Quote:
Originally Posted by bfisher
I was fascinated by her discussion of The Sword In The Stone as a projection of T.H. White's tortured childhood.
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I was fascinated with the moment in Chapter 8 where she feels that she is "turning into a hawk":
"I had put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away."
I was suddenly reminded of a passage in Ursula Le Guin's fantasy novel
A Wizard of Earthsea.
The hero is called "Sparrowhawk" and in a moment of crisis he transforms into a hawk--the creature who most shares his nature.
"Ged had taken hawk-shape in fierce distress and rage . . . . The falcon's anger and wildness were like his own, and had become his own, and his will to fly had become the falcon's will. . . . In all the sunlight and dark of that great flight he had worn the falcon's wings, and looked through the falcon's eyes, and forgetting his own thoughts he had known at last only what the falcon knows: hunger, the wind, the way he flies."
There are interesting parallels in the two passages and I wonder if Macdonald had ever read Le Guin. Of course the theme is not that uncommon and the similarity is most likely entirely coincidental. But it shows the fascination authors have with the wild nobility of the hawk. Le Guin is a remarkable woman of wide interests and I also wonder if she ever had any occasion to study falconry.