Taran Wanderer

Taran Wanderer is a high fantasy novel by the American writer Lloyd Alexander, published in 1967 and the fourth of the five books of The Chronicles of Prydain.

The series had been building towards a battle with a great enemy, and this volume sets the war aside almost entirely to send its hero out to work: he learns a trade from a smith, spends time with a weaver and a potter, and comes to understand quite late that the question he set out with cannot be answered by a name. Alexander said afterwards that he had not planned to write the book at all and had intended to move straight from The Castle of Llyr to the last volume, but his publisher asked for another so that Taran's development would be properly shown. The result is the quietest book in the sequence and the one most often described as a story about becoming an adult, since its subject is not the discovery of noble birth but the discovery that a person is made by what they do. Alexander drew on Arthurian legend and on his own wartime years in Wales, and the series is treated as one of the foundations of American mythopoeic fantasy for younger readers.