{"id":11371,"date":"2015-10-26T16:42:02","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T16:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/from-beowulf-to-tolkien-to-countless-formulaic\/"},"modified":"2015-10-26T16:42:02","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T16:42:02","slug":"from-beowulf-to-tolkien-to-countless-formulaic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/from-beowulf-to-tolkien-to-countless-formulaic\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality\u2019s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged\u2019s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose \u2013 to master it, by learning its nature and its name. \u201cAll my acts have their echo in it,\u201d says Ged of his shadow; \u201cit is my creature.\u201d The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called \u201cindividuation\u201d, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: \u201cIn serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal \u2026 To do good, heroes must know or learn that the \u2018axis of evil\u2019 is within them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p>David Mitchell on Earthsea has been linked all over the place, and rightfully so. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2015\/oct\/23\/david-mitchell-wizard-of-earthsea-tolkien-george-rr-martin\">Read the rest here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve said it before, but you take Tombs of Atuan away from me as a child, and you have a very different writer.<\/p>\n<p>(via <a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/kierongillen.tumblr.com\/\">kierongillen<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality\u2019s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2Xp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}