The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition

I received this book yesterday afternoon and was engaged with it all evening. It is a massive tome, over one thousand pages long, and contains all five Earthsea novels (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, The Other Wind), the collection of short stories called Tales from Earthsea,  the two proto-Earthsea stories “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names”,  “A Description of Earthsea” (history and lore of that world), and the recent stories of “The Daughter of Odren” and “Firelight” (the latter of which deals with the death of the wizard Ged) and the lecture “Earthsea Revisioned” which is Le Guin’s final word on Earthsea and how it grew in the telling. She died in January of 2018 and the book (which had been in preparation for the 50^th anniversary of the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea) came out in October that year and may be said to be an ultimate culmination of her work in that world.  It is unwieldy, I suppose, for a reading copy, but for a fan it cannot be too big.

The fifty illustrations by Charles Vess, known for his associations with Neil Gaiman, George R. R. Martin, Jeff Smith, and Susanna Clarke (among others) are somewhat spare for Vess, perhaps due to his personal collaboration with Le Guin. It is hard for me to tell just yet (it is early days) how much they actually add to the text. At the moment they seem a little ‘graphic novel-y’ and not what I’m used to in real book illustration (think Alan Lee).  But maybe they will settle in for me as time goes on.

          The cover under its illustrated book jacket is red and the tome is graced with a book-marking ribbon; as such it bears a passing resemblance in size and appearance to what I’ve always called ‘the red LOTR’.  This re-enforces the strange connection I’ve always felt between Le Guin and Tolkien even before I read her thoughts about his work, now well documented.

          A Wizard of Earthsea was first published in 1968; the original ‘trilogy’ was finished by 1972 and was already considered classic by the time I read them in middle school in, say, 1977. I had discovered Tolkien by then, of course, and our Drama teacher, Mr. Daryl Fleming, was just getting into Middle-Earth, and that made us friends and fans on an almost equal level. It was he who suggested I read Le Guin and loaned me those first three novels, in what I think of as the Fish Edition by Bantam Books. I soon had to have my own copies.

My next memory of Earthsea is from high school, in the classroom of another Drama teacher, Mrs. Rowley. She had piles of ‘cultural’ magazines for students to read in downtime, and there I found the short story “The Word of Unbinding” accompanied by some intriguing half-tone illustrations. I would still like to find those pictures. I soon found the story and “The Rule of Names” in Le Quin’s collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. And that, I imagined, was that.

But I was surprised in 1990 with Tehanu, then subtitled and touted as “The Last Book of Earthsea”. The series had grown up, as it were, and was tackling sterner issues, becoming more than ‘heroic fantasy’. This seemed to be part of a trend. ‘Speculative Fiction’ had undergone some serious teething issues during the Eighties with the genre suddenly wide open and no longer ‘niche’ but flooded with ‘Tolkien clones’. As the century drew to a close the long-standing and more thoughtful practitioners of ‘Fantasy’ were doing what they could to reclaim it. I eagerly snapped up the new books in Le Guin’s series as they came out.

And now here I am at the end of a long journey. It appears that this will really be ‘The Last Book of Earthsea’ indeed. The short story “Firelight” (published nowhere else and here for the first time) reveals how Ged the heroic wizard at last faces death. It is a moving, real, and somehow joyful experience.

Although this farewell was said some three years ago already, it is fresh to me. Coming on top of what could be the very last of Tolkien’s work on Middle-Earth, it has fallen more keenly. It is October; fall is beginning. I feel something like the elegiac attitude one has after a funeral and the emotional tidying up that must follow. But I have only to open this book and everything (the characters, my memories, and even Granny Ursula) lives again.