The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. In this final week, we’ll be covering Le Guin’s novel Tehanu (1990).
Last year I embarked on a quest: to reread all of Ursula Le Guin’s works, including story and essay collections, and write about them for Tor.com—a dream come true for any SFF critic. I’ve written about Le Guin for a year, covering her novels, stories, and essays from the beginning of her career (some truly just OK stories) to her first novel of the 1980s, the strange anti-Narnia novel The Beginning Place. That’s nearly two decades of powerful, inquisitive writing that racked up awards and made Le Guin into a household name, an undisputed master of the genre.
And yet this last year has been hell and worse for us all; though I was able to keep up (sometimes just barely) for all of 2020, I’ve finally hit my wall and need, unfortunately, to step away from the reread, despite not yet having covered several decades of Le Guin’s writing. While I do feel I have let myself (and the few regular readers) down, I also need to safeguard what little time, focus, and emotional resources I can cobble together in the midst of the pandemic.
The question remained to me, then, of how to end the reread. I could drop Always Coming Home (1985) like the pound of intellectual bricks it is—it’s an important and moving novel that synthesizes Indigenous understandings of space, time, and history with the anthropological approach of Le Guin’s earliest Hainish novels, in a truly experimental masterpiece. But it didn’t feel like the best ending for this series. I could skip ahead to the three YA novels of Le Guin’s mid-2000s Annals of the Western Shore, which allowed the author to revisit her YA fantasy roots à la Earthsea, but in a new publishing market that had wholly redefined and revalued the YA genre. But I don’t enjoy those novels as much as her other work. Alternately, I could have gone with Lavinia, Le Guin’s incredible retelling of the title heroine’s story from Virgil’s Aeneid, providing a feminist rereading of Roman mythology that brings agency to the story of Rome’s founding but also highlights the patriarchal violences at that story’s heart. I could have, and almost did choose Lavinia…but then I couldn’t have ended with Tehanu—Le Guin’s best novel.
Initially subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea, Tehanu sees Le Guin return to the world that helped cement her name in the fantasy halls of fame, though it did not remain Earthsea’s “last book.” My writing about the original trilogy—A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore—has stressed how central the series is to the development of the fantasy genre. (I was tempted to write “modern fantasy,” but fantasy has always been modern and Le Guin’s entry onto the scene in the 1960s coincides with the creation of fantasy as a mass-market genre beginning in the 1960s with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series and Ballantine’s mass-market republication of The Lord of the Rings.) Each novel deals with power and magic in unique ways and together they constitute a theorization of power on its own but especially within the generic tropes of fantasy, in conversation with Tolkien and so many others. The final novel was an argument for fantasy, I noted, as “critical work”—not just something to be read and enjoyed, but something with which to take action, to reflect usefully on power and responsibility, life and death, doing and being.
Tehanu is a step beyond, the product of a writer willing and intellectually excited to revisit her old works and their assumptions, to show us the dark side of beloved characters, and to say, as empathetically as possible, “grow up and get your shit together.” The novel combines the reflections on power and its loss from The Farthest Shore with the emphasis on gender written throughout The Tombs of Atuan, all with the reflective distance of someone able to recognize earlier faults and to address them through new magics.
A literary critic’s job, as I see it, is to provide arguments about what a text means, but also offer aesthetic and political judgements about the text and its place in our world. If you haven’t read Tehanu, I won’t say stop here, go read it, then come back. That’s an annoying gimmick critics pull, and anyway you won’t need to come back: reading Tehanu is an intellectual pursuit of its own and I’d trust you to make equally insightful judgments of the novel because it’s the kind of novel that inspires people to think and feel something, especially if you were a Ged stan (I never was) or wanted more of Tombs (I did). But my job as a critic is to tell you something you might not have explicitly known or to otherwise to say provocative things to make you think, agree, disagree, get angry, or in any way feel something about the text. So I have two things to say about Tehanu and I can’t think of a better novel to end the reread on.
The first point: Tehanu is a redux of the Earthsea trilogy; or, if not a complete redux, then a pointed revisitation.
What I mean by this is that the original Earthsea novels wanted to say something about magic, fantasy, and power, and that Tombs said something more by addressing gender and power. We’ve seen throughout her career that Le Guin is willing to hear where she went wrong and often addressed her shortcomings in writing; Tombs was one clear example of this, an attempt to address the complete oversight of a female protagonist for Earthsea. But she also famously wrote an essay titled “Is Gender Necessary?” which was essentially a knee-jerk response to critics who saw The Left Hand of Darkness as a major failure to (more) radically approach the question of gender, sex, and sexuality, and she even more famously wrote an essay of notes on that first essay—called “Is Gender Necessary? Redux”—in which she pointed out her many critical failures in that response.
In Tehanu, Le Guin returns to the question of power and women’s place in the world (the world of Earthsea, but by analogy also ours). While Tombs dealt with gender and specifically addressed the ways in which those with power (men, in Earthsea) provide women with the illusion of freedom and power over their lives (e.g., by offering them positions in the priesthood of the godkings), while in reality these are but symbols and hold, in truth, no material power. The same seems to be true across the Earthsea novels; women either hardly exist or, if they do, are ascribed one of two roles: wife or witch.
Le Guin was not particularly flattering with regard to the abilities of the witches—women who, not able to be trained on Roke as true users of magic by virtue of their gender, end up as local healers and love-potion dealers, much disliked by the local populace but required for the usual functioning of Earthsea’s societies. Le Guin’s one major female character in Earthsea, Tenar, was a similar figure imbued with social value by virtue of her position as the Eaten One, but feared by the other priestesses and utterly divested from the power structures of Kargad. Moreover, in Earthsea, while women have no major role to play in the grand adventures of archmages, even young boys like Arren in Farthest Shore are able to seize the role of protagonist, to do great deeds, to help restore balance to the world.
Tehanu, then, considers the obvious oversights of gendered and patriarchal worldbuilding from the perspective both of a writer who became an avowed feminist nearly a decade after writing the Earthsea trilogy, and a writer who is now significantly older, in her sixties. Le Guin picks up Tenar’s story not after her journey to the white harbor of Havnor, where she is greeted as a beautiful maiden alongside the triumphant archmage Sparrowhawk after his finding of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, but instead decades later, with a middle-aged goatherd’s widow named Goha. It is perhaps a strange decision, at least from the perspective of a culture that has come to equate doing feminism with writing stories of badass strong female characters, for Le Guin to begin addressing her oversights with regard to gender in Earthsea by telling us that Tenar didn’t go on to, say, force herself into Roke, become a wizard, and do great magical deeds to rival Ged himself. Instead, Goha chose to become the wife of a goatherd, not even a particularly prosperous one, and to raise a kid and grow crops and see to the running of her house and to village life. It was a disappointment to Ged, we learn later, but it is something of an ingenious rhetorical move on Le Guin’s part.
For one, Le Guin herself was 61 when Tehanu came out, and depictions of older women have long been conspicuously lacking in both SFF and the wider culture, so it seems somewhat personally resonant for Le Guin to tell the story of a woman with feminist sensibilities, like Le Guin herself, who chose to be both politically strong-willed (i.e. to have political convictions) and to be a stay-at-home mother—the very thing, as Le Guin suggested (perhaps snarkily), that made feminists dislike her in the 1960s and 1970s. More than this, though, Tenar’s choice to become Goha is part of a larger critique raised by Tehanu about the pursuit of power and the structure of adventure stories, especially fantasy quest stories.
Consider that while A Wizard of Earthsea is exceptionally well-written and reflects on the dangers of pursuing power for power’s sake or to show off to others, it is also an incredibly generic story about a boy who is too talented for his goatherders’ village, who must go on adventure, and who must gain power to suit his talents and protagonist-y specialness; yes, he learns a lesson about humility, but this just makes him a better protagonist for future installments of the Ged story. Tombs throws a small wrench in that hero-trilogy story progression by decentering Ged, but he returns to do a great deed, defeat an evil wizard, set the universe aright, and put the first king in centuries back on the throne of Earthsea.
Tenar, however, refuses the call to adventure—not the refusal that proves her humility and assures the reader that she’s really the hero, the one who will save Earthsea or whatever. She flat out refuses the patriarchal narrative and ironically this means she refuses the call to adventure to become a wife. On the surface, it’s perhaps anti-feminist: be a good woman and embrace goatherd-wifery. But Tenar escaped an oppressive situation in which her life was utilized as a pawn in the symbolic power games of self-proclaimed godkings, a life in which she was meant to be one amongst an eternal line of nameless women serving nameless dark powers, toiling away in obscurity under the illusion that they hold power, when in reality they simply dust a museum no one visit or understands. She escaped with Ged, chose to become uneaten, and entered into the world of her own accord. She saw what power does, how it corrupts, and even though she loved Ged to some extent for the help he gave her, she did not want the life of a person with power. She goes to Gont to live the normal life that Ged, our “hero,” couldn’t stand.
So she became a goatherd and, as Tehanu shows, she led a fulfilling life, one she enjoyed. And then came the death of Ogion, the burning of Therru, and return of Ged. These three events see Tenar/Goha return to a story “worth reading” from the perspective of a publishing industry that thrives on adventures and quests and great deeds. Only, Le Guin surprises us again by not really giving us an adventure; Tehanu is rather a serious examination of power and post-traumatic growth.
In the background of Tehanu is a changing world: monarchical power has been restored to Earthsea by King Lebannen (Arren from Farthest Shore), magic is just recovering from Ged’s closing of the portal between life and death, and the ancient difference between human and dragon has been breached with the birth of Therru, daughter of the dragon Kalessin and a human mother. Yet as all these grand things are occurring and changing the world of Earthsea, the story Tehanu wants to tell is that of Tenar being a caregiver to Therru and a concerned companion of Ged, providing agency and heft to a role often relegated to the background of grand stories and described (usually rightfully) as a consequence of patriarchy. Tehanu is a story that recognizes the importance of the mundane and it is also a story that forces a powerful man to stop whining about the loss of his power, placing Tenar in the position Ged has previously occupied, instructing others that power isn’t the be-all and end-all of the universe, that it is not a thing to be sought, but should instead be divested.
The second point I want to make, here: Tehanu is Le Guin’s best novel.
There are many ways to define “best” and one could easily amass a list of Le Guin’s “bests” for XYZ categories, but more often than not, especially in the mouth of a critic, “best” just means “my favorite” but takes on the heft of a moral pronouncement. Tehanu is, then, my favorite of Le Guin’s novels, but I also think it’s genuinely her best and for a number of reasons. Firstly, I prefer fantasy, and she hasn’t written a better fantasy novel. Secondly, I like Earthsea better than Annals or The Beginning Place or her stories, and this is the best Earthsea novel. Thirdly, what matters most to me about Tehanu is everything described in my first point: Tehanu is a novel that bucks expectations, is quiet and thoughtful, and resists being drawn into the overwhelming epicness of so much fantasy. There are many quiet fantasy novels, but at a time when just about every fantasy novel that wins awards is The Next Big Thing and tries harder than The Last Big Thing to be huge, bold, gods-killing-gods, all-your-favorites-MURDERED! explosive, Tehanu is a breath of fresh air that is not only fresh because it’s Not Those Novels, but is fresh because it talks back to fantasy and says, “You don’t have to do this.” It slaps fantasy upside the head and says what the protagonists of so many EpIc FaNtAsY novels need to hear: power is not an end, but it will lead to the end.
Of course, to each their own! This may not matter to other readers, and that’s okay; we all get our kicks when and where we like them most, and it’s okay not to want your fiction to be what Tehanu is or, at least, not to see what Tehanu does as the greatest expression of Le Guin’s ethos and career as a political writer. My job as a critic has been to guide the way to a sense of the text for my readers, but not necessarily to convince them or to establish the ultimate truth of things. This is what I see and feel, and I do so because of my experiences and training, but I welcome what you see and feel as an outgrowth of your own knowledge. This is what, I think, Tenar would want. Not an established fact of the matter, but a quiet chat over tea, the duties of goatherding and childrearing butting into the conversation as needed, returning to the big questions each new meeting.
That is the lesson of Le Guin: a quiet contemplation in community with one another, not a bang and revolution—though that would be nice, too—but a meeting (and, if necessary) changing of minds.
Great deeds through small actions. Power in people, in community.
Thank you for the chance to read Le Guin with you.
Sean Guynes is an SFF critic and professional editor. For politics, publishing, and SFF content, follow him on Twitter @saguynes.
Wonderfully written article. I’ve held the same conviction – that Tehanu is the best Earthsea book – ever since I read it. Le Guin was never interested in grand battles anyway, and in Tehanu she wrote exactly the kind of slow-paced book she wanted to.
I’ve enjoyed this column, and am sad to see it go, but I’m glad you’re taking care of yourself and your mental health.
Personally I hated Tehanu virulently.
I personally do prefer other works, Always Coming Home was her best book but only just barely better than Lavina which was a better written book, ACH just had all the other amazing materials with it, especially the edition I bought with the tape of the songs of her imagined culture. Glorious. Lavinia was a romp, delightful concept, true to her political/sociological roots and exquisitely written. If I had someone who had never read any LeGuin, I’d be very tempted to start them there.
Tehanu reminds me, at it’s better moments, of the King Crimson quote: Discipline is a means to an end not an end in itself. Unfortunately, to me, it doesn’t sustain that and as a result though it has the most interesting premise of the Earthsea books, it ends with the weakest execution of them. Of course, it’s been a while since I read it but I’m far more inclined to go an grab the library copy of Lavinia and reread it rather than bothering with Tehanu. Unlike @2, I couldn’t say I hated the book, rather I was let down by it.
“A Wizard of Earthsea… reflects on the dangers of pursuing power for power’s sake or to show off to others”
I thought the message of the book was about being hesitant to use great power for any reason, not just the bad ones, as we are all a fallible mix of human and shadow.
I’m not saying Tehanu is an objectively bad book you understand, I am not competent to judge as I couldn’t even finish it. Just that I personally really, really hated it.
I thought there were some parts of Tehanu that were very good, and others that were less so; overall I didn’t like it very much. Probably because it was so unlike the earlier books, and I was wanting more of — not exactly the same, but at least the same kind of story. I had a similar reaction to The Other Wind — parts were very good, and parts I didn’t care for at all.
Possibly I would feel differently if I re-read either of them today, of course. I do tend to be wary of criticism that is mostly about the theory behind the story and not the story itself; it doesn’t tell me much about whether or not I would enjoy reading the story, or how the details of the story work into the theory. (I would suggest that the story has to stand on its own as a story first, before it can even enter into the theoretical discussion — for instance, Bujold’s Sharing Knife tetralogy engages on very deep levels with both the American frontier tale and Tolkien’s Rangers, but first and foremost it’s also interesting to read in its own right.)
@5 I understand you.
I didn’t exactly hate it, but I found it profoundly “meh” and an unnecessary retcon and addition to a work that I considered perfectly finished and balanced as it was, the original trilogy.
Right now, I don’t even remember well what happens in it and in its followup, honestly.
Maybe if it had been an independent work I would have appreciated it more, I don’t know.
Thanks for the good thoughtful exegesis, Sean. I’ll have to bear these points in mind if I reread Tehanu (contingent upon my finding my copy).
I was always puzzled by the apparent power of Therru – it didn’t seem to be explained in the book. Where is it said that she’s an actual daughter of Kallesin?
Sean, as a huge LeGuin fan for many years, I have enjoyed your reread immensely and I want to thank you for doing it! It’s been terrific to hear another thoughtful take (sometimes similar to my own, sometimes radically new to me) on works I am so familiar with. I completely understand your need to step away, but I am indeed disappointed that we won’t be having a conversation with you about “Always Coming Home” (pound of intellectual bricks indeed!). Best of luck in everything you do, and I hope to hear from you again when life is a little bit less …. well, a little bit less like it has been for the past year. Sa-lute!
For “Tehanu”, I’m a big fan of the book, basically for the reasons you mention. Personally, I’m not sure I would rank it above the depth of intellectual exploration in “The Dispossessed” or “Left Hand,” or the crystalline prose and storytelling of “Wizard”, but it’s one of the very best books by one of the very best authors of the last century, which is enough to get by on :-).
S
One of the things I didn’t have a problem with was Tenar’s decision to marry and have a family. In a way it makes a lot of sense; she dimly remembers a happy childhood in a very ordinary family, why shouldn’t she want to recreate that life? The life she would have had if not for the religious hierarchy of Kargad.
I will miss these essays, Sean! You have been doing a great job.
(That said, my favorite Le Guin novel is Lavinia. :) (Also about a mother.))
Thank you for the reread and the associated articles. They have been terrific.
I’m going to admit that I think Tehanu is as different to the previous books as they were to each other. I read it not long after it came out and found it to be a, quieter, more profound book than the previous novels which were also very different from other fantasy novels that I’d read. It was stylistically different, too, which I put down to the author being twenty years older than when she’d last visited the world. When I reread the series last year, though (courtesy of the beautiful Books Of Earthsea edition gifted by my colleagues for my 50th birthday), it felt more a part of the same world, probably because the gap between its publication and that reading was more than the gap between it and the other books.
The Earthseaquence, as I like to call it, is a series of books that are all differently told, illuminating their world in different ways. Tehanu is a wonderful book about the struggles of ordinary people: like all the best fiction, it could be retold anywhere or anywhen. I love it as LeGuin’s best work: I agree with Sean that “best” just means “my favourite, but with evidence.”
Thanks for writing these articles! I reread Tehanu recently (after purchasing the Earthsea omnibus) and I enjoyed it alot. In some ways it feels like a “Scouring of the Shire” novel without Merry or Pippen, so I can see why people may not like it, but for me it was nice to go back into that world and see how ordinary life moves on in spite of the great deeds that may have happened down in foreign parts.
I prefer „The Other Wind”, but the reason may be unusual: the dismantling of the Dry Land. This part of Earthsea always gave me the creeps, and I did understand Cob a little, who, as a wizard, had seen his fate after death and did everything to avoid it.So when the wall fell in TOW I almost cheered aloud ;-).
I just wanted to chirp in and agree that Tehanu is amazing, and thank you for such a well thought out article.
I read Earthsea for the first time last year, and while the series had it’s ups and downs, Tehanu was definitely the peak for me. I loved that it bucked all my expectations. More mature, more intense, and more moving than any of the previous books, it felt like she abandoned all pretense of Tehanu being a book for children. The story expands and deepens the themes used in Earthsea to such a mature level that frankly, without my experience as a parent I don’t think I could have enjoyed it as much. As it is, I was surprised at how relatable the main character was. You know you’re dealing with a great writer when a 40 year old dad can relate on so many levels with a mother in her 60’s. This is the only Fantasy book that I’ve read with an elderly woman as a protagonist, and it makes me wish more Fantasy was written with older main characters.
Tehanu also showed us what was up to that point mostly hinted at in previous Earthsea books: Wizards are misogynists. They refuse to train women in the magical arts, and cast spells on themselves so as not to have sexual urges, so that their magic remains “pure”, as if being with a woman could somehow stain their magic. Often they say “Weak as Womens’ Magic” or “Evil as Womens’ Magic”. When confronted with this, even Ged, who up to this point seems to be the wisest characters in Earthsea, proves he also has these prejudices and claims “if women could use magic, what would a Wizard be but a magician who can’t have children?” or something to that effect. Ged needs to get woke.
I think Tehanu elevated the whole Earthsea series, and I was a little disappointed when the following volumes weren’t on it’s level. I was a little worn out after reading it, but I was amazed at everything she accomplished in the book.
Again, cheers on a great article.
I have been one of your regular readers, too, and am sorry to see the series end. But I am so glad you ended with Tehanu, also my favorite. I don’t see how anyone can say this is a quiet book where little happens, with the horrific violence against Therru, the spent Ged arriving on a dragon, and the wizard who ensorcells Tehanu and makes her lose her identity (almost completely) and crawl over the mountain, and then the arrival of Kaliessen. And the siege by the bandit gang.
My interpretation of Tehanu (and the two other Earthsea books that follow it) is coloured by reading Le Guin’s version of the Tao te Ching. Her notes to the poetry refer many times to ideas like “doing by not doing”, and I read the late Earthsea books, and especially The Other Wind, as a critique of the interventionist, destructive and risky pursuit of power. She also has a lot of fun at the shallowness of male attitudes. Also, it is important to remember that Tenar and Ged stand against evil, with elderly local lord extending his life-span at the expense of the vitality of others. This can be interpreted as critique of capitalism – after didn’t she say: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
And thank you for a great set of reviews. Maybe you can come back to the last books in a few year’s time when everything is better!
“If women could use magic, what would a Wizard be but a magician who can’t have children?”
That makes no sense at all. For one thing women need a little help from men to have children and what does reproduction have to do with magic? It doesn’t sound like Ged either, not the man who believes Old Women are worth listening to and says Akaren isn’t a mere witch but a woman of true wizardry.
Although I’m disappointed that you won’t be covering Always Coming Home (a book that in my not so humble opinion is one of the most important pieces of literature to come out of the 1980’s), I think your analysis and celebration of Tehanu is spot on. Even as a YA, I actually found the original Earthsea trilogy to be diverting but not something that I would re-re-read on a regular basis. It was too much like old-school YA (that is, YA for my generation): all of the themes are announced in the beginning; there is very little moral nuance, mostly Good and Bad; the main characters are inevitably doing the right and expected thing by the end of the story. Sure, Ged screws up in the beginning of his career — but that starts his path towards greatness. There are subtle tweaks at fantasy cliches here and there, but as a trilogy, it’s mostly entertainment (not a criticism, just a description).
Then Tehanu. This is a fully adult novel. As 40+ year-old reader, I found it disturbing and entertaining and deep. I *loved* the ‘redux’ aspect of this: revisiting the entire set up of the Earthsea world from a completely unexpected POV.
Thank you for reminding me how much I love Le Guin’s writing.
I loved Tehanu and I think it is brilliant. However I read the orginal trilogy maybe about age twelve, and then Tehanu a decade or more later when it came out, and both fitted my life at the time. That decade’s difference made me really value the redux. My view of the world had changed, and Tehanu not only fitted that, but actually helped me realise how my attitudes had changed. To be walked through the world of Earthsea anew, in Tehanu and the sequels, foregrounded for me what I now believed, and what I now mistrusted about some of the attitudes I had grown up with.
I can see if you pick the books up now, and have no reason to wait many years between reading the original trilogy and the second trilogy, it could be really jarring.
Sean, your Le Guin reread has consistently produced some of my favorite articles written for Tor and this article really stands out — I never imagined you would have ended on Tehanu, a quiet novel that shook me to my very foundations when I first read it. Thank you for revisiting it in such a way that reproduces the shivery joy of reading Goha/Tenar and Ged’s reunion.
I’m sad to see you go but glad that you are taking care of yourself in these strange times. Wishing you all the best.
The author is forever looking ahead at the work to be written. The critic is forever looking back at what was ultimately published. It’s interesting to track Le Guin’s development as a feminist writer. We can criticize her for not going far enough or for making some missteps. But also, she had to contend with the publishing industry and book market of that time. Like so many of us, she was just trying to get published—and write what she thought her readers would enjoy. Courage came with the changing times and increased success. No doubt, Earthsea would be different if she wrote it today. No doubt, Left Hand of Darkness would not default to the male pronouns. Yes, absolutely, part of the brilliance of Tehanu is that we do see an author in the process of correcting her course. I wonder how often we see that in today’s SFF book industry. I wonder what things I have written that I will wish I could rewrite, if given the chance. (Can you imagine great, great, great grandchildren exploring their ancestors’ Twitter feeds from long ago?) It’s also a good reminder that we throw around the word “timeless” too much when talking about literature. Nothing is truly timeless. It’s all a product of a particular era and a particular person within a particular culture.
Thank you, Sean, for a wonderful and thoughtful exploration of Le Guin’s work within our time.
I’ve not been following your re-read because it fell in between my own Earthsea re-read last year and the Hainish Cycle re-read I am planning for this year, but I wanted to read this one because I absolutely agree that Tehanu is Le Guin’s best Earthsea novel and perhaps her best novel. For many of the reasons you cite, and more. As an archaeologist, re-reading it last spring led me to reconsider a lot of things I was thinking about social dynamics and power in prehistoric times… It’s a great re-examination of the previous trilogy that expands on its world tremendously. I look forward to reading the rest of your re-read as I embark on my own soon!
I’m sorry you’re stopping, but you aren’t the first to hit a COVID wall (I hit it a couple of weeks ago), and of course your health and welfare must come first.
Thanks for the many hours of pleasure and insight that your columns have given me. I agree that Lavinia is a brilliant novel and an astonishing achievement, and I love it. (LeGuin can always make me read more: Lavinia made me read the Aeneid for the first time and her essays both made me give Dickens a second chance and led me to Islandia. And I profited hugely from her example in accepting and learning from criticism.
yes, Tehanu is her best novel, though I’m terribly fond of its sequels, too. The book shows an artist at maturity, with complete mastery of her skills and using them to shape a story as she intends. I also love that it’s a story about both what happens after the Great Deed (what happens after “he is done with doing” is that in fact he isn’t) and about the hard beginnings of a new world.
And as Theak says above, it’s some of LeGuin’s most powerful writing. As just one example, every time Kalessin turns up, I can see, hear, smell and feel him – I was always grateful to be on the other side of the print from him.
Thanks again for everything your work has done for me, and best wishes for the next chapter of your adventures.
I’m sorry to discover this series of articles just as they are winding down, but am a bit excited to know that I can delve into the archives to read more. Le Guin is my favorite author, and I was astounded when I read Tehanu. There was just so much said about the characters, the world, and our world too. Thanks for the wonderful review, Sean, I look forward to reading your previous rereads.
Nice article.
The story The Finder is not only a great one, but also sheds a lot of light about the beginnings of the school in Roke.
Mature works from Le Guin. Both the original trilogy and the later works are wonderful.
I’ve got not much to add to this specific discussion of Tehanu, other than to say it is my second favorite Earthsea book (after Wizard) and that I wonder about the criticism of Wizard as “generic” (Is something really troublingly generic if it was created so relatively early in the shaping of the genre?).
I want most to say thank you for these essays. I’m in the middle of my own years-long re-read of Le Guin and your reflections have helped me contextualize and think more deeply about my re-engagement with Le Guin’s work. I am disappointed that you won’t be reflection on Always Coming Home as I’m in the middle of that one now and was hoping for some distanced companionship in pondering it.
So, thank you. And best wishes for health and wholeness as we all navigate our new realities.
I read the original Earthsea trilogy in the early 1970s, as the books were published, and as a young girl I so loved Tenar–her dreams, her aspirations, her belief in grandeur, her unspoken love for Ged and the freedom he represented. I read Tehanu when it was published, now a woman approaching 30, and I adored this book for Tenar’s acceptance of the things that seem small in life but that are actually so rich and so fulfilling–a husband and family, satisfying work. And then Tenar becomes such a rock, such a source of sustenance to Therru and to Ged. The Other Wind is a great final statement on this all.
I feel like I grew up in parallel with Tenar. She speaks to me as few other female characters do in fantasy.
As one of your regular readers, I want to thank you for this series. I opened my mind to many things.
I like Tenar making a quiet life for herself. I like Ged rebuilding his connection with small, quiet things after years of being a high-powered wizard. It’s been a long time since I read it – were there chickens? But. Making the abused child a dragon is massively off-theme.
Besides plot-drama that seems to me unnecessary, what is supposed to be the take-away from the abused dragon-child? That the way to get past abuse is to breath fire on the abusers? That won’t work for most people, who aren’t dragons, and I doubt it would be a good thing anyway, because you’d most likely get a braid of abuse and retaliatory abuse until the last survivor was standing alone on a hill of corpses. That you shouldn’t abuse people because they might be more powerful then you think? That’s sort of true, but, from Le Guin, I expect things that are, well, truer.
I suppose LeGuin just wanted to blow up the patriarchy, and that resonates with a lot of people, but it’s a cheap shot. Anybody can blow up anything if they sic a dragon on it. Deus ex dragonfire.
I sympathize with Princessroxanna. Tehanu was deeply disappointing. I can get plot-drama anyplace; from LeGuin I hope for more.
Thank you!
I’m fine with other people liking it but I so very much didn’t!
Tehanu is my favorite as well. I read it shortly after its release and used it as the basis for a chapter in my (now long-ago) dissertation on feminist revisions of the hero myth. Sometime in the Nineties, I assigned the book in a college class on SF and fantasy and was bemused at one young student who complained that it was “not really fantasy.” Another hated the book because of what happened to Ged: he was horrified that “she took away his power and then made him live.” Since the class included several women over forty, a fabulous discussion ensued.
Tehanu seems to be experiencing a resurgence of late (on here, and on /r/fantasy in the last couple of years), and I‘m delighted. When I first read it 5 years ago, most reviews seemed to paint it as Le Guin’s worst work. So I went into it with low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised.
Tehanu is the quietest and most pastoral of all the Earthsea books, yet somehow also the most intense. Le Guin was channeling her best when she wrote it.
I loved the development of Irian in Tales of Earthsea and thence to the Other Wind. Tehanu is a great story but when combined with Irian’s parts makes a complete story, and like @14 I was really pleased by the fall of the wall of stones.
I’m overall more a League/Ekumen fan than an Earthsea one. So many favorites among her work, but I’m saddened that we didn’t get to Another Story / Fisherman of the Inland Sea. Science, relationships, travel beyond comprehension – and relationships again.
Touching.
@35 — indeed, “Another Story” is also one of my favorites.
I love Tehanu, but it took me several rereads to get there. TOW was immediately more my speed: when the Wall falls, the ancient evil is reduced (scotch’d not killed — it will be back, but weaker next time). We still need warnings that it isn’t dead, but though tens of thousands of deaths is a horror, it isn’t millions, and if you have to choose, war is better than extermination.
I picked up The Tombs of Atuan in my third grade class room. English was my second language so reading and writing used to make me nervous. The Tombs took me right in and gave me a love for reading and fantasy that follows me to this day. I still remember sitting so quietly after finally finishing the book. I had to give myself a moment to let the story go and come back to reality. Finding Tehanu 15 years later and revisiting with Tenar is her middle age worked so well for me. I loved it so very much, this time it was Tehanu that left me engrossed.