Chapter Two of the novel is called “The Shadow,” a title laden with irony and heavy with multiple meanings in the context of the chapter itself and in the novel at large. The primary focus here is Sparrowhawk/Ged’s brief time as the apprentice to Ogion, the great magician of Gont.

We have a progression on the characterization of our hero as laid out in Chapter One, though Le Guin complicates our feelings towards him in many ways. We realize that he is still young and, if our memory serves, we will also recall the sometimes traumatic childhood he suffered. The problem, however, is that these issues are never brought directly to our remembrance in Chapter Two. All we read about is Ged’s constant lack of patience.

“You haven’t found out what I am teaching”

Now, given what we know of Ged’s upbringing from the first chapter, we can perhaps begin to understand his desire to come into power as quickly as possible. He was not well treated and when finally given the chance to do something meaningful, he took it with both hands. Afterwards, he was showered with much praise and became something of a minor celebrity. The point, simply, is that Ged felt for the first time in life that he was valuable.

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With so much emphasis on world building in the first chapter, it is easy to forget that Ursula Le Guin breaks some other rules of fantasy as well, namely presenting a whole lot of characterization in a style that is somewhat archaic. In fact, the plot, the element for which genre fiction is so well known (and so oft derided) appears little more than a framework to reveal the world and the main character, Sparrowhawk, to us.

Le Guin’s Style

But let us begin with a brief look at the style of the writing, for it is at once so well executed that it often fades into the background, and yet so blatantly obvious that a single thought about it makes all the archaisms pop from the page.

Again, we must keep in mind the era in which this novel was written. The late sixties was in many ways a pioneering age for fantasy, a genre that began to grow in popularity on the back of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, of course, used a rather high, classic style, almost Victorian in its denseness at times. Le Guin’s offering is, to be honest, an Americanized, watered-down version of that same narrative voice, lacking the weight of centuries that underpins her British counterparts. Nevertheless, the choice of style has a very curious effect on the reader.

As mentioned, The Wizard of Earthsea is “a tale of the time before [Sparrowhawk’s] fame, before,” Le Guin says, “the songs were made.” Before the songs were made. What an odd statement, and yet how very telling. This sentence coming, as it does, at the bottom of the story’s first paragraph, immediately gives the reader a sense that the tale he is about to read is very old indeed. How do we know this? Well, the tale is from before Sparrowhawk’s fame, but, more important, it is a tale that preexists the songs—which we are presumably (and ostensibly–if we accept Le Guin’s premise) all familiar with.

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Chapter one of A Wizard of Earthsea breaks all sorts of rules that are now put forward to fantasy writers. While this may not be too surprising for a book first published in 1968, it is nevertheless a testament to Le Guin’s ability that the only comment I have to offer is that it is all so skillfully done. What am I talking about? Well, rule number one (or thereabouts) for fantasy writers is don’t do too much world building in the first fifty/hundred/random number of pages, as it slows the story down. But the first chapter of Wizard consists entirely of world building, though it is world building through story.

Ursula Le Guin introduces three primary facts about her world in the first chapter, only one of which can be discerned by studying the many maps included in the short novel. It is important to remember, too, that at only two hundred pages and ten chapters long, the first chapter represents roughly ten percent of the story, and she uses that ten percent to introduce us to Earthsea. The three facts around which the first chapter, “Warriors in the Mist,” are built are (1) the geography of the world, (2) the ethnicities of its people, and (3) the magic system in place. All three of those are vitally important to any fantasy novel, and yet all three of those are relayed to the reader with a skill and grace frequently lacking in tomes three times Wizard’s size—which perhaps accounts for the rule of avoiding heavy world building early on and proves that more is not always better.

The physical world

In many ways, Le Guin’s Earthsea does not differ too much from Tolkien’s Middle-earth. But that is as much as to say that Tolkien’s Middle-earth does not differ too much from our own world. Clearly, the differences are what are most important, and this is the case with Earthsea. Unlike the majority of fantasy realms, Earthsea is not a continental landmass but a vast island archipelago, seemingly the only inhabitable portion of the planet.

We are told in the very first line that we are on an island, the island of Gont, “a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea.” That is fine and well, but by sentence two we are already being told that this island is part of an Archipelago, and one that has some sort of unity, for there are “Lords of the Archipelago” involved, though we shall not meet any of these for some time. In all, some eight islands are named in the sixteen pages of the first chapter, an overload of information, one would think, coming in so short a space. And yet, a quick glance at the maps reveals that only a fraction of the islands in existence have been named for us here, which suddenly makes the weight of what we are introduced to seem all the lighter.

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