The Farthest Shore

The Farthest Shore

Cover of first edition (Hardcover)
Author	Ursula K. Le Guin
Illustrator	Gail Garraty
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	The Earthsea Cycle
Genre	Fantasy novel, Bildungsroman
Publisher	Atheneum Books
Publication date	1972
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	223 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-575-01603-5 (First British hardcover edition, 1973)
OCLC	481359
Preceded by	The Tombs of Atuan
Followed by	Tehanu

The Farthest Shore is the third of a series of books written by Ursula K. Le Guin and set in her fantasy archipelago of Earthsea, first published in 1972. It follows on from The Tombs of Atuan, which itself was a sequel to A Wizard of Earthsea. It is the Earthsea series novel which inspired the Studio Ghibli animated film Tales from Earthsea. It won the 1973 National Book Award for Children's Books.

Plot summary

A strange, inexplicable malaise is spreading throughout Earthsea. Magic is losing its power; songs are being forgotten; people and animals are sickening or going mad. Accompanied by Arren, the young Prince of Enlad, the Archmage Ged leaves Roke Island to find the cause. After a journey fraught with many missteps, they travel to the end of the earth, and beyond, into the land of the dead. There they confront and defeat the mage Cob, who had opened a breach between the worlds in an attempt to cheat death and live forever. In order to shut this breach, Ged sacrifices all his magic.

When they emerge back into the world of the living, Arren realizes that he has fulfilled the prediction of the last King of Earthsea many centuries before: "He shall inherit my throne who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day." In the intervening time, the realm had broken up into smaller principalities and domains, with little peace between them. Now they can be reunited.

Le Guin offers two endings to the story. In one, after Arren's coronation, Ged sails alone out into the ocean and is never heard from again. In the other, Ged returns to the forest of his home island of Gont. In 1990, seventeen years after the publication of The Farthest Shore, Le Guin opted for the second ending when she continued the story in Tehanu.

Major characters

Main article: Characters in Earthsea

Cob

A sorcerer whom Ged meets and defeats.

Ged

Archmage of Roke. Called Sparrowhawk.

Kalessin

The eldest dragon.

Lebannen

Young prince of Enlads. The name means "rowan tree" in the Old Speech. Called Arren.

Orm Embar

A powerful dragon of the West Reach descended from Orm. Killed by Cob.

Themes

Like both previous books in the trilogy, this is a bildungsroman. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Arren, who develops from the boy who stands overawed in front of the masters of Roke, to the man who addresses dragons with confidence on Selidor.

Ged has also matured. He is no longer the impetuous boy who had himself opened a crack between the worlds in A Wizard of Earthsea, or the foolhardy young man who sailed the Dragon's Run and went alone into the Tombs of Atuan. Though the task before him is every bit as difficult and dangerous as any he had attempted before, necessity alone guides his actions now.

In a sense, Cob is Ged's alter ego - a Ged who did not turn back from the dangerous road of summoning the dead, in which Ged dabbled in his youth, but continued along it to the ultimate conclusion. Thus, Ged's final confrontation with Cob and the closing of the hole between the worlds of the living and the dead is in fact a kind of repetition of his confrontation with the Shadow in the first book, who was Ged's alter ego in a more explicit way.

Ged's closing of that evil hole, at the cost of completely losing his magic power (and very nearly his life), can also be considered as finally fulfilling his wish "to undo the evil" which as a youth he had expressed to then-Archmage Gensher (and which, as the Archmage told him, he was at the time not capable of achieving).

References

• Bernardo, Susan M.; Murphy, Graham J. (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (1st ed.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313332258.
• Cadden, Mike (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 0415995272.
• Drout, Michael (2006). Of Sorcerers and Men: Tolkien and the Roots of Modern Fantasy Literature (1st ed.). China: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 978-0760785232.
• Mathews, Richard (2002). Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415938902. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help)

External links

• Earthsea series listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Preceded by:	Series:	Followed by:
The Tombs of Atuan	Earthsea	Tehanu