The Other Wind

The Other Wind Review

The Other Wind is the sixth and final Earthsea novel, published in 2001 — more than thirty years after A Wizard of Earthsea — and it returns to the question that has haunted the series since The Farthest Shore: what is the nature of death in Earthsea, and what awaits in the dry land where the dead go?

The answer, in The Farthest Shore, was dispiriting: the dead exist in a grey land without joy, without memory, without the ability to speak. Ged’s sacrifice in that novel restored the world but could not change what death was. Le Guin had lived with that conclusion for decades, and The Other Wind is her reopening of the question — a willingness to acknowledge that the answer she gave was incomplete.

A young sorcerer named Alder comes to Roke haunted by the dead — specifically by his dead wife, who reaches to him through the wall between worlds. His petition sets in motion a gathering of the series’ major characters: Tenar and Ged, now old; Tehanu (whose nature this novel finally reveals); Irian; the King of All the Isles. The question they must answer is why the wall is thinning and what lies on the other side.

What Le Guin offers in The Other Wind is a theology of Earthsea revised toward hope — a reconception of what death is and what happens after that doesn’t pretend the grey land wasn’t real but suggests it was built on a mistake, a wrong agreement made long ago that can be unmade. The cosmological revelation is handled with the gentleness of late Le Guin: nothing is forced, the characters find the answer by being willing to ask the question again.

It is a quiet conclusion to one of the greatest fantasy sequences, and it is exactly right.

The Series’ Final Reckoning with Death

The Other Wind is Le Guin’s most sustained engagement with the theological problem she had created in The Farthest Shore: the dry land, the grey country where the dead go, was always presented as a place of deprivation rather than peace. Le Guin had lived with that vision of the afterlife for nearly thirty years before writing The Other Wind, and she found it incomplete.

The novel’s central argument is that the dry land was built on a mistake — specifically, on a wrong agreement made in ancient times between humanity and the dragons, in which humans chose to retain their individual identities after death at the cost of true death. The dragons, who are beings of pure present time, die entirely; humans persist in a grey half-existence. The resolution involves breaking that agreement and letting the dead go — not into nothingness but into return to the world in a different form.

Le Guin’s Late Philosophy

Le Guin was a committed Taoist, and the cosmological revision of The Other Wind is a Taoist argument: the attempt to hold on to individual existence beyond its natural term is a form of grasping, and the grey land of Earthsea was the consequence of that grasping writ cosmic. The solution — acceptance, release, the willingness to let go — is the same solution that appears throughout Le Guin’s work, in The Dispossessed (Shevek must leave Anarres to give his gift), in The Farthest Shore (Ged must give up his magic to seal the breach), and here, where the dead must be allowed to become what death genuinely is.

Le Guin was born October 21, 1929 and died January 22, 2018. The Other Wind was published in 2001, when she was in her early seventies, and it represents a late philosophical reflection on the series she had begun in her late thirties. The question she reopens — what does death actually mean in a world where magic is real and the dead can be seen? — is also a question about mortality more generally, and her answer has the quality of earned wisdom.

Tehanu’s Revelation

The novel finally reveals what Tehanu is: a being of both human and dragon nature, the first of a kind that might bridge the two races. This revelation, gestured at in Tehanu and developed here, gives the Earthsea sequence a mythological completion: the burned child who was taken for useless turns out to be the figure who makes the new world possible. Le Guin’s consistent theme — that power operates through channels the powerful do not recognise — receives its most literal expression in the character of Tehanu, whose significance was invisible to everyone who saw only her damage.

The Complete Earthsea Sequence

The Other Wind concludes the six-novel Earthsea sequence, one of the most formally ambitious sustained achievements in fantasy literature. Le Guin returned to Earthsea across more than thirty years, each return revealing new dimensions of a world built on philosophical principles rather than genre conventions. The full sequence — original trilogy, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind — is best read in order of publication, as each book depends on and extends what came before.

Reading The Other Wind

The novel requires familiarity with the preceding Earthsea books to achieve its full effect. Readers who have read only A Wizard of Earthsea will not have the necessary context for the ensemble of characters from across the series, or the accumulated weight of the dry land as a cosmological problem the series has been living with since The Farthest Shore. But readers who arrive at The Other Wind having read the full sequence will find it a deeply satisfying conclusion: quiet, honest, and generous in the resolution it offers without sentimentalising what came before.

Le Guin received the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, recognition that placed her alongside the major figures of American literary history regardless of genre. In her acceptance speech, she spoke about the importance of fiction that imagines alternatives to the present — fiction that maintains the possibility of change. The Other Wind, in which a wrong agreement is recognised and unmade, is a small-scale enactment of that possibility: a world corrects a mistake it made long ago, and the correction, though it costs something, is more honest than the alternative.