Ok. I Think I've Calculated The Left Hand Of Darkness Characters' Ages. A Fair Bit Of This Is Me Headcanoning

ok. i think i've calculated the left hand of darkness characters' ages. a fair bit of this is me headcanoning but WHATEVER

(under the cut is sorve, genly, estraven, arek, ashe, and estraven & ashe's kids' ages)

sorve harth rem ir estraven: so we'll start with the only character we're given something adjacent to a canon age for: sorve. except the canon age is wrong. genly says he looks around 19-20, but this basically can't be the case because of ~textual inferences~ that can be made. we know that siblings are allowed to be kemmering partners until someone gets pregnant, and then they have to stop. we also know that vowing kemmering after said pregnancy is what gets you exiled. we don't know exact dates, but we can guess that estraven was exiled shortly after sorve's birth because of this (or maybe even during the pregnancy if you think arek is the one who carried him), and while we don't know the exact cause of arek's death, we can assume it was shortly after estraven's exile from estre because of how he always talks about the events together. so we can infer that arek died pretty much right after sorve was born, and we know arek died fourteen years before the events of the story. that puts sorve at roughly fourteen years old, and knowing genly, he probably overestimated because sorve was tall or something

genly ai: we know he's under thirty, at least as per estraven's assessment. estraven could be wrong about this, because genly definitely was for sorve, but i also trust estraven's judgement a little more here (and it helps that genly's the one translating the journal entries, so he could've just added a footnote if estraven was wrong but he didn't). now, estraven specifically says "not thirty", which typically means twenty-nine in formal english (think any of the austen novels, where "not two and twenty" means twenty-one). technically, he could be anywhere from like, 18-30, but at the very least, not thirty means he's in his 20s, and i think 29 works perfectly fine.

therem harth rem ir estraven: estraven's age is a tad bit more complicated to calculate, but still doable. we're given the ages of his mom, esvans (who's 70+), and his son, sorve (who, as i've explained, is roughly 14). this is complicated because it's said that gethenians generally stop having kids and start using contraceptives at about twenty-four, and have all their kids young. if you calculate back from esvans's age, that puts estraven at roughly 46, but if you calculate back from sorve's age, that puts estraven at thirty-eight MAX. you could use either of these calculations and you'd have enough textual support to do so, but i'm going to choose to use sorve's age for a few reasons: - it's more plausible to me that genly's data point about gethenians mostly choosing not to reproduce past twenty-four is based on recent data and not esvans's generation (especially because this choice is facilitated by contraceptives, and it would make sense for that to be a more recent scientific development) - estraven has two kids with ashe (more on that later) who are ten at oldest, and if he is 46, he would've had to father them at 36. if gethenians generally stop reproducing after 24, this is a bit too much of a stretch for me. so, like i said, that puts estraven at a maximum of 38 years old, but i actually think he's even younger than that. as mentioned earlier, estraven has two other kids with ashe. he and ashe vowed kemmering ten years before the beginning of the story (they were partners for seven years and have been separated for three), and although it's possible that they had their children before that, i doubt it just because of how estraven talks about it ("we were kemmerings for seven years and had two sons" at least kind of implies that the sons were born during the duration of that seven years). so with all that, if gethenian reproduction doesn't tend to happen past ~24 and estraven's kids with ashe are ten or younger, he'd be around 34, and would've had sorve around 20 (which is very plausible to me). hell, if his kids with ashe aren't the same age, the math probably means estraven is EVEN YOUNGER and sorve was a teen pregnancy baby, which also tracks imo.

arek harth rem ir estraven: this one is easy, arek is canonically a year older than estraven, which puts him at roughly 21 at the time of his death (potentially younger).

ashe foreth rem ir osboth: again, by assuming ashe's kids are ten or younger, ashe is 34 max, likely younger.

estraven & ashe's kids: all we know is that there's two of them, and they both could be anywhere from 3-10 years old (realistically, 5-10 years old, because the youngest kid being 3 or 4 would mean that estraven had sorve at thirteen or fourteen, which is very implausible even for a "sorve was a teen pregnancy" headcanon). we don't know if the kids are the same age or not either

ok there you have it, thank you for coming to my TED talk