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What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
In that book, my job was to get young Ged and his Shadow back together. I could leave him, then, ready to set off on his brilliant career. That’s where many books about young people stop, after all. Most novels about falling in love don’t tell about the marriage, and most novels about growing up don’t tell about the grown-up.
THE REASON PEOPLE DON’T BELIEVE that I didn’t plan a trilogy from the start is that fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism). Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is largely responsible for this epidemic, since its six books were printed in three volumes, a trilogy. I expect Earthsea is also to blame, although it ended up as six volumes, too. . . . But when I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance. These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them. The women warriors of current fantasy epics—ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies—to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.
word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.
