Roke is already there in A Wizard of Earthsea. Ged arrives and finds a school older than anyone’s memory of it, the Masters already teaching. The novel never suggests it was otherwise. Tales from Earthsea shows it being built. I read it in June. I’d tell you to read it for the world.
“The Finder” runs three hundred years earlier, when wizards served whoever held wealth and power. Otter is taken and worked by the mage Gelluk in the mercury mines. Fugitives built the school Ged walks into, working in hiding and at their own risk. Most of them were women.
That isn’t what Roke teaches him. It teaches him songs. The Creation of Éa is one he learns there, and the novel says outright that the Deed of Ged leaves things out. So the past reaches Ged constantly, and always as song. Seeing a history from inside it is nothing like seeing it warped through story.
The collection lays out how the school closed. Women are barred from study and from teaching. Higher magery becomes a thing only men do. The Archmage is raised from a wizard into an office. Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects reads our own symbols as a mythology that obscures how we got here, and that’s the parallel. It isn’t a complaint about distortion. Myth does more than history to make us who we are, and you don’t get to set it down. What you can do is learn to see around it, which is what these five stories are for.
Tolkien answers this with appendices, the chronologies dated, the genealogies settled. Le Guin closes her book with thirty-odd pages of much the same apparatus, then sets it behind five stories that tell you they may be wrong. She introduces “The Finder” as an airy quilt, half hearsay and half guesswork, yet true enough. “For a cloud hangs over the time when Roke first became the Isle of the Wise,” she writes, “and it may be that the wise men put it there.”
Almost none of it resolves. I came to it already reading Earthsea. It left me wanting more of the world than either book has shown me.