Roots and Beginnings - A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

Isolation can leave a mark on you soul like a small, hot burn. It’s also an excellent Joy Division song. (These two things are not unrelated.) But the idea that it could be used as the emotional canvas for high fantasy never occurred to me until I read A Wizard of Earthsea in elementary school. Certainly the adventures of Frodo Baggins were not all swashbuckling and happy endings, but even at his lowest he had Sam Gamgee by his side. The story of the young wizard Ged, as he first flees from and then pursues his shadow self, the dweller on the threshold, is dominated by long stretches in which the character is painfully alone, and in which circumstances force him to delve deeper and deeper into that state. Since his enemy is effectively himself, even a battle with his nemesis offers no reprieve from his isolation. It’s as though The Lord of the Rings took place in the eerie, lonely dreamworld of “The Sea-Bell.” Indeed, Ged’s long lonely voyage across ocean waters in pursuit of his shadow is the stuff of dreams – a Jung-adult fantasy, if you will. But the symbolism, though vivid and lovely, is ultimately unnecessary. Simply having spent any time in your life alone, beyond the emotional reach and aid of others, mentally sailing farther and farther into yourself, is enough to understand just how powerful an emotional palette LeGuin’s painting with here. It’s a vastly different and more sophisticated tone than that of most comparable fantasies – which, I think, is why this is a fantasy to which so many others are compared.