In the world of the Earthsea archipelago, wizards and mages are bound by duty to use their gifts to help others in their home communities and beyond. After finishing his prenticeship (the word that denizens of Earthsea use in place of “apprenticeship”) at a school for wizards on the island of Roke, Ged finds himself torn between a sense of duty to fellowship, service, and good works carried out on small, unremarkable islands versus the larger pursuit of great deeds, heroism, and his own mortal struggle against the shadow creature that he unleashed upon the world while still in school. As the novel progresses and Ged comes to understand the true meaning of hard work and goodwill, Le Guin shows how while one may feel they are destined for greater things than rote duties, one can learn that living a life of responsibility to other people and service to one’s community is a heroic destiny in and of itself.
As she delves into Ged’s world, Le Guin shows how Ged must learn to see the beauty in his ability to offer his services as a wizard to his friends and neighbors rather than looking upon his destiny as a chore, a bore, or an imposition. While Ged is still a child known as Duny, he lives on a poor and isolated island where he learns charm work from his aunt, a local witch, and becomes versed in the uses of herbs, healing spells, and other minor helpful, protective enchantments. The root of Ged’s education is based in helping others to heal, grow, and stay safe. He comes to magic knowing that magic is a humble thing—its true purpose is not to bring one glory or renown, but rather to allow one to aid one’s community. In spite of Ged’s humble roots, as his skills with magic bring him more and more attention in his small community, he is told—and begins to truly believe—that he is destined for greatness. He begins to conceive of magic as a way to escape his unremarkable home, to make his mark on the world, and to become one of the greatest wizards ever to live. Ged’s hubris in his formative years ultimately leads him to pursue an education on the isle of Roke—but while there, Ged finds that the pursuit of power is not all it’s made out to be. After a terrible accident, in which Ged accidentally unleashes an evil shadow into the world, he begins reconsidering what his destiny might be—out of necessity, out of shame, and out of a deeper sense of self-understanding.
After his adventures in school on the isle of Roke, Ged is injured, humble, and wary of pursuing his former notions of a heroic destiny. Despite his former yearning for power and glory, Ged’s harmful and frightening act of hubris leads him to accepts a post on the poor, faraway island of Low Torning with grace and thankfulness. It does not even “enter his head that a wizard might be ashamed to perform such simple crafts.” Just a few years ago, Ged shirked the humble but essential practice of healing crafts and protective spells in pursuit of flashier, illusion-based magic that would allow him to demonstrate his might and prove that he was destined for greatness. Now, however, Ged has begun to see that duty to his fellow people may, in fact, be a great enough destiny for him. On Low Torning, Ged truly learns the value of serving others. Now a humbler, quieter version of the boy he once was, he quickly finds that the people of the island hold him in high regard as a former inhabitant of Roke, or “the Isle of the Wise”—yet the praise he garners and the attention he attracts make him uneasy and embarrassed. When he sets off for the island of Pendor to confront the young dragons who live there—dragons who will eventually fly eastward to wreak havoc on the poor, vulnerable Low Torning—Ged does not undertake the journey as a means of asserting his power, prowess, or skill as a wizard. He genuinely wants to serve the people of Low Torning by protecting them from any harm that might come their way. Throughout his encounters with the young dragons and their progenitor, Yevaud, Ged remains focused not on outsmarting the dragons, approaching their horde of gold, or matching them in battle: he focuses only on containing them to their isle, ensuring that they leave Low Torning be. This episode is proof of Ged’s realization that duty to others is a great destiny in and of itself. He does not need to use his encounter with the dragons to prove himself, to secure glory, or to begin spinning for himself another, grander destiny. Ged has accepted that his destiny as a wizard is to help others—and it is only after accepting that fact that he’ll begin performing the works that will bring him the renown he always sought. Though Ged’s power as a wizard brings him attention and the sense of pride he always longed for, he now knows that the only way to truly earn these things is to root his actions in a sense of service, duty, compassion, and humility.
Over the course of the novel, Ged transforms from an impatient, petulant boy who sees his gifts as a wizard worthy only for their abilities to bring him power, glory, and fame into a young man who appreciates the value of duty to one’s community and who understands the gravity of his destiny. Ged comes to see that his destiny to serve others is not mutually exclusive from a destiny in which he achieves greatness—and that, in fact, achieving the latter is not possible without fulfilling the former.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Duty and Destiny ThemeTracker
Duty and Destiny Quotes in A Wizard of Earthsea
“To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of the world, is to change the world. […] You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. […] It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
"Lord Gensher, I do not know what it was—the thing that came out of the spell and cleaved to me—"
"Nor do I know. It has no name. You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?”
"You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do..."
"There is no comfort in this place," the Archmage had said to Ged on the day he made him wizard, "no fame, no wealth, maybe no risk. Will you go?"
"I will go," Ged had replied; not from obedience only. Since the night on Roke Knoll his desire had turned as much against fame and display as once it had been set on them. Always now he doubted his strength and dreaded the trial of his power. Yet also the talk of dragons drew him with a great curiosity.
Either he must go down the hill into the desert lands and lightless cities of the dead, or he must step across the wall back into life, where the formless evil thing waited for him.
"I have no strength against the thing," Ged answered.
Ogion shook his head… […] "Strange," he said: "You had strength enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had strength enough to stand up to a dragon."
"It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength," Ged replied, and he shivered again as he thought of the dreamlike deathly cold of the Court of the Terrenon. “As for the dragon, I knew his name. The evil thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name."
“All things have a name," said Ogion.
"You must turn around."
"Turn around?"
"If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter."
There was a great wish in him to stay here on Gont, and forgoing all wizardry and venture, forgetting all power and horror, to live in peace like any man on the known, dear ground of his home land. That was his wish; but his will was other.
The shadow had tricked him out onto the moors in Osskil, and tricked him in the mist onto the rocks, and now would there be a third trick? Had he driven the thing here, or had it drawn him here, into a trap? He did not know. He knew only the torment of dread, and the certainty that he must go ahead and do what he had set out to do: hunt down the evil, follow his terror to its source.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
"Pride was ever your mind's master," his friend said smiling, as if they talked of a matter of small concern to either. "Now think: it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fails, should there not be another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the shadow would be a fearful power then. And if you defeat the thing, should there not be another there who will tell of it in the Archipelago, that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of no use to you; yet I think I should go with you."
On the course on which they were embarked, the saying of the least spell might change chance and move the balance of power and of doom: for they went now toward the very center of that balance, toward the place where light and darkness meet. Those who travel thus say no word carelessly.
“The wound is healed,” [Ged] said, “I am whole, I am free.” […]
And [Vetch] began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
In the Deed of Ged nothing is told of that voyage nor of Ged's meeting with the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragons' Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world.
