Tales from Earthsea

Harcourt brought out Tales from Earthsea in 2001, as a companion to the existing Earthsea books. It won the Locus Award for best collection and the Endeavour Award, which goes to a writer from the Pacific Northwest, and it is usually read as the volume in which Le Guin fills in the history the novels take for granted.

Two of the five stories, Darkrose and Diamond and Dragonfly, had appeared in print before, in 1999 and 1998, and both had been nominated for awards.

The collection spends a good deal of its time on something the first three novels left in the background. In the Earthsea of those books the practice of magic is dominated by men, and a woman can at best be a witch, the lowest and least respected rank in that world. The stories here set out to correct the balance, disclosing among other things that the school on Roke was founded by women who were later shut out of it, and that Ogion, the teacher Ged loved, learned his magic from a woman.