Even the cover is magical Long before Hogwarts became everyone’s favorite magic school, there was the first fantastical magic school: Roke I say first fantastical magic school specifically. There were magic schools before that, but they were old ideas like the School of the Night, where the Devil teaches black magic and one out of every ten students will be tithed to Hell. (We will have a guest post on this kind of magic school later in the month.) How many of you ever wished you could attend Roke? I bet many readers don’t even know what Roke is. Once upon a time, in the long-ago dream time of the 1970s and 80s, there were three fantasy series everyone read: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, and Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy. Everyone who read fantasy had read all three, and they were considered equally great. I remember the day, some years ago now, when I realized that while Narnia and Lord of the Rings had made the grade, Earthsea had been basically forgotten. Many modern fantasy fans had never heard of the books. They didn’t even know that LeGuin had invented one of their favorite concepts: … Continue reading Which Magic School Is For You: Roke