“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?” Ged’s mentor Ogion asks him as Ged contemplates leaving Ogion’s tutelage and traveling to Roke to attend a prestigious school for wizards. With the careful, deliberate Ogion, Ged knows, he will learn intricate magic but must remain beholden to his master’s careful disbursement of knowledge and information. On Roke, however, Ged knows that he will learn as fast as he is able, speeding toward a vast accrual of power. As Ged pursues the power he believes he’s destined for, however, he finds himself in for a rude awakening. In charting Ged’s journey, Ursula K. Le Guin ultimately argues that the reckless, impatient pursuit of power—without knowledge, patience, and skill to ground that power—is not just useless but dangerous.
At the beginning of the novel, Ged yearns for power, glory, and fame despite Ogion’s attempts to slowly and holistically teach Ged small bits of magic. Frustrated by Ogion’s slow pace, Ged defies his master, first by reading forbidden, dangerous spell books, and secondly by deciding to abandon Ogion’s tutelage and pursue fame and power on the isle of Roke at a prestigious school for wizards. “Any craft you undertake to learn you will learn, for your power is great. Greater even than your pride, I hope,” Ogion tells Ged as Ged leaves, demonstrating the fact that while Ged is following the thread of power and pride, Ogion instead longs for Ged to focus on simply learning well and becoming the best wizard he can be. On the isle of Roke, Ged continues his pursuit of power and glory as he grapples with his fellow pupil Jasper, a gifted illusionist, for clout and renown. Ged’s power struggle with Jasper perhaps best encapsulates Ged’s central conflict between knowledge and patience versus power and pride. Ged is so anxious to prove his powers to Jasper—and to the rest of their cohort—that he foolishly performs an act of magic outside of his expertise and unleashes a terrible, horrific shadow being into the world. Ged is horribly maimed in the encounter and forced to spend months in bed recovering. Ged’s breakneck pursuit of power without knowledge and pride without skill nearly kills him, demonstrating Le Guin’s assertion that power for power’s sake is a dangerous thing.
As the novel progresses, Le Guin continues to show how knowledge and patience are more important tools in life than power, pride, glory, or fame. In the wake of his first encounter with the shadow, Ged becomes a more patient person—a person invested in a holistic education based in knowledge, wit, and careful thought rather than rash action or grand displays of power. This change in Ged is evidenced by several important choices he makes relating to the pursuit of power and glory—a pursuit that was once central to his life, but that has since been replaced by a quest for knowledge and holistic understanding of the world. First, when it is time for Ged to leave school, he agrees to take an assignment to help protect the island of Low Torning, a small and rural place where there is “no fame, no wealth, maybe no risk” according to the Archmage of the school on Roke. Ged nevertheless accepts the post: “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,” Le Guin writes of Ged’s mental and emotional state as he leaves school. This demonstrates that experiencing the consequences of power for power’s sake has fundamentally changed Ged. Ged’s thirst for power is tested once again when he ventures to Pendor to protect the people of Low Torning from Yevaud, a gigantic, fearsome dragon who lives there. When Ged encounters Yevaud and binds Yevaud to his will by speaking Yevaud’s true name, Yevaud offers Ged the key to “master[ing]” and besting the shadow that Ged senses is pursuing him and threatening his life. Yevaud offers Ged the power to best his shadow, claiming to know the shadow’s true name—yet Ged refuses Yevaud’s help, knowing that to simply best the shadow without fully understanding it and taming it himself would be an empty and perhaps even dangerous act.
Ged’s fundamental predicament is feeling torn between the pursuit of power, pride, and glory and the hard-to-swallow awareness that without dedication, time, and careful studying, he will never ascend to the heights he longs to reach. Ged’s journey from fiery, impatient, headstrong boy into a more patient, open, and thoughtful young man is a difficult one, and yet his experiences along the way shape him into the person he was always meant to become.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Knowledge and Patience vs. Power and Pride ThemeTracker
Knowledge and Patience vs. Power and Pride Quotes in A Wizard of Earthsea
Many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.
"You want to work spells," Ogion said presently, striding along. […] Wait. Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience. What is that herb by the path?"
[…]
"I don't know."
"Fourfoil, they call it." Ogion had halted, the coppershod foot of his staff near the little weed, so Ged looked closely at the plant, and plucked a dry seedpod from it, and finally asked, since Ogion said nothing more, "What is its use, Master?"
"None I know of."
“Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”
“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…”
If the student complained the Master might say nothing, but lengthen the list; or he might say, "He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea."
Only for a moment did the spirit glimmer there. Then the sallow oval between Ged’s arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged's face.
"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.
"If you could name it you could master it, maybe, little wizard. Maybe I could tell you its name, when I see it close by. And it will come close, if you wait about my isle. It will come wherever you come. If you do not want it to come close you must run, and run, and keep running from it. And yet it will follow you. Would you like to know its name?"
"Leave me at Serd and sail where you like. It's not against your ship this wind blows, but against me."
"Against you, a wizard of Roke?"
"Have you never heard of the Roke-wind, master?"
“Aye, that keeps off evil powers from the Isle of the Wise, but what has that to do with you, a Dragontamer?"
"That is between me and my shadow," Ged answered shortly, as a wizard will; and he said no more as they went swiftly, with a steady wind and under clearing skies, back over the sea to Serd.
“It will speak of things that were, and are, and will be. It told of your coming, long before you came to this land. Will you ask a question of it now?"
“No."
"It will answer you."
"There is no question I would ask it."
"It might tell you," Serret said in her soft voice, "how you will defeat your enemy."
Ged stood mute.
"Do you fear the stone?" she asked as if unbelieving; and he answered, "Yes."
“But I know this: the Old Powers of earth are not for men to use. They were never given into our hands, and in our hands they work only ruin. Ill means, ill end. I was not drawn here, but driven here, and the force that drove me works to my undoing. I cannot help you."
"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.
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.
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.
