The Lady, the Knights and “the Force” or How “Medieval” is Star Wars?

by Dr Sylvia McCosker

“Medieval legend sent into deep space” is how Mary Henderson describes the Star Wars saga. Henderson curated an exhibition about the series and has produced the book “STAR WARS - The Magic of Myth: Companion Volume to the Exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution”.

While detailing the affinities between Lucas’s saga and Joseph Campbell’s theories about myth she also shows that Lucas was probably inspired just as much by individual stories in specific genres. She identifies details drawn from “westerns” and pulp sci fi magazines. It’s also clear that Lucas had encountered versions of certain medieval European stories.

Henderson is a useful guide to much of this “medieval” material. But even without her help many things in Star Wars look familiar. We can spot parallels if we know our Grimm’s and Perrault (even if only via Disney), our Chretien de Troyes and Malory, Tennyson, Wagner and the various Arthurian, Crusader and Robin Hood stories - even Monty Python.

Nevertheless a professional medievalist watching Star Wars is struck not only by continuity but by discontinuity. Star Wars uses a number of plot-lines, incidents, characters and images that modern westerners are used to associating primarily with medieval Christendom. But Lucas combines them with a very different set of spiritual assumptions. Not consistently - which is perhaps as well for the story.

Do different gods make different heroes?

At first glance, it seems, no. The overarching plot (in the first Star Wars trilogy considered and in The Phantom Menace as well) would be recognised by any medieval storyteller. A small group of Knights must save a Lady from an Evil Magician; to do this they must fight fire-breathing Dragons (the two Death Stars which also double as Dark Castles) and a Black Knight (Darth Vader and - in The Phantom Menace - Darth Maul) as well as the Black Knight’s master the Evil Magician (Darth Sidius/ the Emperor) whose enchanted/ dehumanised armies appear as ghosts and shadows (the faceless black-armoured or white-armoured “Stormtroopers” of the first trilogy) or (the battle droids in The Phantom Menace) skeletons or puppets.

Alongside the small group of aspiring heroes are a larger band of “partisans” - hidden in the forest/ wilderness like Robin Hood. As in Wagner’s Lohengrin the Lady (Leia in the first trilogy, her mother-to-be Amidala in the second) is associated with or represents Good and Legitimate Government; the Magician is a tyrant-usurper.

The Jedi “guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy for a thousand generations” might remind us of the Grail-knights. One thinks also of the Knights of St John of Malta, and the original Templars. Unlike the Lohengrin plot, in which the mysterious champion is lost to the lady but gives her back her brother, Lucas in the first trilogy makes the brother the champion - who does not disappear, and brings his sister a husband.

In the second trilogy it’s clear (from what we were told in the first) that the lady will lose her champion not by betraying him but because he betrays himself. The focus in all the films, as in any medieval epic, is ostensibly on the loyalties between the characters and their devotion to their cause. For Luke there is also the conflict between filial piety and civic duty, when he learns that the evil Black Knight whom he is supposed to defeat and kill is his own father.

The sub-plot is the “on the job” physical and moral training, tests of individual worth and of group loyalty, which Lucas’s knights undergo.

This training is provided by a series of captures, escapes, rescues, duels and ordeals in forbidding natural landscapes or along labyrinthine “castle” corridors. Much of this also looks familiar to those who know their medieval texts - or their Arthurian and “Robin Hood” movies.

Three encounters, in particular, stand out to the allegorically minded. As soon as Han enters the story he must face and destroy a bounty-hunter whose name “Greedo” suggests the “greed” which is Han’s peculiar temptation and which he will overcome by the end of the first film.

Similarly, early in Return of the Jedi, Luke has a much more terrifying and difficult fight to kill a monster called a “Rancor” whose name (English “rancour” meaning “malignant hatred, inveterate bitterness") points to his peculiar temptation. “Don’t give way to hate” Kenobi’s spirit told him in The Empire Strikes Back.

Leia, too, must face and kill a monster with symbolic meaning. In Return of the Jedi, she reverses expectations by entering the Dragon/ Monster’s lair (Jabba’s palace) to rescue the Prince/ Knight (Han frozen in carbonite) - but at her moment of triumph, as Han awakes from his deathlike “enchanted sleep” and she sheds her mask, she is seized by Jabba’s minions and forced to endure symbolic rape - Jabba’s revolting physical touch and kiss. She next appears in harem gear (like the heroine in a crusader story or movie, captured by the sultan). Presumably, “offscreen”, she has been humiliated by being publicly stripped and re-clothed.

Expectations are soon reversed again - the Princess kills the Dragon herself.

St George told his rescued princess to use her girdle as a leash for a defeated dragon; Leia uses the choke-chain of her captivity to strangle and kill Jabba.

Luke conquered “Hate”, Han conquered “Greed” - Leia conquers something that might be called “Lust” or, better what Freud calls “Polymorphous Perversity”.

What a medievalist notices at once, however, is that the male characters, unlike medieval saints and knights and many classical heroes, encounter neither sensual temptations nor witches. There are no sirens or harpies; no Medusa, no Helen or Medea or Dido; no Lilith, no Delilah, no Kundry or Morgiana in Lucas’s universe. Likewise Leia is never tempted or seduced. It’s clear that her love for Han is unthreatened by Lando’s casual gallantry.

So, although the plot looks superficially “medieval” to modern western eyes, it isn’t quite. What makes the difference is less what is there rather than what is NOT there.

There are similarities in terms of the staging. We encounter labyrinths, castles, forests, caves, deserts - but the holy places are very different from those in medieval stories. Moreover almost no-one prays. Characters say, “may the Force be with you” however this is nonsensical because from the beginning we see that it can just as readily be with an evil character. Unless we count Luke’s “prayers” to the dead Kenobi, the Ewoks are the only characters who recognisably pray or worship. The Jedi may wear pseudo-Benedictine mantles, but Lucas’s sets never evoke chapel or cathedral.

The “good” sacred places in the saga all have pagan and indeed non-European associations. The pyramids of Tikal were the “location” for the rebel base in A New Hope; Aztec idols feature in the Gungan “sacred place” in The Phantom Menace. Moreover two other places represented as “good” within the saga have names - Dagobah and Endor - with negative Biblical associations. Dagobah is reminiscent of the Phoenician fish-god, Dagon. Endor was the home of witchcraft. Saul consulted a medium in Endor to try to get advice from the spirit of the prophet Samuel, but all he got was a message of defeat and death. Lucas reverses the associations of the name. In his saga it is a place of life and victory.

The weaponry of the Jedi ‘knights’ agains distances Star Wars from Medieval epics. Lightsabres are not swords. Precisely, they are not shaped like swords - there is no symbolic cross of hilt and blade. Nor are they the gift of the gods, like weapons in Greek or Norse myth. Siegfried reforged a broken sword but Luke loses his father’s weapon altogether and makes himself an all-new improved model. Ironically, a lightsabre is much more a projection of the self, much more a symbol of its wielder’s own strength than, say, Excalibur.

A Christian and a medievalist, watching Star Wars, is often struck by a “looking-glass” effect - we think we recognise something, but its meaning is upside down or back to front.

The familiarity of characters and plot lines applies only up to a point. Luke appears as a Parsifal or a Galahad until he starts learning levitation and telekinesis. Kenobi’s Benedictine robe makes us think of medieval monks. He is first encountered in the desert like a medieval hermit-knight, doing penance in the wilderness for some great error. But under his robe he wears Japanese style clothes. His vague pantheism and his insistence that truth is a function of one’s point of view are not what one would expect from a medieval hermit.

Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker) starts out as a sort of Merlin. Except that Merlin the “redeemed” or “baptised” child of a demon became a good and wise adviser to a good king. Anakin the “perfect” child of the (presumably, “good") “midichlorions” becomes the pupil and slave of an evil tyrant, though he is restored by self-sacrifice in the end. A further twist is that “Anakin”, the name of Vader’s “good” identity, chimes with the Biblical “Anakim”, pagan giants who terrified the Israelites.

Han Solo ("Lone Hand”!) played by half-Jewish, half-Irish Harrison Ford, comes closest to his medieval models. A combination of Western gunslinger and the mystery champion who appears and disappears, or even the romantic outlaw Robin Hood with his giant companion Little John (Chewbacca), Han is no Parsifal or Galahad. He is an earthy character, lover, gambler and fighter, like Lancelot or Tristan. However his love is neither adulterous nor tragic. Lucas parts both with “westerns” and with the bulk of medieval tradition by “domesticating” him.

The most striking thing to a medievalist’s ear is the name of Han’s ship - like a medieval knight he has a hunting bird, he flies the “Millennium Falcon”. In medieval literature each rank has its appropriate bird, and it’s “a falcon for a queen”. I doubt whether Lucas knew but it’s beautifully appropriate that it’s Han flying the Falcon who (unwittingly) comes to Leia’s rescue in A New Hope. Lucas cuts from Vader’s line “terminate her” to a shot of the Falcon hurtling through Hyperspace ringed with light. Throughout The Empire Strikes Back, it is Han and the Falcon who carry Leia. Given the close identification of Han and his ship, is it surprising that Han gets to marry the Princess? He - like his ship - is “a falcon for a queen”.

The identification is particularly poignant at the end of The Empire Strikes Back - Han is “dead”, out of the story, but when Leia and Lando sight the Falcon on the landing platform composer John Williams cuts in “Han’s theme”, as if Han’s spirit in his ship is aiding their escape.

Han plays a crucial role in the story: his choice to pursue the Imperial fighter, against Kenobi’s wishes, brings them to the right place at the right time to rescue Leia from the Death Star. His impetuous foot on a twig triggers the event cascade which brings them into contact with the Ewoks - who will save their mission. This non-force-gifted character repeatedly acts as guardian, guide or rescuer for the Jedi Luke and Leia.

I wonder whether Lucas realized that Han is - from a Christian point of view - the most truly supernatural character in the saga? The episode in which Han is betrayed (by his friend), tormented and then frozen/ “buried” draws openly on certain elements of the passion story: Lando’s Judas kiss, Chewbacca trying to fight (like St Peter) but restrained by his master, the woman handed over to the follower to be looked after. Of all the characters Han is the only one who “dies” and is “resurrected” or reborn.

Luke the “white Knight” is a more typical product of Lucas’s syncretic imagination. He begins like Parsifal, reared by family who dread his following in his martial father’s footsteps, or like Arthur, hidden for safety’s sake. Superficially he follows the classic and medieval pattern: he learns to use weapons, he is instructed in right conduct, he serves the Princess his sister, he kills the Dragon (the first Death Star) and finally defeats and unmasks the Black Knight his father and frees him from the sorceror. However: Luke has a vision of evil on Dagobah, but no vision of transcendant good such as the grail-knights experience. Perhaps the most telling detail in Luke’s journey is when he dangles upside down below the city of Bespin. Han’s ordeal was recognisably associated with Christian motifs but Luke enacts “the Hanged Man” of the Tarot.

Despite the authority which Lucas invests in Yoda and Kenobi, it is Luke’s purely human loyalty to Leia and Han - if he’d listened to Yoda he wouldn’t have gone to Bespin - which turns out right in the end. Had he not lost his hand at Bespin he would not have the insight which saves him in the final duel with Vader. Similarly Luke’s conviction that Vader has still some good in him prevails, not Yoda and Kenobi’s belief that Vader is too far gone, that once someone turns to the Dark Side “forever will it dominate your destiny”. Despite all the screen time that Lucas gives to Jedi religion he’s still enough of a child of Western Christendom to baulk at regarding individuals as expendable and fate as inexorable.

The representation of women is a point at which the appearance of continuity conceals major departures from the “medieval” model. As well as the absence of temptresses and female monsters there are no elderly wisewomen, no helpful crones offering advice. Spiritual figures whether evil or good are overwhelmingly masculine. There is one woman on the Jedi Council in The Phantom Menace, but the camera slides past her face and she never speaks.

At first glance Leia, Mon Mothma and Amidala fit the medieval pattern of the Lady to whom knightly deeds are dedicated. However in medieval tradition the devotion is personal and spiritual/ erotic. Lucas’s ladies have little of the shimmering erotic aura of a Guinevere, an Iseult or a Beatrice. Instead they are icons of sisterly, even tomboyish comradeship (Leia) or benign maternal authority (Mon Mothma and Amidala).

Mon Mothma’s very name suggests a mother-figure - “Mon = Mom”, “moth” (er), “ma”, even “momma”.

Amidala’s personal identity - and her female body - are hidden equally by her elaborate robes of office and by the veiled “slave-identity” that she sometimes assumes. Her characteristic pose as Queen, seated and statue-still, recalls both the Empress and Justice in the Tarot. When she speaks to the Senate of the Republic she wears the crescent moon of Artemis or Isis in her headdress. She first meets her future lover, Anakin, when he is a pre-pubescent boy and she is very much the gracious older sister.

Leia also begins as an Artemis or (as Henderson points out) Joan of Arc, the Warrior Virgin, fierce and pure. Her love for Han “tames” or “feminises” her, as happens to various legendary Amazons. Lucas signals this by making her scream and run to Han in a panic when she sees a “mynock” - yet if they’re as common as Han’s casual attitude suggests they are, surely a seasoned space traveller like her would not be put out by the sight of one. Leia’s Jedi abilities are linked to her sexuality in a way that never happens with the male Jedi - only after accepting Han as lover does she begin to show the Force-awareness which is her birthright. Non-Jedi Han conducts Leia’s transition from maiden to potential matron; scenes from their flight and courtship are intercut with scenes from Luke’s initiation into the Jedi arts, as conducted by Yoda. However, the erotic element is surprisingly small. Leia and Han’s romance is overshadowed by their common devotion to the cause; their relationship in Return of the Jedi receives very little screen time and the final frame of that film is not a lovers’ embrace but a combination of curtain call and family or “winning team” portrait.

There are numerous other characters and incidents that could be discussed, in relation to their medieval paradigms - for instance, C3P0 and Jar Jar Binks as Fools, R2D2 as Dwarf - but the material I’ve covered is enough to show the distinctive features of Lucas’s project.

So - how does Lucas measure up as a storyteller? He has chosen fairly well from the available scenarios and introduces some interesting variations, e.g. casting Han as “sleeping beauty/ Eurydice” in the “prologue” of Return of the Jedi. Yes, there are glitches in basic plotting (how DO Leia and Han get from near Hoth, in one solar system, to Bespin, in another, while unable to use hyperspace? Even supposing they can go at almost the speed of light, it’s still a long way from one star to another). There’s corny dialogue and some over-long action sequences (the Pod Race in The Phantom Menace blatantly tries to outdo the Chariot Race from Ben Hur - bigger, louder, faster).

But the real problem for this viewer is the theology and metaphysics. The more the characters tell us about “the Force” the less attractive it is to anyone who knows anything about the Christian God, or even about Zeus and Apollo. If “life creates it, makes it grow” (Yoda) then, so to speak, “we have created the gods and they [or IT] are us” (talk about the apotheosis of the “Me Generation”!). The Force is divided within itself into “light” and “dark” and is about as inherently moral as electricity, since good and evil characters use it with equal ease. Within a universe in which this vague “Force” is supposed to be the ultimate reality it’s strange to encounter a story which mostly follows its medieval and even its classical models in emphasising moral choices, moral conflict, the significance of the individual and of personal loyalties, narrative progression and the possibility of repentance. “Medieval legend” has indeed been, as Henderson put it, “sent into space” - cut off from the fiery personal theology which gave it solid metaphysical focus for almost a thousand years, and set adrift in the interstellar void of an implicitly amoral and passionless pantheism.

Nevertheless a story about a little slave boy who helps to save a Queen and becomes an apprentice knight; or about a young idealistic knight and a romantic outlaw helping a beautiful princess and Robin Hood rebels to defeat (and, ultimately, disenchant) a Black Knight, kill the dragons/ demolish the dark castles and destroy an evil Magician/ Tyrant/ Usurper, thus restoring good government, has enough energy of its own (especially with the help of John Williams’s score) to take an audience along for the ride - even this medievalist who winces every time the characters invoke “the Force”.

Dr Sylvia McCosker has a PhD in Early English Language and Literature from the University of Sydney.