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1、【英文文学】地海故事集 Tales from EarthseaForewordAT THE END OF THE fourth book of Earthsea, Tehanu, the story had arrived at what I felt to be now. And, just as in the now of the so-called real world, I didnt know what would happen next. I could guess, foretell, fear, hope, but I didnt know.Unable to continue
2、 Tehanus story (because it hadnt happened yet) and foolishly assuming that the story of Ged and Tenar had reached its happily-ever-after, I gave the book a subtitle: The Last Book of Earthsea.O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a time, now isnt then.Seven or eight ye
3、ars after Tehanu was published, I was asked to write a story set in Earthsea. A mere glimpse at the place told me that things had been happening there while I wasnt looking. It was high time to go back and find out what was going on now.I also wanted information on various things that had happened b
4、ack then, before Ged and Tenar were born. A good deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke Island, about dragons, had begun to puzzle me. In order to understand current events, I needed to do some historical research, to spend some time in the Archives of the Archipelago.The way one does resear
5、ch into nonexistent history is to tell the story and find out what happened. I believe this isnt very different from what historians of the so-called real world do. Even if we are present at some historic event, do we comprehend it-can we even remember it-until we can tell it as a story? And for eve
6、nts in times or places outside our own experience, we have nothing to go on but the stories other people tell us. Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once its then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our ener
7、gy and honesty. If we let it drop from memory, only imagination can restore the least glimmer of it. If we lie about the past, forcing it to tell a story we want it to tell, to mean what we want it to mean, it loses its reality, becomes a fake. To bring the past along with us through time in the hol
8、d-alls of myth and history is a heavy undertaking; but as Lao Tzu says, wise people march along with the baggage wagons.When you construct or reconstruct a world that never existed, a wholly fictional history, the research is of a somewhat different order, but the basic impulse and techniques are mu
9、ch the same. You look at what happens and try to see why it happens, you listen to what the people there tell you and watch what they do, you think about it seriously, and you try to tell it honestly, so that the story will have weight and make sense.The five tales in this book explore or extend the
10、 world established by the first four Earthsea novels. Each is a story in its own right, but they will profit by being read after, not before, the novels.The Finder takes place about three hundred years before the time of the novels, in a dark and troubled time; its story casts light on how some of t
11、he customs and institutions of the Archipelago came to be. The Bones of the Earth is about the wizards who taught the wizard who first taught Ged, and shows that it takes more than one mage to stop an earthquake. Darkrose and Diamond might take place at any time during the last couple of hundred yea
12、rs in Earthsea; after all, a love story can happen at any time, anywhere. On the High Marsh is a story from the brief but eventful six years that Ged was Archmage of Earthsea. And the last story, Dragonfly, which takes place a few years after the end of Tehanu, is the bridge between that book and th
13、e next one, The Other Wind (to be published soon). A dragon bridge.So that my mind could move about among the years and centuries without getting things all out of order, and to keep contradictions and discrepancies at a minimum while I was writing these stories, I became (somewhat) more systematic
14、and methodical, and put my knowledge of the peoples and their history together into A Description of Earthsea. Its function is like that of the first big map I drew of all the Archipelago and the Reaches, when I began to work on A Wizard of Earthsea over thirty years ago: I needed to know where thin
15、gs are, and how to get from here to there-in time as well as in space.Because this kind of fictional fact, like maps of imaginary realms, is of real interest to some readers, I include the description after the stories. I also redrew the geographical maps for this book, and while doing so, happily d
16、iscovered a very old one in the Archives in Havnor.In the years since I began to write about Earthsea Ive changed, of course, and so have the people who read the books. All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, l
17、arge simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.Its unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable.We cherish the old stories for the
18、ir changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go there and back again, and there is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill. So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.And the mills of cap
19、italism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their act
20、ors to dolls, and their truth- telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers a
21、re copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life-of a s
22、ort, for a while.Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was fores
23、t and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.We have inhabited both the actual and the imagina
24、ry realms for a long time. But we dont live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbos lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and
25、 met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus cest la meme chose, plus fa change.Its been a joy to me to go back to Earthsea and find it still there, entirely familiar, and yet changed and still changing. What I thought was going to happen isnt whats happening, people arent who-or what-I thought they were, and
26、 I lose my way on islands I thought I knew by heart.So these are reports of my explorations and discoveries: tales from Earthsea for those who have liked or think they might like the place, and who are willing to accept these hypotheses: things change: authors and wizards are not always to be truste
27、d: nobody can explain a dragon.Chapter 1 In the Dark TimeTHIS IS THE FIRST PAGE of the Book of the Dark, written some six hundred years ago in Berila, on Enlad:After Elfarran and Morred perished and the Isle of Solea sank beneath the sea, the Council of the Wise governed for the child Serriadh until
28、 he took the throne. His reign was bright but brief. The kings who followed him in Enlad were seven, and their realm increased in peace and wealth. Then the dragons came to raid among the western lands, and wizards went out in vain against them. King Akambar moved the court from Berila in Enlad to t
29、he City of Havnor, whence he sent out his fleet against invaders from the Kargad Lands and drove them back into the East. But still they sent raiding ships even as far as the Inmost Sea. Of the fourteen Kings of Havnor the last was Maharion, who made peace both with the dragons and the Kargs, but at
30、 great cost. And after the Ring of the Runes was broken, and Erreth-Akbe died with the great dragon, and Maharion the Brave was killed by treachery, it seemed that no good thing happened in the Archipelago.Many claimed Maharions throne, but none could keep it, and the quarrels of the claimants divid
31、ed all loyalties. No commonwealth was left and no justice, only the will of the wealthy. Men of noble houses, merchants, and pirates, any who could hire soldiers and wizards called himself a lord, claiming lands and cities as his property. The warlords made those they conquered slaves, and those the
32、y hired were in truth slaves, having only their masters to safeguard them from rival warlords seizing the lands, and sea-pirates raiding the ports, and bands and hordes of lawless, miserable men dispossessed of their living, driven by hunger to raid and rob.The Book of the Dark, written late in the
33、time it tells of, is a compilation of self-contradictory histories, partial biographies, and garbled legends. But its the best of the records that survived the dark years. Wanting praise, not history, the warlords burnt the books in which the poor and powerless might learn what power is.But when the
34、 lore-books of a wizard came into a warlords hands he was likely to treat them with caution, locking them away to keep them harmless or giving them to a wizard in his hire to do with as he wished. In the margins of the spells and word lists and in the endpapers of these books of lore a wizard or his
35、 prentice might record a plague, a famine, a raid, a change of masters, along with the spells worked in such events and their success or unsuccess. Such random records reveal a clear moment here and there, though all between those moments is darkness. They are like glimpses of a lighted ship far out
36、 at sea, in darkness, in the rain.And there are songs, old lays and ballads from small islands and from the quiet uplands of Havnor, that tell the story of those years.Havnor Great Port is the city at the heart of the world, white-towered above its bay; on the tallest tower the sword of Erreth-Akbe
37、catches the first and last of daylight. Through that city passes all the trade and commerce and learning and craft of Earthsea, a wealth not hoarded. There the King sits, having returned after the healing of the Ring, in sign of healing. And in that city, in these latter days, men and women of the i
38、slands speak with dragons, in sign of change.But Havnor is also the Great Isle, a broad, rich land; and in the villages inland from the port, the farmlands of the slopes of Mount Onn, nothing ever changes much. There a song worth singing is likely to be sung again. There old men at the tavern talk o
39、f Morred as if they had known him when they too were young and heroes. There girls walking out to fetch the cows home tell stories of the women of the Hand, who are forgotten everywhere else in the world, even on Roke, but remembered among those silent, sunlit roads and fields and in the kitchens by
40、 the hearths where housewives work and talk.In the time of the kings, mages gathered in the court of Enlad and later in the court of Havnor to counsel the king and take counsel together, using their arts to pursue goals they agreed were good. But in the dark years, wizards sold their skills to the h
41、ighest bidder, pitting their powers one against the other in duels and combats of sorcery, careless of the evils they did, or worse than careless. Plagues and famines, the failure of springs of water, summers with no rain and years with no summer, the birth of sickly and monstrous young to sheep and
42、 cattle, the birth of sickly and monstrous children to the people of the isles-all these things were charged to the practices of wizards and witches, and all too often rightly so.So it became dangerous to practice sorcery, except under the protection of a strong warlord; and even then, if a wizard m
43、et up with one whose powers were greater than his own, he might be destroyed. And if a wizard let down his guard among the common folk, they too might destroy him if they could, seeing him as the source of the worst evils they suffered, a malign being. In those years, in the minds of most people, al
44、l magic was black.It was then that village sorcery, and above all womens witchery, came into the ill repute that has clung to it since. Witches paid dearly for practicing the arts they thought of as their own. The care of pregnant beasts and women, birthing, teaching the songs and rites, the fertili
45、ty and order of field and garden, the building and care of the house and its furniture, the mining of ores and metals-these great things had always been in the charge of women. A rich lore of spells and charms to ensure the good outcome of such undertakings was shared among the witches. But when thi
46、ngs went wrong at the birth, or in the field, that would be the witches fault. And things went wrong more often than right, with the wizards warring, using poisons and curses recklessly to gain immediate advantage without thought for what followed after. They brought drought and storm, blights and f
47、ires and sicknesses across the land, and the village witch was punished for them. She didnt know why her charm of healing caused the wound to gangrene, why the child she brought into the world was imbecile, why her blessing seemed to burn the seed in the furrows and blight the apple on the tree. But
48、 for these ills, somebody had to be to blame: and the witch or sorcerer was there, right there in the village or the town, not off in the warlords castle or fort, not protected by armed men and spells of defense. Sorcerers and witches were drowned in the poisoned wells, burned in the withered fields
49、, buried alive to make the dead earth rich again.So the practice of their lore and the teaching of it had become perilous. Those who undertook it were often those already outcast, crippled, deranged, without family, old-women and men who had little to lose. The wise man and wise woman, trusted and held in reverence, gave way to the stock figures of the shuffling, impotent village sorcerer with his trickeries, the hag-witch with her potions used in aid of lust, jealousy, a