Thus far in my senior project, I am very happy with how it’s going. I am making good progress with my re-reading and annotation of the Earthsea series; I am halfway through the third book. I have been recording my thoughts and ideas along with quotes as I read through the books; this document currently has about 3500 words and I am continuing to add to it every day. Some of my original ideas, what I thought I would write about, have turned out to be not so accurate or relevant. I originally thought I would write with the perspective of Ursula K. Le Guin being unaware or somewhat apathetic towards the lack of female characters in her books. However, the copies that I have been reading each have an afterword by the author explaining her choices, and I have found in these afterwords that Ursula Le Guin was intentional in her choices, either as she was writing them or, as is the case with the first three books, subconsciously and she was able to put intention upon them later. Although she wasn’t consciously thinking about why she wrote the women in Earthsea the way that she did as she was writing the first books, she was able to later go back and discover that she wrote them that way for a reason. I have really enjoyed going along this journey with her, as she writes and discovers herself, her characters, and her world, and I learn them all along with her.
Some expectations for my project that have shifted is that of what exactly my essay will say. I have found in my writings that I’m writing a bit all over the place; I don’t seem to have any central theme thus far. A few themes that I have identified as relevant to my essay include:
The celibacy of wizards
The history of magic in Earthsea
Women can’t learn magic
Sources of power: the Old Power, the Old Speech, Roke, etc.
This week, I am not going to be doing as much work on my project as I might otherwise do because I am in Israel visiting family for Passover. I will be continuing to read and annotate and collect quotes from Earthsea, and as I do so, I also hope to make connections between Earthsea and what I see in Israel. In one of the essays I read about Earthsea, there was a clear connection between the mages of Earthsea and priests of the Middle Ages. These connections are made because of similarities in power coming from language, power from language being taught in one centralized school where women aren’t allowed, and mages and priests both being treated by the public as community servants and living from what the people give them. These similarities also apply to some religious figures in Judaism here in Israel. A large similarity is the significance of a sacred language. Hebrew is an old language containing the history of a people. Outside of Israel, prayers are said in Hebrew because the language brings the words closer to God. In Israel, as everyday activities are done in Hebrew, thus the people who operate in that language are closer to God. This is similar to in Earthsea, where wizards will sometimes converse with each other in the Old Speech when they are having a particularly meaningful conversation. A major difference between wizards and orthodox Jews, however, is celibacy. The men who dedicate their lives to Judaism include the act of marrying and procreating as part of their faith; the orthodox families marry young and have many, many children.
As I continue in my project, I will look out for similarities between Earthsea and the world around me. My goal for this week is to finish the third book.