Thoughts on Taran Wanderer
...in which I write an essay.
The thing about the TW quest is that it’s not really about Eilonwy; it’s never been about Eilonwy, he just uses that as his excuse. If he actually thought for ten seconds that she gave a rat’s rear end about his parentage then he doesn’t know her or appreciate her enough to ask for her hand. I can imagine, if it ever actually came up, that she would tell him flat out that she didn’t care about his status and he would literally tell her she SHOULD care - like he knows better than she does whether their relationship is appropriate, and doesn’t even see how stupid and offensive that is.
TW is the book where Taran comes face to face with his own pride and vanity. That is what his quest is about. He really does hope and secretly believe he’s going to turn out to be a prince or a lord because he’s had his head turned by all those fairy tales in The Book of Three and he thinks that clearly, he has shown his worth so many times over, that PROVES he must be nobility because in his mind only high-born people behave nobly. That his actual lived experience contradicts this at every level is irrelevant; it’s the cognitive dissonance he lives with (and totally human, just look at the flaming garbage of current politics as a real-life example). And he wants to be noble...just because. Because that means he is Somebody besides some worthless Assistant Pig-Keeper. He wants to matter.
So until the experience with Craddoc he is able to lie to himself continually about what he’s looking for on this quest, and he indeed does a lot of heroic and noble things because that’s who he is underneath all the nonsense. But that’s why when he has to face the (apparent) truth that he is not nobly born but the poorest of the poor, it utterly destroys him. He doesn’t even wonder what Eilonwy would think because he’s too busy wallowing in self-pity and the crushing of his own dreams for /himself/ to be sensible and rationalize that if she loves him as a pig-keeper she’ll love him as a shepherd. And because he’s melodramatic Taran he thinks he’s being self-sacrificing for giving her up but he’s really being incredibly, horrendously selfish, not once considering how just being told to “forget him” would rip her heart out. I know I sound hypercritical here but it’s that paradox of, like, a suicide victim - it’s ok to be both compassionate toward that Level of unimaginable pain but also furious for how that act destroys everyone that loves them. And I really do think it’s what Lloyd was aiming for, BECAUSE...
...it takes the crisis of Craddoc’s fall to make Taran realize the depth of his own selfishness, that he could actually fantasize for a hot second about just leaving him to die. And this is not judgmental; most of us would probably feel the same way, because humans /are selfish/. Whether it’s a survival instinct in our DNA or the result of original sin - whatever your beliefs, we all have a streak of it, and it’s the true heroes who learn how to do the right thing in spite of it.
So then we have Craddoc’s confession and Taran’s near-death experience and he comes out of it not relieved to find out he’s not a shepherd’s son but just totally unmoored, because not only does he still not know who his parents are - he isn’t even the type of good guy he thought he was. As it turns out, when push came to shove he was just as fallible and selfish and vain and grasping as all the “common” people he was trying to rise above (It’s like he had forgotten all about Ellidyr and Morgant, two prime examples of royalty who were total frickwads). And so he’s still not ready to hope for Eilonwy at this point, because he realizes that without knowing who he really is, he can’t be anything to anyone.
It’s worth noting that it’s after this turning point that we see him beginning to mingle with common people. With the exception of Coll, and Aeddan and Alarca, every one of his companions, mentors, and acquaintances up to this point have been royalty, nobility, wizard, or some kind of Important Person. It’s Craddoc who gives him his first lengthy taste (Besides Coll, but we always take parental figures for granted) of what a poor but hard-working, proud and generous common man is. It’s a black mark and a big deal that Craddoc lies to him, but he’s still a sympathetic character who Taran comes to respect and love even as he resents him. Then after his crisis we get Llonio and all the Commot folks and for the first time he /gets/ the value of hard labor and craftsmanship beaten into him: prior to Craddoc he wouldn’t have cared or made the effort. (As a parent I can so sympathize with Coll here: “I tried to teach you smithing and it was oh, no, I wanna learn sword fighting, oh but you’ll learn it from THAT guy” - again, Lloyd got human nature so well.)
He wins his own self-respect back not through finding out he’s an orphaned prince or through magical revelation but through honest work and successful and humble leadership, and finding out that that’s who he really is after some of the pride and foolishness is burned away (or at least realizing it’s there and something he has to battle). It’s this that gives him a sense of his own identity so that by the time he looks into the Mirror of Llunet he has no need of it to tell him who he is, and that’s also the point where he realizes - FINALLY- that he’s worthy of Eilonwy. But he wouldn’t have been, prior to all of that; he would have been less of a man but just wouldn’t have known the real reason.
IMO if he had tried to draw Dyrnwyn at the end of TW he would have done so successfully. His accomplishments in THK are just gravy after this.
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