The Earthsea tv mini-series was mounted as a co-production between the US Sci-Fi Channel and Hallmark Entertainment, who have been responsible for a number of often excellent adaptations of classic works of literature and fantasy. The Earthsea series takes place in an archipelago of 1001 islands and concerns itself (principally) with the wizard Ged and his rise from novice to archmage. Some of Ursula Le Guin’s most famous books have been the Earthsea series, which consists of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) and two belated follow-ups – Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990) and The Other Wind (2001), as well as Tales from Earthsea (2001), a series of short stories set around the locale. Le Guin has won numerous Hugo and Nebula Awards for novels like The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) set on a planet where the inhabitants change sex The Lathe of Heaven (1971) about a man whose dreams end up altering reality the novella The Word for World is Forest (1972, expanded to a novel 1976) about the despoliation by colonists of an alien society whose entire world consists of a forest and The Dispossessed (1974), which offered a depiction of a society based on anarchist principles. Le Guin (1929-2018) is celebrated as one of the great writers of science-fiction and fantasy, and possibly the finest woman writer in the genre. At the same time, Ged dreams of Tenar and realises that the end of his quest may lie in the Tombs of Atuan. He is pursued by the gebbeth, which seeks to possess him and kills all it encounters. He is forced to leave the school and ventures out into Earthsea.

During a competition, Ged seeks to best a rival by conjuring the dead, only to inadvertently unleash a gebbeth shadow creature. Ged leaves Ogion and becomes an apprentice at the school for magicians on the isle of Roke. Kossil plots to poison the high priestess Thar and succeed her but Thar confounds this by appointing the bright young Tenar as her successor. Tygath wants to obtain the secrets to unlock the gates of the tombs that imprison The Nameless Ones to obtain the secret of immortality.

Meanwhile, Tygath has seduced Kossil, a handmaiden of the sisterhood that guards the Tombs of Atuan. Afterwards the magus Ogion takes Ged as an apprentice and gives him the true name of Sparrowhawk. As the Kargide warriors invade Gont, Ged conjures a mist that drives them away. Meanwhile, Tygath, the king of the Kargides from the isle of Atuan, receives a prophecy that a wizard will be his undoing and sends his troops forth out across the archipelago to find the wizard.

In the Village of Ten Elders on the island of Gont, the blacksmith’s son Ged wants to be a magician. The land of Earthsea is made up of an archipelago of 1001 islands.

The wizard of earthsea