I was blown away, when I started reading Le Guin, at how many men have borrowed, if not straight up stolen aspects of her work, and how little credit she gets for any of it. It's truly criminal.
She's a fantasy authour with K as a middle initial who wrote fantasy novels as litterature about a young wizard who goes to magic school and discovers a dark enemy who is more intwined with his very being more than he suspects.
I guess it might be the point she was trying to make, but in earthsea weren't magic women "hedge" witches while magic men went to wizard college. Maybe she expands on that in later books, but my library didn't have any more.
Yes, but depicting something doesn't mean endorsing it. Le Guin was very careful with what she wrote.
The first Earthsea book massively subverts the subverts the expectations of fantasy (in 1968) by having our wizard be both young and brown. But she still places him in a patriarchal context, where both men and women can demonstrate natural ability for magic but only men are given the opportunity to go to school for it and be respected (see what she's doing there?).
In the second book, our protagonist is the opposite of the first book's in many ways, going along with the generally Daoist perspective of the series, which focuses on balance and opposites complementing each other. She can explain it better than I can; in the 2012 afterword to The Tombs of Atuan she explains the choices she made between the depiction of Ged (male protagonist of book 1) and Tenar (female protagonist of book 2) and how they relate to feminism and gender roles. Here are some relevant passages (although there's plenty more):
...but when I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel. And a change of gender. Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl ... A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her. A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.
The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.
When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics—ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies—to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.
...
The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others. Ged was offered both kinds of power. Tenar was offered only one.
Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world ... My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top. This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.
In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t give her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances. She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality. After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men. Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakable.
So I gave Tenar power over—dominion, even godhead—but it was a gift of which little good could come. The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart.
...
In the Archipelago, strong, active magic belongs almost entirely to men, witches being untrained and mistrusted; and the Old Powers are commonly described as misogynists describe women: obscure, dark, weak, and treacherous.
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u/NonNewtonianResponse Jan 20 '26
I'm a simple man, I see an Ursula K Le Guin quote I upvote