![]() ![]() I think many children suffer much more from it than has been generally recognised, but if you're given a story in which you're made to see that you can only find light in the heart of darkness, you find hope and healing. Throughout my life, I have drawn on this, particularly when suffering from depression. How he defeats his enemy is wholly unexpected, yet completely right because, like all great quests, it involves confronting the dark side of the hero's nature: "Only in silence the word,/Only in dark the light." With the moral, intellectual and supernatural power to outwit dragons, resist evil, change weather and transform himself into a hawk, he is apparently defenceless against an enemy who increasingly takes on his appearance to trick or kill him. At wizard school, he makes one friend and one enemy, and in a duel summons a monster that scars him and sends him on a deadly quest across the lonely seas full of peril. Ged, a poor smith's son, is born with a huge talent that he uses to save his village from invaders, but his gifts make him arrogant and impatient. Ged, its hero, will become the Archmage of a world in which magic is as common as electricity, but this is a tale from before that time. Long before Harry Potter came along, Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea imagined what a school for wizards would be like. ![]()
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