Lavinia describes the ensuing conflict, as foretold by Vergil, between the armies of Turnus and Aeneas in which men slaughter each other in cruel and treacherous ways. Guided by similar visions, King Latinus welcomes the Trojans and offers Lavinia’s hand to Aeneas, but peace is shattered when Turnus, spurned and power-hungry, leverages misunderstandings between the Latins and the Trojans into inciting a full-out war. Lavinia accepts Vergil’s words and her fate.

Vergil also tells Lavinia that their marriage will be a brief one: Aeneas will only live for three more years. That foreigner is Aeneas, a famed warrior of the Trojan War who will soon land on Italian shores with his exiled people to found a new realm. Growing too weak to revise his story, Vergil reveals to Lavinia some of what is to come, that she is fated to marry a foreigner, that this marriage will cause a great war, yet out of their joining a great civilization, his beloved Rome, will rise. Vergil speaks with his creation for the first time, and realizes that he was wrong to have relegated Lavinia to a minor and voiceless role in his epic poem. During a pilgrimage to the sacred forests of Albunea, Lavinia encounters the spirit of the Roman poet Vergil, whose physical body lies dying on the deck of a ship centuries in the future. Amata, her mother, favours Turnus, a local king and blood kin as the ideal son-in-law, but Lavinia is uncertain. Growing up free in a peaceful time, she feels the pressure of marriage upon reaching womanhood. Lavinia, daughter of the king of the Latins, recalls her life’s story.

Her laconic prose brings to life a little known pre-Roman world, captures the lived essences of a semi-mythical people, and offers voice to one neglected, to tell the tale of her life and beyond.

It is not my favourite of Le Guin’s works, but it is perhaps the most beautifully written. But above all, Lavinia is a haunting story crafted by a great storyteller. Le Guin, is many things: Historical fiction set in the Italian Bronze Age a mythic fantasy derived from the last six books of Vergil’s Aeneid an experiment in which the narrator is aware of her own fictionality a postmodern tale where creation and creator come to learn and love one another. This piece is dedicated to Russell Collier, fellow Le Guin fan, dear colleague, guide, friend. “In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.”

Lavinia ursula