The Dowry of the Angyar

"The Dowry of the Angyar" is a science fiction short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1964. It is the first work of the Hainish Cycle. The story is set on a fictional planet of the star Fomalhaut, and follows a highborn woman as she tries to track down a family heirloom. The story was later used as the prologue to Le Guin's 1966 novel Rocannon's World. In later publications, the story was given the title "Semley's Necklace."

Background and setting

"The Dowry of the Angyar" is the first work set in Le Guin's fictional Hainish universe.[1] In this alternate history, human beings did not evolve on earth, but on Hain. The people of Hain colonized many neighboring planetary systems, including Terra (Earth) and Athshe, possibly a million years before the setting of the novels.[2] The planets subsequently lost contact with each other, for reasons that Le Guin does not explain.[3] Le Guin does not narrate the entire history of the Hainish universe at once, instead letting readers piece it together from various works.[4] The novels and other fictional works set in the Hainish universe recount the efforts to re-establish a galactic civilization. Explorers take years to travel between planetary systems, although the journey is shortened for the travelers due to relativistic time dilation, as well as through instantaneous interstellar communication using the ansible, introduced in The Dispossessed.[3] This galactic civilization is known as the "League of All Worlds."[3]

The story is set on a planet of the star Fomalhaut, which is depicted as having multiple intelligent species upon it.[5] The species that the protagonist belongs to has a social structure which divides individuals into two categories: "Olgyior" and "Angyar," with the former subordinate to the latter.[5] There are two additional species, the Fiia and the Gdemiar. The story depicts the plan soon after "starlords," who are emissaries of the League of Worlds, have begun to land on the planet and levy taxes on its population.[5]

Plot summary

The story follows Semley, a highborn Angyar woman, who is married at a young age. Despite being from a highborn family, she has less material wealth than many of the members of the household of her husband, and feels threatened by this. A few years after a daughter is born to her, she returns to her family seeking a necklace of mythical beauty that her family once possessed. Her father sends her to the Fiia, who profess no knowledge of it. She then turns to the Gdemiar, who manufactured the necklace. They tell her that they can take her to it, in a journey that "will last only one long night."[5] She is taken on board a spaceship to a museum of the League of Worlds, where she meets Rocannon, an ethnologist from the League. She asks the museum for her necklace, and they return it to her. Semley returns to her husband's house, where she finds that although she only experienced two days of travel, she has been away for nine years. Her husband is now dead, and her daughter a grown woman. In her grief, Semley abandons the necklace and runs into the wilderness.[5]

Themes

Reviewer Amy Clarke wrote that the story might have been inspired by "Brísingamen," a Norse myth about the necklace of the goddess Freyja.[6] She stated that the nocturnal Gdemiar in Le Guin's story were the analogs of the dwarves in the Norse myth, while the diurnal Fiaa were similar to the elves.[6]

In an introduction to the story written for a later anthology, Le Guin said that "Dowry of the Angyar" was most characteristic of her early science fiction writing. She described it as the most romantic of her works, saying that she had steadily moved away from explicit romanticism.[5] She wrote "the candor and simplicity of [Dowry of the Angyar] have gradually become something harder, stronger, more complex."[5]

Reviewer Kim Kirkpatrick stated that although the story is seemingly focused on Semley, in some respects Rocannon is the main character. As a scientist, he studies and questions Semley, thus both depicting her as an alien "other" and likening his own perspective to that of the audience.[7] Semley's story is told through Rocannon, making Semley more of a passive object. Additionally, Semley as a character is shown as not being self-aware in the way Rocannon is, and especially unaware of the consequences of her action in travelling on the spaceship.[7] The story also uses stylistic devices frequently used later by Le Guin, such as directly addressing the reader, and involving the central character in an identity-related guessing game.[7]

Richard Erlich wrote that the protagonist of the story gets the object of her quest at the end, but at a high price. Therefore, Erlich states that the story teaches a message of caution, a message that is found elsewhere in folklore.[8]

Publication

"Dowry of the Angyar" was written in 1963, and published in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1964.[6] It was also incorporated as the prologue into the 1966 novel Rocannon's World, which was Le Guin's first novel.[5] It was later reprinted as the first story in the 1975 collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.[5] In later printings the story was titled "Semley's Necklace."[6]

References

  1. ↑ Cummins 1990, p. 68.
  2. ↑ Cummins 1990, pp. 66–67.
  3. 1 2 3 Cummins 1990, pp. 68–70.
  4. ↑ Reid 1997, pp. 19–21.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Le Guin, Ursula K. (2015). The Wind's Twelve Quarters. United Kingdom: Hatchette. ISBN 9781473214361. Retrieved 1 August 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Lindow 2012, p. 258.
  7. 1 2 3 Kirkpatrick, Kim (2009). "Maturing Communities and Dangerous Crones". In Harde, Roxanne. Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story Sequences. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 305–327. ISBN 9781443806541.
  8. ↑ Erlich, Richard D. (15 March 2002), "Coyote Riffs on a Maternal Theme: One System for Some Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin" (PDF), 23rd Annual Conference of the International Association for Fantasy in the Arts, retrieved 2 August 2016

Sources

External links

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