Tehanu

About Tehanu

Tehanu is the fourth book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and it arrives eighteen years after The Farthest Shore. In the time between, Le Guin reconsidered what the Cycle had been — what it had assumed, who it had centered, what it had left out — and Tehanu is the result. It is a quieter, more domestic, and more deliberately feminist book than any of its predecessors, and one of the most interesting genre-revisionist novels in the fantasy canon. Tenar, who readers last saw as a young woman choosing to leave the Tombs of Atuan, is now a middle-aged widow on the island of Gont. She has lived an ordinary life by Earthsea standards: married, farmed, raised children, buried a husband. She is not waiting for adventure. When a burned child named Therru is brought to her — a girl who has survived something terrible — Tenar takes her in without fully understanding why. Then Ged arrives, carried back to Gont by the dragon Kalessin, stripped of his power. He is no longer the Archmage. He is a man in his fifties who has spent himself completely saving the world and is not sure what to do now. What Le Guin is examining in Tehanu is where power actually lives when the obvious forms of it are gone. Tenar has never had a wizard's power. She has the kind of authority that accumulates through years of competence and care — the kind that tends to be invisible in stories about magic and heroism. Ged must figure out if that's enough — for him, for both of them, for whatever Therru is becoming. The book is not a thriller. It moves at a deliberate pace, and there are sections that are simply about the work of keeping a farm, cooking food, and caring for a damaged child. These sections are not filler. They are Le Guin arguing — quietly and through accumulation — that these things matter as much as anything that happens at the center of power. Tehanu won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. It deserved it.

Tropes & Themes