" The Word of Unbinding " may be set any time before The Other Wind, but the differences in magical terminology, the presence of the otherwise unknown " trolls " ( whom Le Guin notes " became extinct in Earthsea at some point "), and the character of the evil wizard Voll the Fell suggest that it might be appropriately placed either before the time of Morred, or later, in the Dark Times after the death of Maharion and before the founding of the school on Roke ; in either case before " The Finder ".

In her Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling observed that a wizard who became a rat had a rat's brain ( although the Animagus talent bypasses this problem ), and in her Earthsea books, Ursula K. Le Guin depicts an animal form as slowly transforming the wizard's mind, so that the dolphin, or bear, or other creature forgets it was human and can not change back, a voluntary shapeshifting becoming an imprisoning metamorphosis.

He later became a Web editor at Hachette Filipacchi, creating sites for Sound & Vision and Popular Photography magazines, and, from 2001 to 2004, at the Sci-Fi Channel television network, creating sites for Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, The X-Files, The Incredible Hulk, Legend of Earthsea and other television shows, movies and miniseries.

In the setting of the five Earthsea novels, Ged, his enemy Cob, King Lebannen and Tehanu are the only dragonlords.

Themes of Jungian Psychology also are prominent in Le Guin's writing ; for example, her Earthsea fantasy collection explores archetypal shadow and anima images.

Le Guin was highly critical of the adaptation, calling it a " far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned ", objecting both to the use of white actors for her red, brown, or black-skinned characters, and to the way she was " cut out of the process ".

He comes to the Tombs in order to find the long-lost half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, a magical talisman necessary for peace in Earthsea, which had been broken centuries before.

In mid-2004, Kreuk took the role of Tenar for the Sci Fi Channel two-part miniseries Legend of Earthsea.

Earthsea is a fictional realm originally created by Ursula K. Le Guin for her short story " The Word of Unbinding ", published in 1964.

The racial characteristics of the people of Earthsea are for the most part " red-brown " in coloring, like Native Americans ; in the South and East Reach and on Way, they are much darker brown, but with straight black hair ; in Osskil, they have a more central or eastern European look, though still with dark skin, and the Kargs resemble predominantly blond northern Europeans.

Each novel in the series has received a literary award, including the 1969 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction & the 1979 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for A Wizard of Earthsea, the 1972 Newbery Honor for The Tombs of Atuan, the 1973 National Book Award for Children's Books for The Farthest Shore, the 1990 Nebula Award for Best Novel for Tehanu, and the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for The Other Wind.

This adaptation was narrated by Dame Judi Dench, with Michael Maloney as Ged, and used a wide range of actors with different regional and social accents to emphasize the origins of the Earthsea characters ( for instance, Estarriol and others from the East Reach were played by actors with Southern Welsh accents ).

The U. S .- based Sci Fi Channel broadcast a three-hour loose adaptation for television of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan in December 2004, and was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK in Easter 2005 in two parts.

This story and The Word of Unbinding convey Le Guin's initial concepts for the Earthsea realm, most importantly its places and physical manifestation, but not the characters appearing in the novels.

Yavaud had turned himself into a human being for the purpose of hiding, like Ged turned into a bird in A Wizard of Earthsea and Festin into a fish in The Word of Unbinding, and there is no suggestion that being human was in any way an inherent nature for him.

Along with the story " The Rule of Names ", this story conveys Le Guin's initial concepts for the Earthsea realm, most importantly its places and physical manifestation, but not the characters appearing in the novels.

In A Wizard of Earthsea Ged is trapped in the form of hawk, and would have remained a bird but for Ogion's changing him back.

The third and fourth Earthsea books were used as the basis of the 2006 animated film.

In 2004 the Sci Fi Channel adapted the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy as the miniseries Legend of Earthsea.

All are set in the world of Earthsea, as are seven short stories by Le Guin, two of which are not collected in any of these books.

However, in later books Le Guin delves deeper into the history of Earthsea and reveals some early events that helped shape the dichotomy of male-female magic.

Trolls went extinct in the realm of Earthsea at an unspecified time before the events described in the books.

The Other Wind continues the stories of Earthsea characters Lebannen, Tenar, Tehanu, and, in a minor role, Ged, from the previous books.

; Selidor: A remote island in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books.

In the above, Witch World is a mirror image of Ursula Le Guin's " Earthsea " series, where to begin with magic is shown as male-dominated, with women's magic despised as " weak " and " wicked ", and where it is assumed that " a mage who makes love thereby unmakes his power "-with both assumptions being increasingly challenged in later books of the series and shown be derived from prejudices of a conservative male hierarchy.

Reviewing the mini-series, the book The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy claimed Legend of Earthsea " totally missed the point " of Le Guin's novels, " ripping out all the subtlety, nuance and beauty of the books and inserting boring cliches, painful stereotypes and a very unwelcome " epic " war in their place ".

The impact that his books, combined with the success of several other series such as C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series and Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, helped cement the genre's popularity and gave birth to the current wave of fantasy literature.

The author, Ursula K. Le Guin, remembers this differently: " In August 2005, Mr Toshio Suzuki of Studio Ghibli came with Mr Hayao Miyazaki to talk with me and my son ( who controls the trust which owns the Earthsea copyrights ).

Ged brings her with him back to Havnor where they are received in triumph, and the reunited ring of Erreth-akbe ushers in a new era of peace to Earthsea.

Technologically, Earthsea is an early Iron Age society, with bronze used in places where iron is scarce.

Earthsea, with the exception of the Kargad lands, is a literate society using a writing system called the " Hardic runes.

Magic is a central part of life in most of Earthsea, with the exception of the Kargish lands, where it is banned.

It is revealed in Tales from Earthsea that once, the women of power spoke with and learned from the Old Powers, but in Ged's age, they are considered evil.

The two 1964 stories are not entirely consistent with the others and they have no certain place in Earthsea chronology.

Titled Legend of Earthsea, it angered fans of the Earthsea novels ( and Le Guin herself ) with the announcement that Ged and the vast majority of the other characters would be played by Caucasians and with the Dramatis personæ posted on the official website ( see below ), which featured several original characters such as " The Archmagus " and " King Tygath ", " Diana ", " Penelope ", and " Marion ", and several references to " Kargide " ( not Kargad, Karg, or Kargish ) characters.

* Chronicles of Earthsea Guardian Unlimited Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, February 9, 2004.

The story is set on Sattins Island, a small rural island among the Islands of Earthsea, and opens with the schoolteacher, Palani, introducing the concept of naming to her pupils: people have one name as children, then are given their adult name at puberty, but this name must be kept private as it can be used by magicians to cast spells on the person.

* Review of A Wizard of Earthsea by J. K. Pelletier

simple: A Wizard of Earthsea

* A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968 ( Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner, 1979 )

Its events take place a few years after A Wizard of Earthsea and around two decades before The Farthest Shore.

The numbing routine of Arha's world is dramatically disrupted when she is fifteen years old by the arrival of Ged, the protagonist of A Wizard of Earthsea.

" The name suggests similarity to the Germanic runes, but there are supposed to be hundreds of runes in use ( in A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged learns to read and write " The Six Hundred Runes of Hardic "), suggesting a logographic system similar to Chinese.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, the young wizard Ged guesses a dragon's true name and forces him to promise not to attack people again.

In The Wizard of Earthsea, a man possessed by a creature that Ged inadvertently summoned nearly takes the wizard unawares.

* A Wizard of Earthsea ( Parnassus Press, 1968 )

* A Wizard of Earthsea

" The Rule of Names " apparently takes place some time in ( about ) the century before A Wizard of Earthsea ; Le Guin writes that the main character " must have been on Sattins Island some decades or centuries before Ged found him .... on the Isle of Pendor ".

" The Rule of Names " has some plot links to A Wizard of Earthsea, while " Darkrose and Diamond " is an entirely independent story.

" The Bones of the Earth " takes place early in Ged's lifetime, ten years before his apprenticeship to Ogion, and is closely linked to A Wizard of Earthsea.

A BBC-produced two-hour radio dramatisation of A Wizard of Earthsea was originally broadcast on Radio 4 on December 26, 1996.

* Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequels

Circe transforms intruders to her island into swine, whereas Ged, in A Wizard of Earthsea, becomes a hawk to escape an evil wizard's stronghold.

In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged knows this tale as an ancient bit of lore and makes a desperate gamble based on it.

In this story, the Earthsea realm, which was later made famous by A Wizard of Earthsea, was first introduced.