Lavinia: More than a Mention

I chose to read “Lavinia” by Ursula Le Guin because I’d never heard of it, and it hadn’t been made into a movie that I know of. I know that her series of Earthsea is a big hit, and everyone knows about it, but I didn’t want to delve into the popular over-worked stories. When I read that Lavinia is a character in a poem by Virgil, and Le Guin took his small mention of her and created the rest of her life, I was pleasantly intrigued and looked forward to the creativity involved in making her live more than one or two lines in a very old poem.

The plight of this young woman, who glimpses a stranger on an incoming ship but knows it’s her destined husband, fills-out the purpose behind what would have been a great turn of events in Virgil’s poem if I’d read it. She is the reason for a war in as much as men give reasons other than their vanity for going to war. Virgil’s poem is, apparently, about the escape of Aeneas from Troy as it is being attacked, and he loses his wife to the fire and soldiers while he’s saving his father and son outside the city. He traverses the Mediterranean and ten years after Troy ends up in Italy where Lavinia lives.

What struck me as particularly up my alley was when Lavinia is in the forest paying homage to Deities, when an unknown man appears from the darkness and talks to her. He seems lost, but when she tells him who she is and where they are, he seems to recognize everything. He then explains to her that he wrote about this place, and created her as a minor character in a poem, and that he is not actually there but on the deck of a ship dying of sickness. This was the spirit of Virgil, meeting his character Lavinia! He tells her of the war coming with the stranger, Aeneas, and his soldiers who were looking for a new home. He explains who in her kingdom dies and how, and about omens that Lavinia’s father the King will see and obey.

She watches it all happen, confirming what Virgil told her. But by the time the war is over, Virgil had died on his ship and stopped visiting her. Lavinia recognizes the outcome of the war, which her poet had laid-out for her, and then wonders, “Now what? Everything has happened that my poet had written. What do I do now that my part of the poem is done? How do I know to go on without my poet’s words?” This is when it struck me that Lavinia’s poet and her despair at not knowing what’s in store now that destiny has been fulfilled, is akin to those who feel God has given them a purpose, and they fulfilled it, and then what do they do? I am more apt to believe in a “god” when I think of my life as a story that’s made up and written, and my maker as a storyteller. The movie “Stranger than Fiction” comes to mind – another awesome idea, though not inspired by Virgil.

I may have to read the Aeneid so I can recognize Lavinia when she is mentioned, (as having golden tresses, apparently), and know what her life might have been thanks to Ursula Le Guin. The perspective of my own life as a character in a story gives my actions some more meaning, if I let it, because any character in a story is there to move the plot along somehow. Just as some of us like to think our existence in the universe is developing energies that make the world work toward a better future.