Early in Tehanu, Tenar (hello old friend!) muses about her friend Moss, the village witch: “She thought Moss was following her heart, but it was a dark, wild, queer heart, like a crow, going its own ways on its own errands.” I can’t think of a better way to describe this book. In the last pages of The Farthest Shore, another mage says of Ged, “He has done with doing.” Tehanu is the story of what comes after The Doing. Ged leaves Roke and returns […]
“There is a hole in the world, and the light is running out of it. And the words go with the light.”
After the glory that is The Tombs of Atuan (for me at least), The Farthest Shore comes as – well, “disappointment” isn’t the right word, because I am always thrilled to return to Earthsea. But it’s less of a revelation, perhaps, and doesn’t touch me as deeply as Tenar’s story. Which doesn’t mean that it’s a bad book. Far from it! The Farthest Shore features Ged, now Archmage, in the role of a mentor to young Arren, a prince of Enlad. It has been years […]
“You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light.”
Decades before The Wire‘s second season premiere made viewers yell, “Who are these people? Why are we at the port? Where is McNulty?” Ursula K. Le Guin begins her sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea by introducing us to Tenar of Atuan. Who? Where? It’s a powerful sense of dislocation. We’re in the Kargad Lands, the realm of pale barbarians referenced, but not explored, in Wizard. As the reincarnated First Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan, Tenar is taken from her family at the age […]
“Bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky”
After taking on the rather draining Tiptree anthology, I wanted to rest my heart and mind and spirit. So I am revisiting one of my most cherished treasures: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. I was 10 or 12 when I discovered this series, and I fell precipitously in love with it. It was my gateway drug to the world of fantasy and SF. A Wizard of Earthsea is, at heart, a classic story of a Young Wizard who Comes Of Age And Goes On […]