It’s not like Tolkien, who in one sense wrote The Lord of the Rings to give his invented languages somebody to speak them.’ As Le Guin said, ‘No use trying to make a lexicon of Hardic or of the True Speech there’s not enough in the books. If I were, it would make coincidence much likelier.Īctually there’s very little of the Old or True Speech in the Earthsea sequence. But it’s not as if I’m cherry-picking from a vast vocabulary. The fact that I unwittingly tweeted this on the eve of the anniversary of Le Guin’s death serves as a reminder that coincidences happen. The only voice that speaks there is the creator’s voice. A world where no voice has ever spoken before where the act of speech is the act of creation. Nonetheless she paid her dues: ‘To create what Tolkien calls “a secondary universe” is to make a new world.
Instead she was able to begin forging her own path before it crossed his. Le Guin (born 1929) once thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t encountered Tolkien’s work when, as a child, she began writing her own stories, because if she had, ‘that achievement might have overwhelmed me’. What would it imply? Simply a tip of the hat from one world-builder to a predecessor? Rather more than that, I think. Elide the middle syllable as is done to produce sukien. So the stuff of the earth is called tolk and the sea is called inien. ‘A bit of the stone of which Roke Isle is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live.’ ‘This is a rock tolk in the True Speech,’ he said, looking mildly up at Ged now. ‘Earth’ is a little trickier, but there’s a telling comment by the Master Hand, teaching Ged the lesser arts of Changing:
The Master Namer of the wizard isle of Roke tells it to our hero Ged: ‘We call the foam on waves sukien: that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, suk, feather, and inien, the sea. What happens if you want to translate the name of Ursula Le Guin’s world, Earthsea, into the Old Speech (or True Speech), the language of magic there? Let’s see… Ursula Le Guin’s map of Earthsea, a primary piece of world-building by name-making
So now I seize the day in order to enlarge and refine my observation here, where it can more easily be found. Is should have waited until today, because this turns out to be the anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s passing, a fact that I had overlooked. I used this question to introduce a social media post yesterday. A tribute embedded in A Wizard of Earthsea?
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