the Boy King.
Strip that powerful wizard stuff away. Start with the foolish youth who has a point to prove to the world and to himself by showing he is no foolish youth. Watch as the future legend
falls flat on his face in the early days, the youthful fool.
Ursula’s story is one of magic. Magic comes to the forefront of this book. Authors are notorious for writing stories packed with magic rules…that serve the plot at the
time, flash-in-the-pan style. Very much of the moment. The moment passes, and the rules of magic are altered, misplaced, forgotten, revived, reversed…
Maybe there’s precious little magic in the fantasy world. There’d still be a place for wizards. And they’d be powerful, no matter how little magic they made use
of.
Bill Seligman, in a piece published in 1977, put rules to the framework of Tolkien’s magic by slotting Gandalf into the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. Going by Gandalf’s exploits in the books, and turning to the D&D magic system, Seligman proposed that Gandalf was no more powerful than a fifth level Magic-User.
(March, 1977. The Dragon: GANDALF WAS ONLY A FIFTH LEVEL MAGIC-USER. I’ve sworn off footnotes. There’s an overwhelming sense of wanting to use them for comedy purposes alone, and no good would come of that.)
Some context, for non-gamers. Your wizardy chappie starts out at first level and, through adventure after adventure, rises in level, power, and stature. Broadly, the first three
levels of the character’s game-life are about survival. The next three levels offer more options for adventure. Truly powerful world-altering characters are of much higher level. So, in a game sense, at fifth level,
Gandalf would be versatile, but not awesome.
This doesn’t track with the reputation Gandalf wields in Tolkien’s world. There’s a very good reason for that. Roleplaying games are not novels. The concept of
the hobby as a business did not exist when Tolkien finished writing The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien died in 1973 as Dungeons & Dragons was being put together for publication in 1974. Several Tolkien-based references appeared in early D&D and had to be removed on pain of litigation. Hobbits were out. Halflings came in. It was that or pay Saul Zaentz a load of money.
Official Tolkien roleplaying games came and went, as rights were rented out or expired. (While I sat typing this, an advert for a Tolkien-themed roleplaying game dropped into my
e-mail.) Each new game offers a magic system. Magic exists in Tolkien’s writing. But it doesn’t match the magic system used in D&D. That takes inspiration from the writing of Jack Vance.
D&D magic has literal rules to it. Much of the spellcasting is flashy. You’d increase the movie budget significantly
just by welding D&D magic onto The Lord of the Rings. There’s before The Lord of the Rings in terms of fantasy stories and there’s after. There’s also before Dungeons & Dragons and after.
Today, if you feel like writing a fantasy novel, you might delve into a game rulebook or two for ideas on how magic works in a setting. D&D magic is casual. Magic = spells, and spells are plentiful. You’d ignore how spells distort the world, only concerning yourself with how spells save the characters, or
else you’d embrace the chaos…
Do you need hospitals in your fantasy world if magic healing is plentiful? If you can create water on a whim, the Great Inaccessible Desert doesn’t sound so uncrossable after
all. Turning lead into gold will flood the market. So the magician who can do this is a threat to society as a whole. He must be stopped. Or bought off. Not with gold, though. I see a flaw in there, somewhere.
Magic has rules. Story demands structure.
Back to Ursula. She, too, was writing before the first copy of D&D was sold, and didn’t need to consider the game of magic. Incidentally, if Gandalf is only fifth level in a game…which edition of the game would that be? Just let
it go.
All a writer has to do is consider the blank page. Ursula had to rewrite the wizard story, rather than just write it. And so. Our hero, Ged, is powerful. He’s heading places.
The future is awesome. But first, the early years. Conflict. Drama. Tension. Mistakes. Learning from some of those mistakes. Making more mistakes.
Magic, in Earthsea, comes at a price. There is balance. And if you push the balance in your favour, the balance shoves
back. In this way, Ursula doesn’t trap herself into writing up a D&D spellbook. (Though, if she’d done that, Gary Gygax would’ve certainly perked up his ears and started scribbling notes.) Instead, she shows that magic is about making choices. Also. Actions have consequences.
The magic in Earthsea is one of the most elegant depictions of magic I’ve encountered. Edward Eager, let’s
call him an American disciple of E. Nesbit, gave us Half Magic. Magic wishes abound in the tale, but only at half-strength and for comedy. Characters wishing to benefit
from full wishes have to double the description to gain the full wish. This also leads to comedy, and trouble. Yes, Hijinks. Shenanigans. Misadventures.
Eager controls the rules with an iron glove. Tolkien has a loose hand on the tiller. C.S. Lewis provides this bit of magic here and that bit of magic there. Some of the magic is
very old and deep, and woe unto ye if you seek to quote the rules of magic to any entity who was there when the deep magic was written.
Ursula…gives us balance. A quest for equilibrium in an ever-changing world. Action and reaction. She sciences this up. There is a cost to making magical alteration. You could
see an ecological theme in here. (For it exists.) What does magic cost the magician? Is there anything in the awkwardness of a young wizard’s journey that’s going to teach the much older character when looking
back?
A Wizard of Earthsea barely reminds me of anything else. It feels fresh. New. There are, perhaps, a few touchstones. Ursula
wasn’t born when John Masefield wrote The Midnight Folk. Susan Cooper’s magical cycle, The Dark is Rising, shares something with John Masefield and Ursula le Guin. There’s a sense of flow.
Random events in The Midnight Folk tune themselves into a sense of flow. And that goes on in Susan Cooper’s books. It seems to be everything in Ursula’s story. Granted, the flow is aided by the maritime nature of the tale.
It’s not something I can put a finger on, and point to, in an illuminated manuscript. I sensed it, and I recognised something similar in the writings of Masefield and Cooper.
Tolkien’s world is too vast, detailed, and intricate to give me that particular sense of flow. The gears grind slowly and relentlessly in Tolkien’s grand design.
C.S. Lewis offers a mosaic feel to the tales set in far-off Narnia. Not this vague notion I’m trying to convey. Perhaps the vagueness in conveying it is part of the atmosphere.
But even here, in good company, Masefield and Cooper, there’s a distinction worth making.
Tolkien, certainly with The Hobbit, where his saga began, E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, John Masefield, Susan Cooper…all have had this label applied at some point. They wrote books for children. To some, the Earthsea books are seen as for children.
No. Recreating a story of wizards and magic so that it seems new, fresh, and hard to pin down…was not something Ursula did for children. Granted, children weren’t banned
from reading those books. If you had the stomach for it as a child, maybe you gained something from The Lord of the Rings. And if you discovered The Chronicles of Narnia as an adult, you weren’t breaking any laws.
Some books read in childhood may interest you enough to return to them when you are older and supposedly wiser, it’s true. I realise I’ve not mentioned the plot. Haven’t
I, though? Ged is a young wizard, in need of training.
He magicks his way through a maritime world, and learns the hard way that magic has a cost. Ged learns that striking the right balance is a difficult thing, hard to pin down. He
heads off on a quest of his own making, for he is his own worst enemy and must leave to confront the error of his ways.
Oh, yes, and something about a dragon. I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself if you haven’t read the book. The graphic novel adaptation is another John Fordham
work. What to say of adaptations? I’ve seen adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the sequel to The Midnight Folk – The Box of Delights – some stuff by E. Nesbit, nothing by Edward Eager…and I’ve only seen the trailer for a fucking awful attempt at The Dark is Rising.
Yes, I can judge the movie as quite awful based entirely on the atrocious trailer. It would make you reach for a Susan Cooper book if you felt in need of an antidote to the travesty
on screen. Which takes me…nowhere. Certainly not in the direction of adaptations of Ursula’s works.
I haven’t watched any of that stuff. And I won’t watch any of that stuff. If you seek an adaptation, try the graphic novel. There’s a sense of scale to the world,
an atmosphere of menace in even considering the use of magic. And character aplenty.
What level of wizard would Ged be, in a Dungeons & Dragons game? He wouldn’t be in a D&D game at all. (Ged faces the challenge of a dragon in one book. And there’s a dungeon later, but we mustn’t
run ahead of the story sequence.) As I type, there is no commercial roleplaying game based on A Wizard of Earthsea. There’s the book, and a graphic novel adaptation. Steer clear of the moving image for now. Perhaps someone with passion for the story will take a decent crack at the whole series, one day. On big screen,
or small.
