In Defense of Dragons: Imagination as Experience in the Earthsea Trilogy

If an adult is to cope with the inevitable tragedies and incongruities of life, then it is the faculty of imagination which, having been nourished in him as a child, will provide him with the inner resources to do so. In the Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula LeGuin offers just such imaginative sustenance — a symbolic rendering of the journey from childhood to adulthood. Although clearly clothed in the habiliments of fantasy, this imaginative journey may, in fact, be more relevant to the lives of its young readers than an entire shelf of numbingly factual and matter-of-fact books.