Earthsea - The Dry Land

The Dry Land

The Dry Land is where the people of the archipelago and reaches of Earthsea go when they die. It is a realm of shadow and dust, of eternal night where the stars are fixed in the sky, and nothing changes. The souls who live there have an empty, dreary existence, and even "lovers pass each other in silence". Wizards can, at great peril, cross from the land of the living to the Dry Land and back again by using their magic to step over the low stone wall that separates the two realms. At the bottom of the valley of the dead is the dry river, and beyond that lie the Mountains of Pain. In The Farthest Shore, Ged loses his magical powers in the Dry Land; no longer able to cross the wall, he and his companion Arren become the first to traverse the Mountains of Pain to return to life.

It is revealed in The Other Wind that the Dry Land was a failed attempt by early mages to gain immortality. The mages stole half of the land "west of west" from the dragons to create a paradise in which their souls would dwell. This earned them the enmity of the dragons, who considered it a breach of the agreement between them and humans called the Vedurnan. However, when the mages walled off the land, its beauty vanished, it fell under eternal night, the wind ceased blowing, and the immortal souls that went there existed without any meaning. The Other Wind recounts how the wall around the Dry Land is destroyed, freeing the trapped souls to rejoin the cycle of death and rebirth. Tenar, who was born in the Kargish lands, makes clear that the Kargad, and all other living things, were always part of the cycle of death and rebirth. It was only the people of the archipelago and reaches who entered the Dry Land after death, on account of the actions of what the Kargish traditionally called their 'accursed sorcerors'

Ursula Le Guin has stated that the idea of the Dry Land came from the "Greco-Roman idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante Alighieri's work, and from one of Rainer Maria Rilke's Elegies."