Covers of the korean translation of Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series

The Books of Earthsea Illustrations from the complete illustrated edition, Illustrated by Charles Vess [X]

The fact that Ged becomes a house-husband at the end of Earthsea so his wife and daughter can go and save the world makes me love him even more

Loved the description of Tehanu's hair in The Other Wind

tehanu!

“All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

Image description: a digital painting of Tehanu, cropped at the bust. Tehanu is a young woman with dark skin and eyes and long curly black hair caught in a breeze. A burn scar covers the left side of her face and her left eye. She wears a purple shawl and a blue dress over a white shirt. She looks sad and she is starkly lit from behind with an orange light. The air around her is black, smokey and full of sparks. End ID.

two pieces i did of tehanu earthsea (and also tenar)

“I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

- Ursula Le Guin

Book: The Other Wind

Art: Photograph of Le Guin by William Anthony

sciencefictiongallery: Paul Lehr | The Legion Of Space | 1969

* * * *

"I think that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, 'The Other Wind'

Everytime I think I understand the degree to which Ursula K. LeGuin Got It™ she hits me with another life revelation

Hello Earthsea fandom, I made some playlists!

General Earthsea Reading playlist:

Ged/Sparrowhawk/Duny themed playlist:

Tenar/Goha/Arrha themed playlist:

vote YES if you have finished the entire book.

vote NO if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed." She looked up at the stars and sighed. "Not for a long time yet," she whispered.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind.

I finished reading The other wind (the 6th and last book of the Earthsea cycle) just yesterday and I'm still trying to collect my thoughts on it. It's just genuinely life-changing. It's so incredibly human, no other piece of art before had made me feel so at peace with myself before. From the first to the last book Earthsea is just an oath to life and death, to selfhood.

"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed."

This quote towards the end of the novel just made me bawl my eyes out but in the best of ways, not of sadness, and I couldn't stop crying for the rest of the book, and for the next hour after I finished it.

And the end, oh my god, the end. I won't spoil it but without Le Guin even knowing it every important moment of all the previous books just leads to it, Ged's shadow, Tenar's name, Arren's acceptance of the possibility of death and Ged's glass of water spent on the dry land, Tenar's love for a burned child and Tehanu's link to Kalessin. It is so fitting and Le Guin treats its themes with such dignity and respect. This series has done what no other thing could before, it has made me respect death but not with fear. Maybe I should learn more about taoism, maybe it was just how UKLG wrote it exactly the way I needed to read it, but that idea of balance and returning to the earth after we die has changed something in me.

And on a bit of a different topic (although really it is just the same thing) it has also changed my view on fantasy as a whole, which is surprising as someone who's been reading fantasy since I was 10. Although I feel like the seeds of change where there beforehand and these books watered them and made them turn into plants. I've always found something unsettling in the use of violence and war and the concepts of good and evil in most fantasy stories, I've always hated fantasy games whose sole purpose was mindlessly killing enemies, I've always had trouble believing the end of Harry Potter, where all evil is finished when the evil person (who was evil from birth because of magic) was killed. UKLG has shown me the alternative to all these stories. Evil in Earthsea is internal, not an external being that personalizes it, and it is a possibility in all humans. Ged and Cob could have both been evil, but Ged isn't because he has chosen not to. Ged does wrong, and he fixes it not by wining a violent battle against evil but by choosing to accept his own shadow and his own eventual death. Tenar chooses to be Tenar and not Arha. The dragons of Earthsea have no ability to choose good or evil, and that is what makes them free, and what makes them animals, but humans do have choice. They must find themselves and make peace with their life and with their death. The main characters are constantly re-considering their own selves and choosing themselves along with the change that is happening in their world, and the end to it all is not a return to the status quo but an undoing of what has been made wrong, an end to immortality, a reconciliation with the human fact that we have no choice over death. No win of a battle can restore the balance, no evil is inherent and no killing can stop evil.

Percy Jackson has been my favorite series for a long time now. It is not perfect in the slightest and a big part of my liking for it is the nostalgia that I have for having read them when I was 12 years old. But there has always been something in it that I have admired over many other books. The gods do wrong that they fail to acknowledge, and that is their downfall. Luke is a complex villain, and like Tenar he is under control of a greater evil, not fully to blame but also being under the consequences of his own choices to remain there. And when Percy saves the day he doesn't question the reign of the gods the way I would have liked it, but he rejects immortality and godhood, because he knows himself beyond the power of the gods and chooses to live, and instead he forces them to accept to fix what they have done wrong. Even with its faults and holes that meant something to me as a kid, and it has stayed my favorite since then because of it, but it didn't fully fill the longing in me for a story that would really tell what I wanted to be told. I think Earthsea, written way before I was even born, is that story for me, I think UKLG knew what I needed to know long before I did.

I guess this is my way of saying that Earthsea is my favorite now, and I think it will be for a long time.

Doodling while listening to the last chapter of the other wind

women of gont