The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

First published: 1984

Type of work: Fantasy

Themes: Coming-of-age, gender roles, and race and ethnicity

Time of work: A mythical time reminiscent of the Middle Ages

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: The mythical kingdom of Damar

Principal Characters:

• Aerin, the only daughter of the king of Damar
• Arlbeth, the king of Damar, her loving father
• Tor, her cousin, who befriends her as a child and eventually falls in love with her
• Teka, her nursemaid and surrogate mother, who offers unfailing loyalty
• Talat, her faithful horse and companion
• Maur, the great Black Dragon that she conquers
• Luthe, the wizard who heals her after her battle with Maur and gives her the magical sword Gonturan
• Agsded, an evil mage who has stolen the Hero’s Crown, Damar’s treasured talisman

The Story

The Hero and the Crown, a high fantasy, has the setting and plot of ancient legend, with a twist: The heroine is thoroughly contemporary in her assertiveness and capabilities. Aerin, eighteen and the only child of Arlbeth, king of the mythical land of Damar, is his rightful heir. Yet she must overcome the typical obstacles of being female; furthermore, she feels unaccepted by the Damarians because her mother was a foreigner rumored to be a witch, and Aerin herself displays none of the characteristic giftedness of the royal family. In addition, she is clumsy and red-haired among a dark-complexioned, graceful people.

In spite of her low morale and self-doubts, Aerin sets out to find her identity and prove herself worthy of recognition, a quest that becomes her rite of passage. Slowly, she begins to succeed and to undergo a transformation in feelings of self-worth. Two things enable her to accomplish this transformation: her discovery of the recipe for kenet, a dragon-fire ointment, and her earned reputation as a dragon-slayer.

The small dragons she kills eventually lead to her battle with the last of the great dragons, Maur. At terrible physical cost to herself and Talat, Aerin does slay Maur and returns to Damar with its skull. Even so, she remains vulnerable to the taunt that only a witchwoman’s daughter could have killed Maur. The wounds of body and soul ultimately drive Aerin to seek Luthe, a wizard who appears to her in a dream after the battle with Maur. With Luthe, Aerin achieves immortality and finds the healing knowledge that becomes the key to her triumph: that her mother was the sister of the evil mage Agsded, who has stolen the Hero’s Crown from the people of Damar. Furthermore, Luthe tells her that it is her destiny to confront Agsded, because only a hero of his blood may defeat him. Luthe’s last gift to Aerin is Gonturan, a powerful blue sword, to be her ally against Agsded.

Aerin sets forth to find Agsded, and their confrontation in his black tower-mountain is as much psychological as it is physical. He, too, attacks Aerin on her most vulnerable point—her differentness and the lack of acceptance she endures because of her mother’s identity. What he does not know, however, is Aerin’s newfound strength from the knowledge of her mother’s identity and her own self-discovery as the chosen hero. Thus, Aerin overcomes Agsded and rescues the lost Hero’s Crown. She then returns the crown triumphantly to Damar and leads the Damarians, along with her cousin Tor, to victory over the evil forces of the North, which threaten the kingdom.

When Arlbeth dies in the battle, Tor, the closest male heir, becomes king. Tor already has fallen in love with Aerin, and he insists that she become coruler of Damar when they marry. Finally, the Damarians also come to accept Aerin and accord her their affection as the rightful queen.

Context

The Hero and the Crown earned for Robin McKinley the Newbery Medal in 1985. It is part of the Damarian cycle and a prequel to her earlier Newbery Honor Book, The Blue Sword (1982). That book, also, is fantasy, though set in a later (rather Victorian) period of Damar’s history, and the two stories have similar themes of good versus evil and the adolescent’s search for identity. The time setting of The Hero and the Crown, however, gives it the flavor of folklore and legend, a quality that makes this book akin to three of McKinley’s other works: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (1978); The Door in the Hedge (1981), a collection of adapted and original fairy tales; and The Outlaws of Sherwood (1988), a recounting of the legend of Robin Hood.

McKinley has said that she was inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). Indeed, her Damarian cycle is in the tradition of other modern quest-fantasy series such as Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence. Her retellings of folklore and legend, on the other hand, can be compared to Rosemary Sutcliff’s trilogy of King Arthur legends.

Overall, McKinley’s writing explores the nature of honor and heroism, or what Horn Book magazine likens to “a musical theme and variations.” One of her most distinguishing features is that she creates strong female characters who often must combat stereotyped roles. Beauty is brave enough to preserve her father’s honor and save his life, Harry (Angharad) Crewe carries the blue sword (Gonturan) into battle, Aerin kills dragons and finds her destiny as the chosen hero, and Robin Hood’s Marian is a quick-witted, skilled archer who saves his life. In fact, McKinley seems to write about young women like herself, or, as she has said, “Girls Who Do Things.”