Staff Pick: The Tombs of Atuan

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Power of Names

By Delilah Deckert

It is no secret that talking about Ursula K. Le Guin is an easy and all too common choice when talking about great authors of the Pacific Northwest. I think that is for a good reason. Le Guin is a writer of not only great skill but great empathy and depth. My staff pick for the month is the Earthsea series by Le Guin, and while I do recommend the entire series, my favorite book is the second, The Tombs of Atuan.

Tombs does so much as a sequel and as an interesting story in its own right. The first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, gives you not only an amazing character study on the classic wizard archetype but a vast and lived-in world that feels realistic and allows you to really believe in its secondary reality. In contrast, Tombs says yes we have this world, it’s vast and magical and you know about so much of it, but you’re going to see so little of it. You’re going to be taken from this perspective of someone who knows and learns about the world and sees the world and we are going to give you instead the perspective of a young woman who knows half truths and lies, who is expected to see none of the world. No magic, no dragons, just a young girl and a tomb.

Now if that doesn’t sell you, let me tell you why this book is important to me. In the Earthsea series magic has so much to do with names, to control wind and water you must know its name. Every branch on every tree, every leaf, has its own name. 

There is little magic to be found in The Tombs of Atuan but it too deals with the power of names. And this time, instead of names being magic, being powerful and able to change the world around them, names have the very real power to put someone in a place they don’t want to be. Names are power because they can dictate someone’s role in life. In The Tombs of Atuan that is just what happens. Without spoiling too much, our protagonist is a young woman who lives in a cult in the middle of nowhere. She was taken there as a child, told she was the reincarnation of a priestess, and forced to become her. To take a name that is not her own, to live and die under the conditions others have forced upon her.

Without meaning to, Le Guin created a fantasy narrative that holds up today not only as a work of amazing fiction, but as a work that to me, as a transgender woman, made me feel seen in a way that I hadn’t before. It is all too often that I have read fantasy novels about strong cisgendered, heterosexual men, but never a woman with a name that is not her own. The Tombs of Atuan shows us an average woman, who does great things to be free. In a world that feels more oppressive by the day, being free is the bravest thing someone can do.