The Song of the Shadow

The Song of the Shadow is the name given to a lost epic that once told of Ged's first great deed: the hunt for the shadow he had loosed, his voyage to the edge of death's kingdom, and his final confrontation with the nameless thing. Though the song itself has vanished, its story forms the hidden foundation of Ged's later fame, and fragments of it survive in the folk memory of the East Reach, carried like driftwood from isle to isle over the long years.

Origins and Loss

If Estarriol of Iffish kept his promise and made a song of that first great deed of Ged's, it has been lost. The Song of the Shadow is never sung in the great halls of the Archipelago; no chanter recites it at festivals. Instead, only a few scraps of legend remain, scattered across the islands of the East Reach. In Iffish they say it was Estarriol who sailed that boat, but in Tok they tell of two fishermen blown by a storm far out on the Open Sea, and in Holp the tale is of a Holpish fisherman who could not move his boat from the unseen sands it grounded on, and so wanders there yet. The song's disappearance is itself a kind of testimony: the event it described was so strange, so far beyond the ordinary boundaries of human experience, that it could not be fixed in a single authoritative version.

The Story It Told

The core of the lost song was Ged's decision, following Ogion's counsel, to turn and hunt the hunter. "You must turn around," Ogion had told him. "You must seek what seeks you." Ged set off from Gont in a small boat, sailing westward across the winter sea, and on the Open Sea he summoned the shadow aloud. It came, and he pursued it across the waves, through mist and storm, until it tricked him onto the rocks of a nameless isle where two castaways, a prince and princess of the Kargad Empire, lived in utter desolation. From there he built a new boat and sailed on, following the bond that now linked him irrevocably to the shadow. In the Hands, a pair of lonely isles in the East Reach, he met the shadow face to face in a narrow inlet, and though he could not hold it, the encounter forged a bond that could never be broken. He knew then that his task was not to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.

The Final Confrontation

The song's climax came on the Open Sea, beyond the last known land of Astowell. Ged and Vetch sailed eastward for days, the magewind driving them over the great swells, until the sea itself began to change. The waves grew sluggish, the wind died, and the boat grounded on unseen sands. Ged stepped out onto the dry land of death's kingdom, his staff burning with white radiance. There, in the silence of that place, the shadow came to him, wearing first the faces of his father, Jasper, Pechvarry, and Skiorh, then a fearful face he did not know. Ged lifted his staff high, and in the intolerable light, the shadow shed all borrowed forms and became a black, crawling thing. They met face to face, and Ged spoke the shadow's name, and the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." The two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands and took hold of his shadow, and light and darkness met and joined and were one. When Vetch reached him, Ged was whole, and free, and weeping like a boy.

Survival in Folk Memory

Though the Song of the Shadow is lost as a formal composition, its truth is preserved in the Deed of Ged, which tells nothing of that voyage or of Ged's meeting with the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragons' Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more as Archmage of all the islands of the world. The Deed passes over the shadow-quest in silence, as if the event were too intimate, too transformative, to be sung in the public mode of epic. Yet the folk tales of the East Reach keep the memory alive in their own way: the story of a boat that ran aground days out from any shore, of a fisherman who wandered on unseen sands, of a man who met his own shadow and became whole. These scattered legends are the fragments of a song that was never written down, a song that Ged himself might have preferred to leave unsung.