Adapting Game Magic from the Literature of the Fantastic ◾ 269
named Ged, gradually initiated into magic and the power of True Names.
In Le Guin’s novel, the common speech of the islanders is descended from
“the Old Speech, in which things are named with their True Names, and
the way to the understanding of this speech starts with the Runes that were
written when the islands of the world were rst raised up from the sea” (19).
Here Le Guin conjoins two traditions: the notion of a primordial language,
in which words are directly and naturally connected to things themselves,
and the idea of magic runes, inuenced by Tolkien and originating in the
ancient Norse way of writing (see Chapter 6, Section 6.8). Perhaps coinci-
dentally, the T