作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: THE BEGINNINGS silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:17:00 2004
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.
It may be that Segoy is or was one of the Old
Powers of the Earth. It may be that Segoy is a
name for the Earth itself. Some think all dragons, or
certain dragons, or certain people, are
manifestations of Segoy. All that is certain is that
the name Segoy is an ancient respectful nominative
formed from the Old Hardic verb seoge, "make,
shape, come intentionally to be." From the same
root comes the noun esege, "creative force, breath,
poetry."
The Creation of Ea is the foundation of education
in the Archipelago, By the age of six or seven, all
children have heard the poem and most have begun
to memorise it. An adult who doesn't know it by
heart, so as to be able to speak or sing it with
others and teach it to children, is considered grossly
ignorant. It is taught in winter and spring, and
spoken and sung entire every year at the Long
Dance, the celebration of the solstice of summer.
A quotation from it stands at the head of A Wizard
of Earthsea:
Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
The beginning of the first stanza is quoted in
Tehanu:
The making from the unmaking,
the ending from the beginning,
who shall know surely?
What we know is the doorway between them
that we enter departing.
Among all beings ever returning,
the eldest, the Doorkeeper, Segoy...
and the last line of the first stanza:
Then from the foam bright Ea broke.