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Somebody in this fine household—a witch, a widow, a cripple, and a half-wit—had to do what must be done, and not frighten the child with weeping.
CHAPTER 5 BETTERING
HE LAY LIKE THE DEAD but was not dead.
Yup, that's Ged after The Farthest Shore
“Which of us saved the other from the Labyrinth, Ged?”
She slept, and her sleep opened out into a vast windy space hazy with rose and gold. She flew. Her voice called, “Kalessin!” A voice answered, calling from the gulfs of light.
using words for his needs only, never for pleasure and the give and take of love and knowledge.
You did not ask a true name. It was given you, or not.
Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning.
Who knows where a woman begins and ends?
And I had my man, I bore my children, I lived well. In the broad daylight. And in the broad daylight, they did that—to the child. In the meadows by the river.
This whole passage is powerful
“When he’s himself again, you’ll see,” she said to Moss. “Himself!” Moss said, and she made that gesture with her fingers of breaking and dropping a nutshell.
Callback to a wizard without power is an empty nutshell
When she spoke the dragon’s name again it spoke itself, shaping her mouth to its shape and sound, making her breath soft fire.
It would be a pity, she thought, if he did think about it, if he started fearing that his dignity hung by a dishcloth.
As a young woman she had been taught a powerful knowledge by a powerful man and had laid it aside, turned away from it, not touched it.
“He carried me from death to life. Arren of Enlad. Lebannen of the songs to be sung. He has taken his true name, Lebannen, King of Earthsea.”
Was a hero being born?
Therru keeps watching Ged
CHAPTER 6 WORSENING
She felt no power in those songs but that of song itself; and she liked to sing in her own language, though she did not know the songs a mother would sing to a child in Atuan, the songs her mother had sung to her.
pondering the indifference of a man toward the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached,
She spoke once. The name was not fire in her mouth this time, but hissed and dragged softly out of her lips, “Kalessin. . . .”
LeGuin's names are great, but they are only words in stories to us. I love the way she conveys that they are so much more than that to our characters.
I married my death. It gave me life. Water, the water of life. I was a fountain, a spring, flowing, giving. But the springs don’t run, there.
because it was all you could do. And so we must live on into the new age with the spoils of our victory over evil. You with your burned child, and I with nothing at all.” Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.
One of those she had seen from indoors was the white summer star that they called, in Atuan, in her own language, Tehanu.
"Tehanu" is the Atuan word for a summer star, but in the True Language of the Making, it is the child's true name.
“The Heart of the Swan,” he said, looking up at it. “In Ten Alders they called it the Arrow.”
Tenar had hoped that Ged could heal Therru—could lay his hand on the scar and it would be whole and well, the blind eye bright, the clawed hand soft, the ruined life intact. “Knowing what her life must be . . .”
games? Destroyed, she had drawn the destroyed to her, part of her own ruin, the body of her own evil.
End of a powerful passage
saw herself the hawk, the wild bird.
Tenar sees herself as something Ged had caught with his magic
CHAPTER 7 MICE
Townsend nodded. “Might keep the foreign riffraff out.” Tenar nodded her foreign head pleasantly.
For all she knew, Tenar’s son was a sailor on a pirate ship. And safer, maybe, as such than on a steady merchantman. Better shark than herring, as they said.
But gossip about the doings of wizards and mages would not go far. The matter was too uncanny, the lives of men of power were too strange, too different from their own.
She met the Archmage of Earthsea as he came past the garden fence.
Simple, lovely juxtaposition
Looking at him in the dusky light to see how he took this, she wondered sharply for a moment what it must be like never to have feared a human being—what it would be like to have to learn to be afraid.
But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.
“He said, ‘They will fear her.’ And he said, ‘Teach her all! Not Roke.’ I don’t know what he meant.
“We seek the Archmage, Sparrowhawk of Gont. King Lebannen is to be crowned at the turn of autumn, and he seeks to have the Archmage, his lord and friend, with him to make ready for the coronation, and to crown him, if he will.”
Distraught, she used the defense of her appearance, her seeming to be a mere goodwife, a middle-aged housekeeper—but was it seeming? It was also truth, and these matters were more subtle even than the guises and shape-changes of wizards—She
running freely, flying, Tenar thought, seeing her vanish in the evening light beyond the dark door-frame, flying like a bird, a dragon, a child, free.
CHAPTER 8 HAWKS
And I know that all I understand about living is having your work to do, and being able to do it. That’s the pleasure, and the glory, and all. And if you can’t do the work, or it’s taken from you, then what’s any good? You have to have something. . . .”
“They set themselves apart.” “Aye. A wizard has to do that.”
though maybe some witches are, but they dishonor the art, I say. I do my art for pay but I take my pleasure for love, that’s what I say.
the world she had chosen to live in—a world not of kings and queens, great powers and dominions, high arts and journeys and adventures (she thought as she made sure Therru was with Heather, and set off into town), but of common people doing common things, such as marrying, and bringing up children, and farming, and sewing, and doing the wash.
Is this Le Guin reflecting on the parts of her own life? In the world of letters and in the world of her family?
the clouds and peaks were the towers of the city, and the men and women were winged, and the dragons looked with human eyes.
Similar to the story that dragons and people were once the same
When she knew that a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.
“Yes. You are a red dragon.”
CHAPTER 9 FINDING WORDS
“Calls himself Handy,”
Handy? Or handsy?
She had thought him, on the morning of Ogion’s death, to be a young man, a tall, handsome youth with a grey cloak and a silvery staff. He did not look as young as she had thought him,
Something unnatural about his aging. Made young and hale by the death of another.
The man did well who tried to destroy that creature, but the job should be completed.
