Tehanu The Last Book of Earthsea

Tenar may know the answer to that question, but for Ged to be able to answer it himself, as he must, he has to find out what he gave up to become a man of power. Which might be defined as everything but that power. Or which might be seen as a different kind of learning. The kind of learning ordinary people get from talking in the kitchen on winter evenings . . .

Or is it beyond learning—is it the kind of magic that men lost, but the dragons kept?

Beyond the obscure worship of dark earth-powers, and beyond the common sense of daily life, she wants understanding. Living the mystery of daily life, she longs for the clear light of thought. Tenar has a fine, strong mind. The two people best able to see and respect that in her were Ged and Ogion. Ogion is gone; Ged has come back to her.

roots, I have roots deeper than this island. . . . I go back into the dark!” And she ends with a rhetorical question—“Who’ll ask the dark its name?”

“I will,” Tenar says. “I lived long enough in the dark.”

I’ve often seen Moss’s rhapsody quoted with approval. Tenar’s fierce answer almost always goes unquoted, unnoticed. Yet it refuses Moss’s self-admiring mysticism. And all Tenar’s life is in it.

The conversation between Tenar and the witch Moss in the fifth chapter is a case in point. Is it “feminist”? Moss is pretty contemptuous of men in general, having been treated by them with contempt all her life. That’s all right, and I find her discussion of men’s power and women’s power harsh, incomplete, but interesting. Then she goes off into an incantatory praise of mysterious female knowledge: “Who knows wher

It’s not surprising that Tehanu was labeled “feminist.” But the word is used so variously that it’s worse than useless. If you see feminism as vindictive prejudice against men, the label lets you dismiss the book unread; if you see feminism as a belief in superior properties unique to women and expect the book to confirm that belief, you’ll find it equivocal.

There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood. Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.

What cannot be mended must be transcended.”

I didn’t want it to be. By the time I wrote this book I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included. The ones who can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have shining staffs or swords. Women, kids, the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes, ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.

turned to her, and she said to him, “I have loved you since I first saw you.”

“Life-giver,” he said and leaned forward, kissing her breast and mouth.

So Flint had answered her questions for twenty years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance; a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought.