Northward Vale

The Northward Vale is the steep, terraced valley on the island of Gont where Ged was born and raised in the village of Ten Alders, and it serves as the setting for his childhood, his first demonstration of magical power during the Kargish raid, and the symbolic origin point of his lifelong journey.

Geography and Setting

The Northward Vale slopes downward level below level from the high mountain village of Ten Alders toward the sea, with other towns lying on the bends of the River Ar. Above the village, only forest rises ridge behind ridge to the stone and snow of the heights. The River Ar, like all Gontish rivers, runs very quick and cold, and its pools were where the young Duny swam and where, at age thirteen, he walked naked into the icy springs to receive his true name, Ged, from the mage Ogion. The Vale's high pastures, such as the meadow called High Fall, were where Duny herded goats and first tested the rhyme that gave him power over them, a power that later, during the Kargish invasion, he would use to weave a fog that saved the village.

The Kargish Raid and Ged's First Great Deed

When the Kargad Empire attacked Gont, a band of about a hundred white-skinned, yellow-haired warriors came up the Northward Vale, burning fields and orchards. The villagers of Ten Alders, only eighteen men and boys, prepared to fight with hunting bows and newly forged spear-points. Duny, then twelve, worked the forge-bellows all night until his arms ached. At dawn, a thick white fog covered the heights. Seeing the fog blow and thin before the Kargs, Duny wove a fogweaving charm, interlacing it with a spell of concealment, and cried the word that set the magic going. The fog closed and thickened over the village, hiding the defenders. The villagers, led by Duny's father the bronze-smith, taunted the Kargs and led them to the cliff's edge at High Fall, where the pursuers fell a hundred feet to the rocks below. The Kargs, terrified by the uncanny mist and the phantom shapes within it, fled down the Vale. The story of the lad who wove the fog was told all down the Northward Vale, and it reached the mage Ogion in Re Albi, who came to Ten Alders to give Duny his true name and take him as a prentice.

Ged's Return and the Beginning of the Hunt

Years later, after his flight from Osskil as a hawk and his restoration by Ogion, Ged returned to the Northward Vale. Ogion told him, "You must turn around. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter." Ged left a message on the hearthstone: "Master, I go hunting." He then set off down the road from Re Albi to the Port of Gont, beginning the hunt that would lead him across the Open Sea to confront the shadow he had loosed. The Vale thus marks both the beginning of his journey into wizardry and the point from which he turned to face his greatest enemy.

Thematic Significance

The Northward Vale represents Ged's origin, the place of his first power and his first failure. It is the "beginning" to which Ogion told him he must return in order to know his end. The Vale's geography—the mountain spring where he was named, the High Fall where he first used magic in battle, the village he saved—grounds his identity. His final confrontation with the shadow, in which he spoke its name and made himself whole, echoes the naming ceremony at the spring of the River Ar, completing the circle that began in the Northward Vale.