Death & Fantasy, Part II: THE FARTHEST SHORE

What's in a name?

Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Farthest Shore is the third installment of her Earthsea books, a series of fantasy novels set in a vast archipelago filled with magic, dragons, and, frequently, the exploits of a wizard named Ged. In this world, to know something’s true name is to have power over it. That is the basis of all magic in Earthsea. And wizards are those who learn the true names of things, and can thus cast spells over them, whether it be the true name of the wind giving you power to fill the sails of your boat at will or a person's true, secret name giving you power over them.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, an adolescent Ged opens a breach between his world and the land of the dead, unwittingly releasing his Shadow self, an aspect that many of us face for the first time when on the verge of adulthood. In the second book, The Tombs of Atuan, the story focuses on a young woman named Tenar. Believed to be the reincarnated high priestess of a cult that worships the so-called “Nameless Ones,” she is taken from her family to look after the Tombs of Atuan. It speaks of a different aspect of death: of a life not lived, of feeling unfulfilled on a path you did not choose. It is a book about breaking free from the tomb of societal expectations which can turn you into the walking dead, and learning to live for yourself. The Farthest Shore, however, explores death more directly than its predecessors. A young prince named Arren seeks out the now older, Archmage Ged to ask for his help in stopping the inexplicable seepage of life from the world. Together they travel across the sea, from island to island in search of the cause.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about the subject of death as it relates to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Le Guin was a great admirer of Tolkien. And I can't help but read the Earthsea books in conversation with the books of Middle Earth, particularly The Farthest Shore. Like Frodo, young prince Arren leaves the comfortable life he knows behind, shepherded by an experienced wizard, for a mission that is a burdensome responsibility full of unknown danger, against an enemy who, a bit like Sauron, seeks to conquer death. In contrast, Frodo knows where he is going from the start, whereas Arren and Ged do not discover what or who their enemy is until much later. Theirs is a story of discovery as much as responsibility.

While The Lord of the Rings offers a clear vision of what may come after life (both in Frodo's dream at Tom Bombadil's house and again in his reference to that same dream at the end of the books), The Farthest Shore offers an unknowable transformation, one that we all must go through. Take this moment when Ged says to young Arren:

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

This might be less comforting than Frodo's vision of “white shores” and “a far green country under a swift sunrise,” but it is more honest, as well as more open to religious and non-religious readings alike. Ged is not sure what, if anything, will come after death, only that his humanity will change. Whether he means a merely physical change of decomposition or a spiritual one, he does not say. I like to believe it's because, like us, he doesn’t know.

When Arren and Ged finally meet Cob, the wizard whose spell to conquer death has opened a breach between the world and the land of the dead (much like Ged did in Book One), they follow him to a place that is not meant to be reached by the living. This afterlife feels more like a purgatory than heaven or hell; it feels like a stepping stone, a way station filled with lost souls unable to move on—but into what or to where, we do not know. While Middle Earth's realms of dark and light are more physical, reachable by pickaxe or boat, Earthsea's are on other plains of existence, intended to be accessible only by magic. This subtle distinction is key to understanding the different ways in which these two works of fantasy approach the subject of death.

Cob and Sauron both desire immortality, living half-lives in their phantom realms. But Cob is not as imperialistic as Sauron. He isn’t out to kill Arren and Ged (at least, not initially), nor is he consciously trying to conquer the world. He simply did something selfish that is changing the world for the worse, and he doesn't really care if his poison sucks all the magic out of Earthsea as long as he remains immortal. He has minions, but they seem to exist more to satisfy his own ego than to be used in some plot for world domination. He feels more human than Sauron, more pitiable, more real.

Like Sauron's Ring of Power, Cob’s immortality spell disconnects him from the world. The Ring extends life, but it also drains the wearer’s energy and turns them invisible. In Earthsea, where the true name of something gives you power over it, conquering death requires the opposite. To become immortal, Cob must give up his true name. Because life without death has no true name, like the so-called Nameless Ones worshipped by the priest cult in The Tombs of Atuan.

The greatest similarity between Tolkien and Le Guin is in their appreciation of fellowship and storytelling as immortalizing acts. In their respective endings, Ged and Frodo leave their friends behind, but live on in memory, in the ever-changing stories left behind. When a truly great story is reaching its end, we don’t want it to go. We dread it even, yet we know that we must see it through. And then, when that last page has finally been read, it lives on in our minds, stays with us into adulthood. A truly great story changes us, integrates into the fabric of our being, in both tangible and intangible ways; it takes on a new life in our consciousness, aspects of which we aren’t able to define.

Le Guin once wrote about how Change, as apposed to the oft-touted Conflict, is the essential element of story. “Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing,” while conflict is merely one of many human “behaviors.” While Arren and Ged do face obstacles on their quest, instead of typical conflicts like Ring Wraiths hunting them down, they are faced with the light and dark sides of ordinary people on the road. Each step on the path presents opportunities for change in the characters—not always for good, not always for bad, but hopefully leading towards some kind of balance. In the end, that is what Ged and Arren seek. It is not good vanquishing evil, one kingdom conquering another, but balance between light and dark, life and death, because the painful truth is that they are inextricable from one another.