LITERATURE AND THE
SOURCES OF HISTORY
A millennium and a half ago or more, the runes of Hardic were developed so as to permit narrative writing. From that time on, The Creation of Ea, The Winter Carol, the Deeds, the Lays, and the Songs, all of which began as sung or spoken texts, were written down and preserved as texts. They continue to exist in both forms. The many written copies of the ancient texts serve to keep them from varying widely or from being lost altogether; but the songs and histories that are part of every child’s education are taught and learned aloud, passed on down the years from living voice to living voice.
Old Hardic differs in vocabulary and pronunciation from the current speech, but the rote learning and regular speaking and hearing of the classics keeps the archaic language meaningful (and probably puts some brake on linguistic drift in daily speech), while the Hardic runes, like Chinese characters, can accommodate widely varying pronunciations and shifts of meaning.
Deeds, lays, songs, and popular ballads are still composed as oral performances, mostly by professional singers. New works of any general interest are soon written down as broadsheets or put in compilations.
Whether performed or read silently, all such poems and songs are consciously valued for their content, not for their literary qualities, which range from high to nil. Loose regular meter, alliteration, stylised phrasing, and structuring by repetition are the principal poetic devices. Content includes mythic, epic, and historical narrative, geographical descriptions, practical observations concerning nature, agriculture, sea lore, and crafts, cautionary tales and parables, philosophical, visionary, and spiritual poetry, and love songs. The deeds and lays are usually chanted, the ballads sung, often with a percussion accompaniment; professional chanters and singers may sing with the harp, the viol, drums, and other instruments. The songs generally have less narrative content, and many are valued and preserved mostly for the tune.
Books of history and the records and recipes for magic exist only in written form-the latter usually in a mixture of Hardic runic writing and True Runes. Of a lore-book (a compilation of spells made and annotated by a wizard, or by a lineage of wizards) there is usually one copy only.
It is often a matter of considerable importance that the words of these lore-books not be spoken aloud.
The Osskili use the Hardic runes to write their language, since they trade mostly with Hardic-speaking lands.
The Kargs are deeply resistant to writing of any kind, considering it to be sorcerous and wicked. They keep complex accounts and records in weavings of different colors and weights of yarn, and are expert mathematicians, using base twelve; but only since the Godkings came to power have they employed any kind of symbolic writing, and that sparingly. Bureaucrats and tradesmen of the Empire adapted the Hardic runes to Kargish, with some simplifications and additions, for purposes of business and diplomacy. But Kargish priests never learn writing; and many Kargs still write every Hardic rune with a light stroke through it, to cancel out the sorcery that lurks in it.
History
Note on dates: Many islands have their own local count of years. The most widely used dating system in the Archipelago, which stems from the Havnorian Tale, makes the year Morred took the throne the first year of history. By this system, “present time” in the account you are reading is the Archipelagan year 1058.
THE BEGINNINGS
All we know of ancient times in Earthsea is to be found in poems and songs, passed down orally for centuries before they were ever written. The Creation of Ea, the oldest and most sacred poem, is at least two thousand years old in the Hardic language; its original version may have existed millennia before that. Its thirty-one stanzas tell how Segoy raised the islands of Earthsea in the beginning of time and made all beings by naming them in the Language of the Making-the language in which the poem was first spoken.
The ocean, however, is older than the islands; so say the songs.
Before bright Ea was, before Segoy
bade the islands be,
the wind of dawn blew on the sea…
And the Old Powers of the Earth, which are manifest at Roke Knoll, the Immanent Grove, the Tombs of Atuan, the Terrenon, the Lips of Paor, and many other places, may be coeval with the world itself.