Whilst The Hobbit offers a Western interpretation of good and evil, Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea propose an alternative perspective of what good and evil entail. These two worlds differ in many different ways. For example, the landscape of the Hobbit tends to resemble that of Europe and all the characters tend to be described with European colouring. Whereas Earthsea is a mixture of islands that house “isolated communities”, the cultures and people of each islands ranging from “pale haired folk” in Atuan to the “coppery brown in colour” of Ged’s people; thus showing a more diverse culture than that of Tolkien’s world (Lenz, 45). Furthermore, whereas The Hobbit is influenced by the Western ideology of Christianity, Earthsea is influenced
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Whilst Hobbit punishes those who succumb to the dark tendencies and wishes to rid the world of evil completely, Earthsea strives to covey that acceptance of one’s own darkness, their shadow is curtail. For Le Guin, “the man’s mistake is not following the shadow. It goes ahead of him, as he sits there at his window, and he cuts it off from himself” (Le Guin “Shadow”, 50). By not acknowledging their darkness and weaknesses, characters in The Hobbit allow their inner evil to take over their behaviour completely. However Ged is able to realise that every person has this darkness and the only way to stop the inner evil from taking over and disrupting the balance, is to acknowledge its existence. Striving to maintain that balance by thinking carefully about the consequences of one’s actions.
To conclude, fantasy is a useful genre that can be utilised to get readers to think critically about real-world issues. The novels The Hobbit and The Wizard of Earthsea have managed to present the struggle of good and evil in different ways based on the mutual subtext it was drawn upon. Whilst Tolkien chooses to present good and evil as a struggle to resist temptation, Le Guin suggests that good and evil are both play an important role in maintaining the balance of the self, and to ignore ones inner evil would be
Whilst Hobbit punishes those who succumb to the dark tendencies and wishes to rid the world of evil completely, Earthsea strives to covey that acceptance of one’s own darkness, their shadow is curtail. For Le Guin, “the man’s mistake is not following the shadow. It goes ahead of him, as he sits there at his window, and he cuts it off from himself” (Le Guin “Shadow”, 50). By not acknowledging their darkness and weaknesses, characters in The Hobbit allow their inner evil to take over their behaviour completely. However Ged is able to realise that every person has this darkness and the only way to stop the inner evil from taking over and disrupting the balance, is to acknowledge its existence. Striving to maintain that balance by thinking carefully about the consequences of one’s actions.
To conclude, fantasy is a useful genre that can be utilised to get readers to think critically about real-world issues. The novels The Hobbit and The Wizard of Earthsea have managed to present the struggle of good and evil in different ways based on the mutual subtext it was drawn upon. Whilst Tolkien chooses to present good and evil as a struggle to resist temptation, Le Guin suggests that good and evil are both play an important role in maintaining the balance of the self, and to ignore ones inner evil would be