A Wizard of Earthsea by Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world.
This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death's threshold to restore the balance.
With stories as perennial and universally beloved as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of The Rings—but also unlike anything but themselves—Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels are some of the most acclaimed and awarded works in literature. They have received accolades such as the National Book Award, a Newbery Honor, the Nebula Award, and many more honors, commemorating their enduring place in the hearts and minds of readers and the literary world alike.
You the Reader have Reader’s Rights. One of them is to pronounce made-up names and words the way you want to.
But people do like to know how the maker-up pronounces them. And since this does affect the sound and rhythm of a sentence – and since names are magic in Earthsea – here are some guidelines. In my invented names and words, usually:
A is ah
E is eh
I is ee
O is oh
U is oo
EY rhymes with they
AY rhymes with either they or high
All the E’s are pronounced, including final e: Meshe = mesheh.
You have to take your chances with G, but usually it’s G as in get, not G as in gem. So Ged is Ged not Jed, Ogion rhymes with “bogey on.”
(A couple of names in Left Hand are pronounced as if in English: Tibe is not tee-beh, but rhymes with bribe. Karhide sounds like two English words, car-hide.)
Where to put the stress? No general rule. (Yeowe is yeh-OH-weh, not YOWie!)
Don’t worry about it. Say things the way they sound good to you.
Or you could get one of the audio recordings of the book. As a rule the producers and performers take great care to check the pronunciations with me.
(But in an early British recorded reading of Wizard, well honey, sure enough, there was Jed the Kentucky Mountain Man. And in the American film “based on” A Wizard of Earthsea, Ogion became oh-JYE-on. But that wasn’t the the worst by a long shot. He became the only non-white man in the whole Archipelago – they’d poured Clorox on all the others.)
