The Underworld Revised in Earthsea and His Dark Materials

The Earthsea cycle, which concluded in September 2001 with the novel The Other Wind and the collection Tales from Earthsea, and the His Dark Materials trilogy, completed in October 2000 (with the first edition of The Amber Spyglass), are two works of young adult fantasy in which the theme of death assumes profound significance. Possessing distinct philosophical orientations—Earthsea with a clear Taoist inflection and His Dark Materials rooted in Western cultural tradition—both draw on Western concepts of Hell, rooted in Classical and Judaic Christian mythologies, which they recreate in radically different ways to suit their respective philosophical backgrounds. In the end, Le Guin and Pullman propose semantically aligned visions of the meaning of death and the conceptualization of immortality, but differ profoundly in their answers to the questions: what is the meaning of Hell, and how does it adapt to the Western culture of the new millennium? Operating outside traditional religious frameworks, these representations of death and immortality for young readers and young adults of the second millennium approach the subject with a directness that is both unsettling and provocative. This paper compares and analyzes the two realms of the dead depicted in the aforementioned literary cycles, the underlying philosophies, and the literary strategies employed by the two authors.