The Tombs of Atuan

About The Tombs of Atuan

The Tombs of Atuan is the second book in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, and it is a very different novel from the first. Where A Wizard of Earthsea is about a boy moving outward — across seas, toward power, into conflict — The Tombs of Atuan turns inward. Its world is underground. Tenar was taken from her family as a small child and dedicated to the Nameless Ones, ancient powers who require no prayers, only obedience. She is raised as their high priestess, given a new name — Arha, the Eaten One — and trained to administer the labyrinthine underground tomb complex that is her entire world. She is good at it. She is also, by the time the story begins, completely isolated in a way she doesn't have the reference points to recognize as isolation. Ged arrives in the tombs searching for something — half of a ring whose other half is crucial to Earthsea's political stability — and Tenar catches him. What follows is a prisoner-and-warden relationship that slowly, carefully, becomes something else. Ged does not rescue Tenar in the conventional sense. He offers her a different account of who she might be, and she has to choose whether to believe it. Le Guin's great achievement in this book is that Tenar's choice is genuinely difficult. She has been shaped by years of doctrine and isolation, and the Nameless Ones she serves are not obviously false — they are real powers, with real claims, and leaving their service is not morally simple. The Tombs of Atuan takes that complexity seriously in ways that most coming-of-age fantasy does not. The book is structurally unlike anything else in the Cycle. It is quiet, claustrophobic, and slow in the best sense — every page is doing something. Le Guin writes the underground with enough physical specificity that it never feels like a vague symbolic space; it feels like a place that someone has actually mapped and memorized, because Tenar has. One of the most carefully constructed novels in the Earthsea series.

Tropes & Themes