The beginning of the first stanza is quoted in
Tehanu:
The making from the unmaking,
the ending from the beginning,
who shall know surely?
What we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.
Among all beings ever returning,
the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy . . .
and the last line of the first stanza:
Then from the foam bright Éa broke.
HISTORY OF THE ARCHIPELAGO
The Kings of Enlad
The two earliest surviving epic or historical texts are
The Deed of Enlad,
and
The Song of the Young King
or
The Deed of Morred.
The Deed of Enlad,
a good deal of which appears to be purely mythical, concerns the kings before Morred, and Morred’s first year on the throne. The capital city of these rulers was Berila, on the island of Enlad.
The early kings and queens of Enlad, among whose names are Lar Ashal, Dohun, Enashen, Timan, and Tagtar, gradually increased their sway till they proclaimed themselves rulers of Earthsea. Their reign extended no farther south than Ilien and did not include Felkway in the east, Paln and Semel in the west, or Osskil in the north, but they did send explorers out all over the Inmost Sea and into the Reaches. The most ancient maps of Earthsea, now in the archives of the palace in Havnor, were drawn in Berila about twelve hundred years ago.
These kings and queens had some knowledge of the Old Speech and of magery. Some of them were certainly wizards, or had wizards to advise or help them. But magic in
The Deed of Enlad
is an erratic force, not to be relied on. Morred was the first man, and the first king, to be called Mage.
Morred
The Song of the Young King,
sung annually at Sunreturn, the festival of the winter solstice, tells the story of Morred, called the Mage-King, the White Enchanter, and the Young King. Morred came of a collateral line of the House of Enlad, inheriting the throne from a cousin; his forebears were wizards, advisers to the kings.
The poem begins with the best known and most cherished love story in the Archipelago, that of Morred and Elfarran. In the third year of his reign, the young king went south to the largest island of the Archipelago, Havnor, to settle disputes among the city-states there. Returning in his “oarless longship,” he came to the island Soléa and there saw Elfarran, the Islewoman or Lady of Soléa, “in the orchards in the spring.” He did not continue on to Enlad, but stayed with Elfarran. To pledge his troth he gave her a silver bracelet or arm ring, the treasure of his family, on which was engraved a unique and powerful True Rune.
Morred and Elfarran married, and the poem describes their reign as a brief golden age, the foundation and touchstone of ethic and governance thereafter.
Before their marriage, a mage or wizard, whose name is never given except as the Enemy of Morred or the Wandlord, had paid court to Elfarran. Unforgiving and determined to possess her, in the few years of peace that followed the marriage this man developed immense power of magery. After five years he came forth and announced, in the words of the poem,
If Elfarran be not my own, I will unsay Segoy’s word,
I will unmake the islands, the white waves
will whelm all.
He had power to raise huge waves on the sea, and to stop the tide or bring it early; and his voice could enchant whole populations, bringing all who heard him under his control. So he turned Morred’s people against him. Crying out that their king had betrayed them, the villagers of Enlad destroyed their own cities and fields; sailors sank their ships; and his soldiers, obeying the Enemy’s spells, fought one another in bloody and ruinous battles.
While Morred sought to free his people from these spells and to confront his enemy, Elfarran returned with their year-old child to her native island, Soléa, where her own powers would be strongest. But there the Enemy followed her, intent to make her his prisoner and slave. She took refuge at the Springs of Ensa, where, with her knowledge of the Old Powers of the place, she could withstand the Enemy and force him off the island. “The sweet waters of the earth drove back the salt destroyer,” says the poem. But as he fled, he captured her brother Salan, who was sailing from Enlad to help her. Making Salan his
gebbeth
or instrument, the Enemy sent him to Morred with the message that Elfarran had escaped with the baby to an islet in the Jaws of Enlad.
Trusting the messenger, Morred entered the trap. He barely escaped with his life. The Enemy pursued him from the east to the west of Enlad in a trail of ruin. On the Plains of Enlad, meeting the companions who had stayed loyal to him, most of them sailors who had brought their ships to Enlad to aid him, Morred turned and gave battle. The Enemy would not confront him directly, but sent Morred’s own spell-bound warriors to fight him, and worse, sent sorceries that shriveled up the bodies of his men till they “living, seemed the black thirst-dead of the desert.” To spare his people, Morred withdrew.
As he left the battlefield it began to rain, and he saw his enemy’s true name written in raindrops in the dust.
Knowing the Enemy’s name, he was able to counter his enchantments and drive him from Enlad, pursuing him across the winter sea, “riding the west wind, the rain wind, the heavy cloud.” Each had met his match, and in their final confrontation, somewhere in the Sea of Éa, both perished.
In the rage of his agony the Enemy raised up a great wave and sent it speeding to overwhelm the island of Soléa. Elfarran knew this, as she knew the moment of Morred’s death. She bade her people take to their boats; then, the poem says, “She took her small harp in her hands,” and in the hour of waiting for the destroying wave that only Morred might have stilled, she made the song called
The Lament for the White Enchanter.
The island was drowned beneath the sea, and Elfarran with it. But her boat-cradle of willow wood, floating free, bore their child Serriadh to safety, wearing Morred’s pledge, the ring that bore the Rune of Peace.
On maps of the Archipelago, the island Soléa is signified by a white space or a whirlpool.
After Morred, seven more kings and queens ruled from Enlad, and the realm increased steadily in size and prosperity.
The Kings of Havnor
A century and a half after Morred’s death, King Akambar, a prince of Shelieth on Way, moved the court to Havnor and made Havnor Great Port the capital of the kingdom. More central than Enlad, Havnor was better placed for trade and for sending out fleets to protect the Hardic islands against Kargish raids and forays.
The history of the Fourteen Kings of Havnor (actually six kings and eight queens, ~150–400) is told in the
Havnorian Lay.
Tracing descent both through the male and the female lines, and intermarrying with various noble houses of the Archipelago, the royal house embraced five principalities: the House of Enlad, the oldest, tracing direct descent from Morred and Serriadh; the Houses of Shelieth, Éa, and Havnor; and lastly the House of Ilien. Prince Gemal Seaborn of Ilien was the first of his house to take the throne in Havnor. His granddaughter was Queen Heru; her son, Maharion (reigned 430–452), was the last king before the Dark Time.
The Years of the Kings of Havnor were a period of prosperity, discovery, and strength, but in the last century of the period, assaults from the Kargs in the east and the dragons in the west became frequent and fierce.
Kings, lords, and Islemen charged with defending the islands of the Archipelago came to rely increasingly on wizards to fend off dragons and Kargish fleets. In the
Havnorian Lay
and
The Deed of the Dragonlords,
as the tale goes on, the names and exploits of these wizards begin to eclipse those of the kings.
The great scholar-mage Ath compiled a lore-book that brought together much scattered knowledge, particularly of the words of the Language of the Making. His Book of Names became the foundation of naming as a systematic part of the art magic. Ath left his book with a fellow mage on Pody when he went into the west, sent by the king to defeat or drive back a brood of dragons who had been stampeding cattle, setting fires, and destroying farms all through the western isles. Somewhere west of Ensmer, Ath confronted the great dragon Orm. Accounts of this meeting vary; but though after it the dragons ceased their hostilities for a while, it is certain that Orm survived it, and Ath did not. His book, lost for centuries, is now in the Isolate Tower on Roke.
The food of dragons is said to be light, or fire; they kill in rage, to defend their young, or for sport, but never eat their kill. Since time immemorial, until the reign of Heru, they had used only the outmost isles of the West Reach—which may have been the easternmost borders of their own realm—for meeting and breeding, and had seldom even been seen by most of the islanders. Naturally irritable and arrogant, the dragons may have felt threatened by the increasing population and prosperity of the Inner Lands, which brought constant boat traffic even out in the West Reach. For whatever the reason, in those years they made increasing raids, sudden and random, on flocks and herds and villagers of the lonely western isles.
A tale of the
Vedurnan
or Division, known in Hur-at-Hur, says:
Men chose the yoke,
dragons the wing.
Men to own,
dragons no thing.
That is, human beings chose to have possessions and dragons chose not to. But, as there are ascetics among humans, some dragons are greedy for shining things, gold, jewels; one was Yevaud, who sometimes came among people in human form, and who made the rich Isle of Pendor into a dragon nursery, until driven back into the west by Ged. But the marauding dragons of the
Lay
and the songs seem to have been moved not so much by greed as by anger, a sense of having been cheated, betrayed.
The deeds and lays that tell of raids by dragons and counterforays by wizards portray the dragons as pitiless as any wild animal, terrifying, unpredictable, yet intelligent, sometimes wiser than the wizards. Though they speak the True Speech, they are endlessly devious. Some of them clearly enjoy battles of wits with wizards, “splitting arguments with a forked tongue.” Like human beings, all but the greatest of them conceal their true names. In the lay
Hasa’s Voyage,
the dragons appear as formidable but feeling beings, whose anger at the invading human fleet is justified by their love of their own desolate domain. They address the hero:
Sail home to the houses of the sunrise, Hasa.
Leave to our wings the long winds of the west,
leave us the air-sea, the unknown, the utmost . . .
Maharion and Erreth-Akbe
Queen Heru, called the Eagle, inherited the throne from her father, Denggemal of the House of Ilien. Her consort Aiman was of the House of Morred. When she had ruled thirty years she gave the crown to their son Maharion.
Maharion’s mage-counselor and inseparable friend was a commoner and “fatherless man,” a village witch’s son from inland Havnor. The most beloved hero of the Archipelago, his story is told in
The Deed of Erreth-Akbe,
which bards sing at the Long Dance of midsummer.
Erreth-Akbe’s gifts in magic became apparent when he was still a boy. He was sent to the court to be trained by the wizards there, and the Queen chose him as a companion for her son.
Maharion and Erreth-Akbe became “heart’s brothers.” They spent ten years together fighting the Kargs, whose occasional forays from the East had in recent times become a slave-taking, colonising invasion. Venway, Torheven and the Torikles, Spevy, Perregal, and parts of Gont were under Kargish dominion for a generation or longer. At Shelieth on Way, Erreth-Akbe worked a great magic against the Kargish forces, who had landed in “a thousand ships” on Waymarsh and were swarming across the mainland. Using an invocation of the Old Powers called the Waterlore (perhaps the same that Elfarran had used on Soléa against the Enemy), he turned the waters of the Fountains of Shelieth—sacred springs and pools in the gardens of the Lords of Way—into a flood that swept the invaders back to the seacoast, where Maharion’s army awaited them. No ship of the fleet returned to Karego-At.
Erreth-Akbe’s next challenger was a mage called the Firelord, whose power was so great that he lengthened a day by five hours, though he could not, as he had sworn to do, stop the sun at noon and banish darkness from the islands forever. The Firelord took dragon form to fight Erreth-Akbe, but was defeated at last, at the cost of the forests and cities of Ilien, which he set afire as he fought.
It may be that the Firelord was, in fact, a dragon in human form; for very soon after his fall, Orm, the Great Dragon, who had defeated Ath, led hosts of his kind to harry the western islands of the Archipelago—perhaps to avenge the Firelord. These fiery flights caused great terror, and hundreds of boats carried people fleeing from Paln and Semel to the Inner Islands; but the dragons were not doing as much damage as the Kargs, and Maharion judged the urgent danger lay in the east. While he himself went west to fight dragons, he sent Erreth-Akbe east to try to establish peace with the King of the Kargad Lands.
Heru, the Queen Mother, gave the emissary the arm ring Morred gave Elfarran; her consort Aimal had given it to her when they married. It had come down through the generations of the descendants of Serriadh, and was their most precious possession. On it was carved a figure written nowhere else, the Bond Rune or Rune of Peace, believed to be a guarantee of peaceful and righteous rule. “Let the Kargish king wear Morred’s ring,” the Queen Mother said. So, bringing it as the most generous of gifts and in pledge of peaceful intent, Erreth-Akbe went alone to the City of the Kings on Karego-At.