BTS Moebius's Willow and TPM

In the finale of Trinity, when Elora healed Laiph's groin wound, most likely only one of his "two veg" would regrow itself. This is actually a darkly comic continuance of the Nazi imagery assocatied with Laiph, as it draws on a jocular Second World War song about Adolf Hitler's intimate anatomy. Thus Laiph's castration has permanent effects in a triple sense--two degrees of physical mutilation, as well as a magical component.

Lucas has repeatedly referred to Luke Skywalker's loss of his right hand as a "castration." Evidently, given the more adult nature of the original concept for Willow, he decided to literalize the implicit metaphors of the SW universe. Precisely the same thing happens with Elora's rape and impregnation: the same disturbing implications are present in Leia's capture by Jabba in ROTJ, but since SW is a family saga, nothing is ever explicitly said about it.

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Undoubtedly, the bedrock inspiration for the unorthodox resolution of the story's love triangle was Frank Herbert's Dune. Herbert's Paul Atreides marries Princess Irulan, daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV, for political reasons, but he remains firmly devoted to his beloved concubine, Chani of the Fremen. As with the heroes of Trinity, the trio in Dune run the gamut of hair colors: Paul has black hair, Irulan is blonde, and Chani is a redhead.

Laiph's two wives, Elora and Marazad, would be symbolically equated, both in their accumulated injuries and in their outfits during the ending scenes. The lower half of Marazad's queenly outfit would likely be a purple loincloth--very like what Carrie Fisher wears in ROTJ--but she would leave her breasts bare. While Elora would have only one breast bared, her golden metallic loincloth, unlike Marazad's panels of purple cloth, would be basically transparent.

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It is increasingly apparent to me that GL must himself have deliberately locked this script away deep in the Lucasfilm vault. As he must have realized, a mature fantasy film of this sort would cause immense controversy in Ronald Reagan's puritanical 1980s America--and shatter his carefully crafted Walt Disney-esque public image. So he abandoned the unsalvageable Trinity, and watered Willow down as best he could.

It wouldn't surprise me, though, if several important writers had been given access to some... unusual reading material in the library at Skywalker Ranch. Provided, of course, that they signed a binding non-disclosure agreement beforehand. Wouldn't want to knock the boss off that Disney-esque pedestal, after all.

Given the widespread and virulent hate for the SW prequels, it is immensely amusing to me to consider that GL may in fact be the secret godfather of contemporary fantasy literature.

 

It occurs to me that Marazad would likely have battled the Basilisk using her bow and arrows, which she'd earlier used to shoot down the flying unicorn. This idea derives from the living statue of Diana seen in Jean Cocteau's film version of Beauty and the Beast, which fatally shoots the roguish Avenant with its bow and arrow.

Marazad would likely use only two arrows, one apiece in each scene--a detail that derives from the thief Abu's use of a bow in the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad.

Significantly, Diana's mythological emblem is an upturned crescent moon on her forehead. It's therefore extremely probable that Marazad would already be marked with this same forehead tattoo when she first appeared. So it would actually be a mark of royalty--and Elora's subsequent branding with it would signify her forced adoption as a royal concubine.

Marazad's brothers, the six princes, would probably have slightly more elaborate forehead marks--likely adding in a star above the upturned crescent, and so incorporating an extremely common Islamic symbol.

(Guillermo del Toro considered using two similar but distinct forehead tattoos for his Elven Prince and Princess, who are twin siblings, in Hellboy II. It would seem the impact of Trinity must run far and wide indeed.)

But Marazad would also receive, along with Laiph, a triskelion brand on her left forearm during her battle with Dark Elora--the pair of marks thus signifying her shared relationship with both Laiph and Elora.

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Also, it's likely that Elora's fit of sexual desire, experienced on the road with Laiph after defeating Brunhild, would somehow be tied to the sudden appearance of a satyr, the mythological Pan--albeit he'd perhaps be cloaked in disguise as a human fellow traveler, whose road coincides with theirs for a brief time. Pan would play his trademark pipes, sending Elora into a frenzy of dancing and desire, which she would overcome only with great difficulty.

This scene is an idea taken from the 1964 fantasy film 7 Faces of Dr. Lao--one of the movies shown on TCM in the wake of the recent documentary on fantasy movies starring GL.

In that movie, the standoffish widow Angela Benedict initially ignores the friendly flirting of local crusading journalist Edward Cunningham. But when Angela visits Dr. Lao's circus, she stumbles into Pan's chamber, where his piping nearly drives her into climax right there and then. In Angela's manic dance, Pan takes on Edward's face; her reverie is only broken when a stranger enters the room. This overtly erotic encounter is the catalyst for her eventual acceptance of Edward's affections, on the second and final night of the circus.

In Stardust, a background character in the English town of Wall, the Greek tavern owner Mr. Bromios, is quite clearly Pan, living in disguise just on the mortal side of the borders of Faerie.

 

OK, if I haven't grossed you all out enough by now, prepare for some Wagnerian-level mind-bending. But first a bit of housekeeping.

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Each major kingdom in the world of Willow would have its own distinct animal emblem and colored banners--just like the great families in A Song of Ice and Fire, or the four Hogwarts houses in Harry Potter.

Judging by the colors of Madmartigan's armor in the Moebius concept art, the ancient empire of Galladoorn would be represented by a golden eagle on a blue field (an image that is both Roman, and even more so, Napoleonic, in character). The very Anglo-Saxon people of Land's End, meanwhile, would have a golden English lion on a red field. (This is the seed of the red-and-gold lion flag shared by House Lannister and Hogwarts' Gryffindors.)

The emblem of the short-statured Elves of Tir Asleen would be a black porcupine on a golden field: a diminutive creature with great power to sting malefactors. (Thus, the Hufflepuff badger. But black and gold are also colors associated with the German flag.) The flag of the feuding princes of the Sultan's southern kingdom would likely display a white stag on a green field: the sigil animal of the feuding Baratheon clan of Westeros. And Dark Elora's triskelion emblem, of course, would double as a three-headed dragon--which, drawn in red on a black field, is the seal of House Targaryen.

It's likely that, like Jaime Lannister, Laiph Thaughbaer of Land's End would have blond hair, but green eyes--the last being the single detail that would belie his otherwise perfectly Nazified image in the finale of Trinity. (A real Nazi would of course have blue eyes.) But Laiph's father, Airk, would have had red hair and green eyes.

While Airk's armor would have been silver, Laiph's armor would be golden, like the golden ring-mail of Sigurd in Norse myth. Airk's silver armor instead invokes Wagner's other hero, Lohengrin the Grail Knight, who arrives and departs on an enchanted swan-boat. Presumably in Willow, Airk would reach Tir Asleen, and then return, on a magical boat with a swan's-head prow--like the Elven-boats used in Lothlorien in The Lord of the Rings.

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Elora's twin sons, fathered by Prince Marayar, would likely have had some combination of their parents' features--presumably, black hair and green eyes, traits shared by Harry Potter.

If Lucas had ever gotten as far as making a third Willow movie, the most likely plot would involve the younger twin attempting to disinherit and exile his older brother, the rightful heir. This continues the theme of the feuding princes from Trinity, but it also is based on the feud between Edgar and Edmund, sons of the Duke of Gloucester, in King Lear. The elder Gloucester, rather like Elora, is blinded on-stage in the middle of the play.

The central conflict in Lear comes about when Lear attempts to abdicate and divide his kingdom among his three daughters. The youngest, Cordelia, opposes the plan, rightly guessing that it will lead to Lear losing all political power. But her father, not recognizing her wisdom until too late, disinherits her out of spite. So, by analogy, Laiph Thaughbaer's three daughters with Elora may have been primed as key players in this never-written third film. The machinations of the elder two would presumably lead to the aged Laiph being temporarily forced from his rightful throne.

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Okay, now bear with me here. Time to get Wagnerian.

In Dune, Paul Atreides' mother, Lady Jessica, has red hair and green eyes, inherited from a father she has never known. Paul himself inherits his mother's green eyes, and his father Leto's black hair.

Later, Paul learns via prescient vision that his maternal grandfather is actually his deadliest enemy: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who shares Lady Jessica's red hair and green eyes.

The Harkonnens and the ruling Corrino dynasty are both products of the long-running Bene Gesserit breeding program. Emperor Shaddam IV is yet another figure with red hair and green eyes; his daughter Irulan, whom Paul marries, has green eyes, but is blonde.

Now go back and look at Willow. I'll wait.

Okay. Both Airk Thaughbaer and Elora Danan would have red hair and green eyes. Airk spent the last several years wandering the countryside on a fruitless quest for the Golden Fleece. Elora has a biological mother, but no known father to speak of.

Get it? Airk is Elora's biological dad. He fathered her during a one-night stand with a peasant girl in some village. Which means that Elora and Laiph Thaughbaer are not only husband and wife... they're also siblings, and are thus conceiving children in incest. That should sound alarmingly familiar to even the most casual Game of Thrones fan.

In Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, the world's ultimate hero, Siegfried, is conceived through the incestuous union of the brother and sister couple, Siegmund and Sieglinde, who willingly sleep together despite knowing about their relationship. (Wagner messed with the mythology here a little. In the old legends, this union actually resulted in the conception of Sigurd's older brother, Sinfjotli, who dies before Sigurd is ever born.)

Presumably Elora and Laiph would be warned about their relationship at some point--most likely in the Underworld, by Airk's ghost. But this would ultimately not keep them from consummating their love.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, it's notable that Aegon I, the first Targaryen king of Westeros, conquered his new realm with the aid of his two sister-wives.

This has extraordinary implications for the subtext of the SW saga. As far back as 1975, Lucas (who already knew quite a lot about the Sigurd legend) instructed Ralph McQuarrie to draw Luke and Leia as physically identical. Lucas has, many years after the fact, stated that even then, he wanted the two to be siblings. But what if that isn't just hyperbole? What if, inspired by Wagner's Ring operas, he actually considered the idea of Luke and Leia being brother and sister as far back as 1975--and decided they would hook up anyway?

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Elora's twin sons, obviously, would not be the products of incest, being fathered by an unrelated man. But her three daughters with Laiph would certainly be.

Meanwhile, it would seem that Elora's ultimate destiny, like Wagner's Sieglinde, is to give birth to a world-savior figure: a Sigurd or a Paul Atreides, who would share Paul's black hair and green eyes. But Elora has two sons. So they would likely follow the mythological trajectory of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founder-twins of Rome.

Romulus (the elder twin) and Remus (the younger) were the children of Rhea Silvia, daughter of a local ruling chieftain. She had been forced into the chaste cult of the Vestal Virgins by her father's chief political rival, but she "miraculously" gave birth to twin sons.

The boys were raised by a lupa, a Latin word that literally means "she-wolf" but was common Roman slang for a prostitute. On reaching manhood, together they defeated their father's foe, and restored him to his rightful kingship. (That's presumably where the King Lear story comes in.) But, desiring a city to rule on their own, they traveled elsewhere and laid the foundations of Rome. When the brothers one day fell into a violent quarrel, Romulus slew his younger brother and became the sole founder of the city.

Once again we have the motif of duality: a good son slaying his evil-twin counterpart. It would be the elder twin, therefore, a Romulus figure, who in the third Willow film would become the world-savior. His conception was Elora Danan's ultimate purpose in life, and he would go on to found some sort of Holy City.

Not only that: his likely spouse would be Elora's youngest daughter, the only one to help him in the task of restoring her father Laiph's kingdom. Of course, just as with Laiph and Elora, the couple would be half-siblings--once again continuing the cycle of symbolically divine incest.

On top of that, the four daughters of Marazad would surely get their own plot line. This would presumably be a variant on the story of William Morris's fantasy novel The Well at the World's End: the king's four children go out (the elder three openly with parental permission, the youngest sneaking off without leave) to make their fortunes in the wider world.

Of course, just like the young hero of Morris's novel, Marazad's youngest daughter would return home just in time to save the day during the story's big final battle. She would end up as her brother's second (technically non-incestuous) wife--an arrangement which exactly replicates the threesome structure of their parents' relationship.

 

It's likely that a fourth major theme running through this third Willow story would have been a Ragnarok of sorts: a fiery apocalypse like the end and recreation of Narnia in CS Lewis's The Last Battle.

After the end of Ragnarok in Norse myth, two humans, a man and a woman, repopulate the new world, after hiding from the chaos of cosmic war in the newly reborn World Tree. But here we have a man and two women, who would evidently do the same.

This is probably a notion drawn from the implicit conclusion of "Doc" Smith's Lensman series. In the conclusion of Smith's last book, the five children (one boy and four girls) of the series' overall protagonist, Kimball Kinnison, are said to go on to found a new race of super-beings in the distant future. Presumably through copious incest.

The five Kinnison children become the successors to the departing Arisians, the benevolent overlords of the current galactic Civilization. The Arisians' whole purpose was to save the universe from rule by a race of equally powerful, but utterly evil, beings.

So far the titles of the Willow movies would leap from Willow (a tree sacred to the ancient Druids of prehistoric Britain), to Trinity (a reference to the dawn of the modern nuclear age). What, then, is left, except to take a page from William Morris's novel title, and call the finale The World's End?

It's likely that Elora's evil second son, and she and Laiph's two wicked elder daughters, would form a villains' alliance of sorts. An evil inversion of the three incestuous heroes, completing a recurring pattern of duality and mirroring. The villainous trio would all perish in the end of the old world.

So, too, would Meegosh, the great Nelwyn warrior who was immortal during the lifetime of his world. Madmartigan and Sorsha would come back from their kingdom in Tir Asleen to battle the forces of darkness, but would both perish in the bloody final battle. Even the satyr Pan, lord of the forests, would do battle in his true form, and he too would be slain.

Elora Danan, Laiph, and Marazad would ascend to a higher plane of existence--becoming the new world's trio of gods. They would indeed be a Holy Trinity. This is surely why Elora's regrown hair is blue: it's the color of Mary, mother of Christ the Messiah.

Marazad's three eldest daughters, spinsters all, would most probably become the new Norns or Fates: the next incarnations of the Three Witches, weavers of mortal destinies, seen in Trinity.

And as for the World Tree, the fantasy version of Yggdrasil, which would protect the three mortal survivors, the children of the New Gods, in its branches? It would surely be a willow--the final fate of Willow Ufgood himself, just as the Nelwyns in the old world had been ruled by a sacred talking oak.

This is some seriously trippy stuff. It's not really a wonder that this trilogy was never completed.

 

Right, a few more thoughts before I take a much needed nap:

Laiph's mother was likely a figure equivalent to King Hrothgar's queen, Wealhtheow, in Beowulf. A common interpretation of her name's meaning reads, literally, "foreign slave." So, presumably Airk carried a female slave off from a battle as a spoil of war, brought her to his home, freed her, and married her. That sequence of events is an extraordinarily close anticipation of the story of Shmi Skywalker in the SW prequels.

Not only that: years before she herself is freed, Shmi gives up her only son, Anakin.

Transplanting the story to the context of Willow, it's likely that Laiph's mother was actually one of the Sultan's royal concubines: the very one, in fact, who had earlier given birth to his twin children, Marayar and Marazad. So Marazad, just like Elora, is also Laiph's half-sister, as well as his wife.

To complete the Shmi parallels: during Trinity, Laiph's mother would presumably be kidnapped in a raiding party by Valerius's men, at whose hands she would incur mortal wounds. When Laiph himself was captured by the same band, he would be reunited with his dying mother and hold her as she expired. During his escape, Laiph would kill almost all of Valerius's soldiers (like the enraged Anakin in AOTC), but the man himself would elude him for the moment.

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The final film in the Willow sequence would be transparently mythological in nature: a surrealist film, in a way, one which would make Alejandro Jodorowsky proud. This sort of surrealist apocalyptic vision is probably the same sort of thing GL conceived for the "esoteric" SW sequel trilogy.

In doing some more research on world mythology, I've only just realize that somehow I have, entirely unwittingly, reproduced an extreme amount of details from Egyptian mythology. In particular, Egyptian gods get mutilated with astonishing frequency. Eye-gougings, partial castrations, full castrations, sexual assault--it's all there.

In particular, it's apparent that Laiph, Elora, and Marazad are in some sense avatars of the castrated Egyptian deity Osiris, and his sister-wives Isis and Nepthys. Meanwhile, Elora's two twin sons, one good and one evil, would be avatars of the sun god Ra and his evil brother Apep (the Serpent).

I'll look more deeply into this once I have some sleep.

 

OK. Back.

In the boat scene in Trinity, it's likely that Marazad would have been out hunting for mermaids. As a result, after Elora and Laiph climbed on board, the mermaids would attack the ship. Laiph and Elora, who had learned the language of mermaids as well from eating the dragon's heart, would speak to the mermaids in their own language and pacify them. In return, they would get Marazad to promise that she would no longer hunt the mermaids for sport.

The mermaid attack on the heroes' ship derives from a similar scene in CS Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And among other things, Marazad's promise to stop hunting them derives from the Rohirrim's (rather appallingly colonialist) treatment of the Woses in The Lord of the Rings.

As in her river journey to Willow Ufgood's farm in the first movie, here Elora Danan is symbolically associated with water--making her eventual blue hair all the more fitting.

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So, I've sat down to outline the likely structure of the third Willow film, and I've come up with a few ideas.

In the opening of The World's End, Laiph, like King Lear, would probably announce his intention to abdicate and divide his realm among his children. Two of them would object: Elora's eldest son, and her youngest (blue-haired) daughter. This duo would be banished, and forced into exile.

They would be joined by their sister, Marazad's youngest (white-haired, purple-eyed) daughter, who could not bear to part from her exiled siblings. As a result, the trio would decide to go on a quest together--to find what lay at the end of the world.

Here is a fusion of various plots about rebellious siblings: the two subplots of King Lear, in which an older son and a youngest daughter are respectively banished; along with the tale of the youngest of four princes, who runs away from home, in William Morris's The Well at the World's End.

Meanwhile, Elora's younger son, now the heir to the throne, would turn out essentially to be a Mordred figure. Like the Arthurian Mordred, he would conspire against his royal uncle, and eventually raise a rebellion. He would become romantically involved with Elora's two older daughters, the ones with red and yellow hair. (In some Arthurian accounts, Guinevere goes over to Mordred's side.)

Marazad's three older girls, however--the eldest with white hair, the next with black, and the third, actually, with Laiph's blond locks--would likely stay neutral in the conflict. This sets up their eventual transformation into the impartial Three Fates: Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

With Laiph and his nephew locked in deadly combat, his three lost children would return--like Lancelot coming back from exile to aid King Arthur. But the evil brother would castrate, and then kill, his good twin. He would also use dark magic on his two good sisters, permanently transforming them, respectively, into a mermaid (the girl with blue hair) and a bird (the girl with white).

At these outrages, the evil twin's two female companions would object--and he would kill them, too. Lastly, he would mortally wound Laiph himself.

The dying Laiph would be placed on a funeral pyre by his sister-wives Elora and Marazad, who would leap on it themselves, as the Valkyrie Brunhild does with Sigurd. This symbolic sacrifice of three lives would let them, in exchange, restore their three dead children to life. (Daenerys uses this very principle to hatch her dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire.)

In Arthurian legend, the mortally wounded King Arthur is carried on a boat to Avalon by several women, usually including Morgan le Fay, and sometimes the Lady of the Lake. Elora Danan, with her water-colored hair, is a good analogue to the latter figure, which means that Marazad must stand in for Morgan le Fay.

(Marayar, then, would be a gender-flipped version of Morgause, Morgan's sister who gives birth to Mordred in more traditional variants of Arthurian lore.)

Parents and children would meet, one last time, in the Realm of the Dead, before the younger generation returned to the mortal world. The trinity of dead heroes would go on to become Lords of the Dead--the new trinity of gods.

At that point, things would get apocalyptic. A messianic Christ figure, and his two sister-wives, fighting against his evil twin--resulting in a world-shattering cataclysm. Other heroes would do battle alongside the messiah figure: Madmartigan and Sorsha, returned from Tir Asleen in the world's hour of need; the immortal Nelwyn warrior Meegosh; and the satyr Pan, lord of the forests. All four would die on the battlefield in the end: the death of the Old Gods.

Willow Ufgood, too, would join the final battle, and though he would not die, he would become permanently transformed into a willow tree--the new World Tree, like Yggdrasil in Norse myth.

In the end, only five mortal survivors would remain, surviving in the branches of the World Tree that was once Willow Ufgood. There would be the victorious messiah figure himself, his two human sisters, and his two animal sisters. (Remember, in Children of the Lens, young Christopher Kinnison by implication commits incest with his four sisters--two sets of twins.)

Using a prosthetic golden phallus, the sole man left on Earth would impregnate his two human sister-wives, and his two animal sister-wives--repopulating the world with humans and beasts. By their four respective hair colors, the four women are equated with the Greek classical elements: Earth (yellow), Fire (red), Air (the white-haired bird girl), and Water (the blue-haired mermaid).

In the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris, the god is killed by his brother Set. Set cuts up his body, and casts Osiris' phallus into a river, where a fish swallows it. Osiris' two sister-wives, Isis and Nepthys, gather the pieces of his body and restore him temporarily to life. Using a prosthetic golden phallus, they manage to become pregnant with his children. Osiris then dies once more, and becomes the Lord of the Dead in the next realm. Plus, in some versions of the myth, the two women copulate with the resurrected god while in the form of birds.

The same Egyptian myth also tells the story of Osiris' son Horus, who avenges his father's murder by fighting his uncle Set. During their various battles, Set loses one of his "two veg"; Horus loses an eye; and Set sexually assaults Horus. It would thus seem that Lucas performed an inversion here, whereby the son in the old Egyptian legend now becomes the father in his story, and the hero switches roles with the villain. So Horus is in fact equated with Laiph, who fights against his villainous nephew.

At some point, it would likely be stated that the world has been destroyed in similar cataclysms twice before. This third Apocalypse would usher in a Fourth World, one of New Gods. That's quite clearly a shout-out to comics legend Jack Kirby.

The impending apocalypse would be foreshadowed at various points in the early stages of the story. At one point, for instance, it's likely that Elora's Crystal Crown would suddenly shatter irreparably. The old incarnations of the Three Norns, meanwhile, would fade out of existence--just as they do at the start of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung.

 

Here are some further apparent plot details for The World's End:

When the three exiled heroes set out for the titular end of the world, they would be searching for a Pool of Destiny of some sort--a magical water source, gazing into which would allow you to discover your true destiny.

This is of course modeled on William Morris's magical Well at the World's End in his book of the same title. Morris's Well grants extraordinarily long life. But this Pool would likely instead take after the Mirror of Llunet in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain: an ordinary body of water. But on gazing into it, and seeing his reflection, the hero would realize something about himself on his own.

So, the good twin, on gazing in the Pool, would see his own reflection, with black hair and green eyes, and realize that he needed to return home--to defend his father Laiph from his identical evil twin.

Meanwhile, the evil twin's two consorts, Elora's older daughters, would now appear with the red crescent of Babylon tattooed upon their foreheads. The evil brother, increasingly, would appear himself with the red eyes of dark sorcery.

When the good trio returned home, the evil brother would kill his good twin by running him through with a spear, as Mordred does to King Arthur in legend. He would then cut out his eyes, sever his right hand, and castrate him, destroying all these body parts. When his sister-wives objected, he would cut out the heart of one, and slit the other's throat. He would also, probably, cut out one of their eyes, each, and carve his triskelion emblem into their left forearms. (After all, he is essentially the reincarnation of Dark Elora.)

The dead trio would, upon being resurrected, take up their parents' prostheses, which survived in the ashes of their pyre. The resurrected son would take Laiph's hand and Elora's sapphire eyes; one of his wives would take Elora's breast-shield, to cover her missing heart; and the other would take up Marazad's speaking-bird, probably now freed of its need for a cord. (Laiph and Elora's children, like Sigurd's daughter Aslaug, would inherit their parents' ability to understand animal languages.)

The two human sister-wives would each remain with an eye missing, though, and their brother would forever lack a phallus. Nonetheless, he and his four wives would manage to conceive somehow--perhaps through having his wives swallow drops of blood, an idea that comes from Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune film.

The resurrected trio, having been immolated and revived by means of a funeral pyre, would also now be completely hairless, like the protagonists in THX 1138. While in the Realm of the Dead, however, they would appear as they did originally in life, unmutilated.

In the apocalyptic finale, the evil twin, abandoned by his two sister-wives, would conjure three monstrous demons to aid him. If the three monsters in the ending of Trinity were (as is likely) a foreshadowing of these, they would be a fearsome three-headed dragon, a giant serpent, and a ravenous wolf. The latter two in particular echo the world-ending monsters of the Norse Ragnarok.

Against these creatures would be sent the four immortal heroes, fated to die: most likely, Madmartigan and Sorsha, coming to fight the dragon; Meegosh, to kill the serpent; and Pan, against the wolf. All would triumph, and then perish of their wounds.

(In the end of Trinity, it's possible that Madmartigan and Sorsha would appear healed of all their old wounds, thanks to Elora using her Crystal Crown to heal them. Which she could do, because unlike with the wounds of the heroes in Trinity, Elora's dark side wasn't ultimately responsible for inflicting them.)

With no one left to help him fight the heroes, the evil twin would decide there was nothing left, except mass oblivion. He would turn himself into a great fire, covering the entire world. The heroes' last remaining ally, the Archmage Willow Ufgood, would turn himself into a tree, in the tall branches of which they could take shelter.

As the fire licked at the base of the tree, the divine hero would save the world, by calling upon his deceased father, the sky-god, to make it rain, and quench the flames in a torrential flood.

Once the fire died, the waters would recede, and the four heroes would be left to populate the world anew.

 

It probably doesn't need saying, but the reason that Laiph and Elora would be able to understand Marazad's dog (the transformed Prince) in Trinity would be because of their newfound ability to talk with animals.

Meanwhile, earlier I probably got the sequence and hair colors of Marazad's daughters slightly wrong. Her two eldest daughters would have white hair; the third oldest would have black hair; and her youngest girl would have Laiph's blond hair.

In fact, though, her eldest daughter would actually be the child of her own brother, Marayar. They were already in an incestuous relationship before Marayar died--that's why he lost it when his father tried to kill Marazad. This fact would not, though, be revealed until The World's End, as, unlike with Elora's sons, everyone would think that Marazad's daughters were all fathered by Laiph. (The oldest child's white hair results from her petrification in Marazad's womb during the events of Trinity.)

This means that both of the wives of Elora's good son are actually his half-sisters, just like with his parents. Way to keep incest in the family.

Notably, all three of the villains of The World's End--the evil son, and his two half-sisters who later repent--are the children of Elora Danan, whose own dark half would have been the villain of the second story.

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The motif of infidelity and transfiguration would recur in The World's End: the evil brother would use magic to transform his unfaithful sister-wives. Actually, he'd likely transform the redhead into a bear, and the blonde into a fox. So it would instead be the two sister-wives of the hero whom he killed outright, in the gruesome manner I described earlier.

So, actually, the evil twin's two consorts would likely be the ones to have the triskelion emblem carved into their arms--perhaps as a secret pledge of loyalty to him, in advance of their rebellion against their father. (An echo of Trinity, where Elora's two romantic partners would have this symbol burned into their arms by her evil half.)

Meanwhile, the hero's two wives would instead have a crescent mark burned onto their foreheads during their fight with the villain. The male hero himself would have a rayed sun burned on his forehead instead--symbol of his status as a messiah figure, a role that in many mythologies (as well as the Norse legend of Sigurd) is linked to a sun god.

Much of the other stuff I said before--the points about the villain removing his good twin's hand and eyes; fatally stabbing and castrating him; and taking from his sisters each an eye, from one her heart, and from the other her voice--still applies, too.

On top of all this, before he killed his three heroic opponents, the evil twin would likely sexually assault all of them, brutally symbolizing his dominance.

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During the final apocalyptic battle, the massed army of human soldiers, under the command of the evil new King of Galladoorn, would be pitted against a Tolkienesque total of Five Armies, drawn from the natural world to join the side of the heroes. The two transformed women, a bear and a fox, would each recruit an army of their fellow creatures. Madmartigan and Sorsha would lead an army of Elves from Tir Asleen; Meegosh would lead the Nelwyns into battle; and Pan would command his forest creatures, including the winged unicorns. All of these armies would ultimately be wiped out, and the world of humans too would perish.

The three resurrected heroes, meanwhile, would do battle against three stone statues, in the shape of hideous demons and wielding obsidian swords. In this battle the male hero would get a scratch on his cheek--which would probably be left forever open and bleeding--while his two wives would each have their front teeth knocked out by the statues' fists. Each of them would also have their noses broken. From these wounds, the reborn trio would bleed golden blood, the culmination of the symbolism of Greek ichor.

The heroes would be unable to defeat the stone statues, until the good son used the prescient vision of his sapphire eyes to learn the secret. They would take their swords--three blades which had been placed on their funeral pyre, and survived--and shed their own blood upon the blades by cutting their hands. This would cause the weapons to ignite in flame. (A legend about flaming swords ignited by blood sacrifice appears in A Song of Ice and Fire.)

The male hero's sword would burn with blue flame, the color of his new eyes. His formerly blue-haired sister's blade would have red fire, and the sword of his other, once white-haired sister would burn purple. These last two colors, purple and scarlet, are those associated with the Whore of Babylon in the Metropolis novel. These three flaming swords would serve to kill the colorless statues--symbolizing how these heroes will bring light and color into a dead, lifeless world.

Significantly, the three heroes would suffer a total of fourteen wounds from the villainous evil twin. They would then get nine more wounds, three apiece (including each one's loss of hair in the pyre), on being resurrected. These are the same totals that appear in both Willow and Trinity. In fact, in Egyptian myth, the god Set traditionally cuts his brother Osiris' body into fourteen pieces.

Plus, the attacks on the heroes' noses represent a further moment of implied castration, as noses are often seen in folklore as phallic symbols.

---

After the final battle and the climactic flood, the male hero would use his magic to try to restore his transfigured sisters, the former consorts of the villain. But because his evil twin--really his own dark half--had done the magic, he would be only partially successful: the bear-woman, formerly Elora's red-haired daughter, would turn into a blue-haired mermaid, and the fox-woman, once a blonde human girl, would turn into a white-haired half-bird creature, harpy-like, with wings.

Notably, in both cases, the hybrid woman's underlying animal half is a common prey for her previous, entirely animal form. Bears eat fish, and foxes eat young birds. A symbolic form of penance, no doubt.

In fact, the earlier parental generation anticipates these links. Elora Danan is associated with both water and the furry Brownies. Marazad, meanwhile, is linked to birds, but she is a also great huntress, a skill for which foxes are renowned (though they in turn are hunted by humans).

In the finale, the impotent male messiah figure would feed his blood to his four sisters, two humans and two chimerae, to repopulate the world of humans and beasts.

The two human women, however, would already be pregnant, having been raped by the evil second son. But their children, purified like their swords through fire and blood, would not take after their father... at least, so it would appear. For evil must always return one day into the world somehow.

Finally, Marazad's three younger daughters, those who stood aloof from the family conflict, would spend their days weaving and spinning. From this art they would learn great magic power. In the end, they would survive the final cataclysm by using their magic weaving skills to ascend into immortality--as the new Three Witches, the impartial Fates who spin the threads of men's lives.

---

All this would result in an extremely surrealistic, esoteric film. Not for nothing does the final scene of The World's End feature a symbolic impregnation by blood, taken straight from Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune.

Now I wonder how this trippy, apocalyptic finale, which wouldn't look out of place in the Book of Revelations, compares with the "esoteric" films that GL (in his own words) once intended for the SW sequel trilogy... and whether any of these ideas, in modified form, are about to hit our cinema screens.

 

In Willow as originally conceived, the three magic acorns, which are actually weapons that petrify objects, were likely given to Willow Ufgood by the Sacred Oak. This Oak would be a magic talking tree standing in the Nelwyn village--a tree that had once, long ago, been a man and a great wizard. This is of course the ultimate fate of Merlin in Arthurian legend: his spirit is trapped within an oak tree.

The motif of petrification continues throughout, with Bavmorda's seven stone statues; the basilisk in Trinity; and finally the three statues conjured by Elora's evil son in The World's End. These three statues are the symbolic final forms of the three acorns of Willow: the barren fruit of the decayed old world that is about to perish. The statues are ultimately killed with fire, like the old world itself, by the founders of the new cosmos.

Much of this final film's evident inspiration comes from The Last Battle, the apocalyptic final book in CS Lewis's Narnia series. The three daughters of Marazad who stand aloof from their family's battle, for instance, are like the Narnian Dwarfs in Lewis's book: strict neutrals who reject the entreaties of Aslan (God) and Tash (the Devil) alike.

One additional small note: the satyr god Pan's incognito appearance on the road in Trinity would likely have taken the guise of a wandering human minstrel.

Postscript: When Valerius captured Laiph in Trinity, one additional humiliation would be that he stole Laiph's father's sword. During his escape, Laiph would turn the tables by stealing Valerius's own cursed blade--the same one that had been used to cut off his hair.

So during their final duel, each of them would be using the other man's sword. The slash Valerius left on Laiph's cheek would therefore heal as a scar--unlike the similar wound suffered by the hero of The World's End, which would be forever bleeding, unable to heal.

Using his foe's obsidian sword, a relic of Nockmaar, Laiph would break Valerius's own weapon--his father Airk's sword. It's at this point that, outmatched with a blade, Valerius would transform into a werewolf. After being nearly killed, and saved by his dog, Laiph would bind Valerius with silver rope, then behead the werewolf with his own black sword.

The idea of a hero and a villain exchanging swords in the final duel naturally comes from Hamlet. However, there's also additional influence from the fourth book in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.

At one point the protagonist of Prydain, Taran, is robbed by a bandit named Dorath, who steals his prized sword of fine quality. Later, Taran learns how to forge his own sword, which is blackened and crude in quality thanks to his inexperience. Eventually Taran and Dorath cross blades, and Taran's new sword simply cuts through Dorath's blade (once his own) like butter.

 

Oh, and in The World's End, the villain would likely also have impregnated his two lovers--resulting in them giving birth to various hybrid creatures afterward. These children, too, would be purified when the beast-women drink a few drops of their good brother's blood in the finale.

While the evil brother would be the one responsible for his four sisters' physical (carnal) impregnation, his good twin would be responsible for their children's development in a spiritual sense. Because the second, symbolic impregnation is accomplished without actual intercourse, it technically avoids breaking the incest taboo--indicating a divine purification of an act which for mortals is usually seen as a great crime.

What's more, there is evidently seen here a literalized reflection of the Christian Eucharist ceremony: "Take ye, this is my body," and "Take ye, this is my blood." In this case, the carnal "body," which induces fertility, comes from the evil twin, and the spiritual "blood," which provides purification, derives from the good twin instead.

Also, fittingly, there are three particular instances of purification by fire and blood. The three heroes have their blood spilled by a villain, and are then immolated on a pyre; their blackened swords, which were also on the funeral pyre, are ignited with holy fire by the shedding of their blood; and their offspring, too, are purified, when the whole world burns in fire, and afterward the four surviving women drink of their brother's blood.

---

Actually, although they were about the same age, Marayar and Marazad, just like Laiph and Elora, would likely only be half-siblings. Marazad's mother would be the harem slave who was later rescued by Airk Thaughbaer, whom she married. And Marazad and Marayar's common father, of course, would be the ruling Sultan of the desert kingdom.

But Prince Marayar's mother would have been a different woman--perhaps even a prostitute, one who later moved on to ply her trade elsewhere. This very same prostitute would later have been impregnated by the weary traveling warrior Airk Thaughbaer in a one-night stand... and would die in Bavmorda's dungeons, nine months later, after smuggling her newborn daughter to safety.

So Marayar, too, is Elora's half-sibling, and their sons, like Sigurd, are the products of incest. This family is screwed-up all the way around!

 

In this third Willow film, the three exiled siblings' journey to the titular World's End, like Prince Caspian's quest to the same destination in the Narnia series, would probably be made by ship. The heroes would encounter several islands along their way, each coming with its own adventure, until they reached the final island with its legendary oracular pool of water. (CS Lewis in turn got this idea from William Morris's novel The Water of the Wondrous Isles, which GL may well have read himself.)

---

Once the three heroes of the previous generation, Elora, Laiph, and Marazad, arrived in the Underworld, they would probably be challenged by the Lord of Death, who would demand how they could think to ask for something so outrageous as the release of three souls--even in exchange for their own.

(Orpheus, you'll remember, tried to arrange his own escape from Death's realm, along with the release of his beloved Eurydice. But, of course, only he successfully emerged from Hades.)

Nonetheless, Laiph would dare to challenge the Lord of Death himself.

Death would be a terrifying figure, a half-rotted corpse, part-human and part-animal. In fact, he is bound to his ebony throne with chains. For Death was not always a god. He was once a living man himself, and has been slowly transformed through spending eons in his current role. At his feet lies a pool of water, in which he sees all that passes in the mortal worlds.

Laiph insists that there must be some sort of test--some challenge Laiph could pass in order to free the three children's souls, like Ingmar Bergman's nameless knight who plays chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. Orpheus, after all, used his lyre that way, playing it better than he had ever before or would after.

And Death would answer that there was such a test indeed. His challenge? "Make me cry."

Death has never cried in all his eons of existence.

But Laiph makes him cry--by having him gaze into the pool of water at his feet. Not at anything in the mortal world: just at the water itself.

The water shows to Death what he has become. A cold, callous, impartial, unfeeling creature, with no mercy or pity for anyone who enters his domain. Death remembers his lost humanity--and sheds one single tear.

Death will give Laiph what he asks, at a price. Laiph must make the ultimate sacrifice: he must replace Death upon his immortal throne, so that Death himself can die.

And so Laiph accepts. He lets himself be bound to the immortal throne, and takes up his crown--probably one made of bones. Elora and Marazad, too, will share his fate.

So the new Lord of Death reigns with two women beside him: Elora Danan, a Marian-esque intercessor before God for pity on mortals, and Marazad, who will argue as the "devil's advocate" in the eternal judgment of the deceased.

Here there's some clear influence of Catholic doctrine about the Virgin Mary, and also the Jewish concept of Satan as a sort of prosecuting attorney before God. But equally, much of this imagery derives from the Norse myth of Loki.

Loki, after all, was forever bound in the Underworld, until Ragnarok should come and he could escape. The eventual next Apocalypse is, of course, when Laiph himself will be released. And Loki, too, had a woman who cared for him--his wife Sigyn, who held up a bowl to protect him from the drops of venom, issuing from the maw of a serpent the gods had left to torment him.

It's worth mentioning that quite a lot of this same imagery regarding the Realm of the Dead, including the Lord of Death who hates his job, appears pretty much verbatim in the 1992 Sierra adventure game King's Quest VI. That game also has a mechanical nightingale; a fantasy Arabian princess; a clan of secretive Druids; a transfigured prince yanked straight from Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, complete with armed Diana statue; and a city on a mountainous island, sitting atop a burial catacomb, and which is home to some winged flying people--who were, early in the game's development, going to be albinos.

In Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, too, we see a Lord of Hell who wants nothing more than to climb down off his throne. Lucifer Morningstar cuts off his devil's wings, retires to Earth to open a swanky nightclub, and leaves the keys of Hell in the hands of the series' protagonist, Dream of the Endless. Dream himself ultimately dies in the end of the series, and is replaced by a new incarnation of Dream, who began life as a human boy.

---

I mentioned that in the final scenes of The World's End, the hero--the one man left on Earth--would try to heal his transfigured sisters, and only partially succeed. It's likely, then, he'd also try to heal his other two sisters' wounds as well.

So he'd regrow their hair--but the previously blue-haired sister would have hers grow in red, and the once white-haired girl would become a blonde (completing the reversal of hair colors). His own hair, meanwhile, would come back in white: the color of Paul Atreides' hair as planned in Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune.

The hero's beard, which would originally have been black, would never grow back, though--more symbolic impotence.

He would also regrow his two human sisters' missing teeth and eyes, for a total of nine instances of healed wounds. But, as with the other cases, these two would be chromatically wrong.

So their new eyes would likely grow in with colors equal and opposite to their respective new hair, and their front teeth would grow in colored black, like the dyed teeth of feudal Japanese geishas.

The hero's sister-wife with newly red hair would have originally had blue hair and green eyes, and his other sister-wife, now with blonde hair, would have had white hair and purple eyes. Now, their new eyes would be mismatched sets, respectively of yellow and green, and of purple and red.

As was the case with Laiph, the sisters' new appearance is meant to almost entirely suggest evil. Red and golden hair; the crescent mark of Babylon branded on their foreheads; one demonic yellow or red eye.

However, the other eye of each girl--green or purple in hue--would give the lie to that outer appearance, as it did with Laiph... but, then again, evil must always return to the world in some fashion.

 

In the finale of The World's End, it may also have been the case that, just as the surviving male hero was now beardless, his two sister-wives would regrow their head hair only in one spot, high on their scalps. This is exactly the same hairstyle sported by Sorsha in the middle of the original Willow. Unlike with Sorsha, though, the sisters' lower bodies would remain hairless: yet again a symbolic instance of impotence, comparable to their brother's own divine sexlessness.

---

It's likely that in Willow, the half-Elf Sorsha was herself meant to have "Elvish" purple eyes. One of them would be slightly injured by a blow, so that its pupil changed shape, while the other would be blinded in the finale and become milky blue in color. Until, that is, Elora healed her foster parents' wounds (all except for infertility, that is) years later in Trinity.

(Another Arthurian reference: just as Madmartigan and Sorsha would depart in a ship for Tir Asleen at the end of Trinity, King Arthur sails to Avalon "where I will heal me of my grievous wound.")

Laiph's injured (green) eye in Trinity, then, would acquire a misshapen pupil as well.

So therefore, in The World's End, it's likely that only the male hero would have his nose (a phallic symbol) broken in the battle with the statues. His two sisters would instead be hit with a blow to the eye--the one eye that remained to each of them.

The resulting swollen-shut black eyes would leave both of the girls totally blind. But they could see, magically, through the sapphire eyes of their brother, and so continue their battle.

In the finale, then, the two surviving sisters would each be seen with one demonic eye (in red or yellow) and one eye with a misshapen pupil (in purple or green).

The male hero's bleeding wound on his face, on the other hand, would likely be cauterized during the great fire that ended the old world. He would end up with a vivid scar line on his cheek.

 

In the opening of The World's End, when the good son, and Elora's youngest daughter, were banished by Laiph, he wouldn't be so cruel as to leave them with nothing. He'd give the pair a sizeable sum of money, as well as one priceless gemstone apiece: a red gem to the son, and a green gem to the daughter. The third companion, a girl, would sneak out of her parents' palace, and thus receive no such parting gifts.

The trio would decide to go look for the fabled Water of the World's End, a legendary oracular pool far in the eastern seas. So they would buy a ship and sail forth in search of it. But they would be shipwrecked, and cast ashore on the island of the Archmages--now presided over by Archmage Willow Ufgood.

Here they would be dried off and given fine new clothes, probably in white, like the robes of medieval Christian pilgrims. But the Archmages would have no bigger boats for them than a small three-person rowboat. Besides, they would have lost all their money in the shipwreck, except the two gemstones, so they couldn't go back and buy a new boat.

Willow the Archmage would warn them that the world itself was coming to its end, and that they had better hurry if they wanted to see the Water of the World's End. But before they left, he would give them three gifts to speed their journey.

A lodestone in the shape of a fish--modeled on that used in the 1958 film The Vikings--which would guide the way to their destination. (Since lodestones usually point to the North Pole, this is, yes, a compass that doesn't point north.)

Also, a stoppered bottle, with strict instructions not to open it until they'd reached the Water. And lastly, an inheritance for the third sister: a simple wooden cup. So the sibling trio would embark on their journey, sailing eastward (in the direction of the rising sun) using the lodestone as a guide.

---

They would soon find an island in their path. The heroes would disembark, and find the ground covered in black lotus plants. The two girls would eat some of the plants, and fall into an unbreakable sleep. Their brother would have to continue on alone. (This is modeled on Odysseus' encounter with the Lotus-Eaters, very early in his ten-year wanderings. It also provides a symbolic reason for the sisters' regrown black teeth in the finale.)

The hero, sailing on alone, would come to a third island. Here there would be nothing except a golden pool, which would turn whatever fell into it to gold--as he would learn when the tips of his boots brushed the water. Good thing he didn't swim in it! (This pool pretty much comes straight from CS Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.)

The hero would decide to use the gold-making pool to his advantage, since he currently had no money. He'd dip the two gemstones into it--they would become golden and shining in color. He'd be careful, like Achilles' goddess mother dipping her infant into the Styx, to leave a small portion above the waterline, allowing him to safely hold the jewels. Then, he'd do the same with the wooden cup. These would, he'd think, allow him to buy something in the future, if he ever returned home.

Lastly, the hero would sail on to the fourth island: the home of the Water. Once here, he would unstopper the bottle Willow had given him. A black smoke would come out of it, but nothing else would seem to happen. Then, gazing into his reflection in the Water, the hero would realize that it was not really a magic pool at all. It was quite ordinary. But he was needed at home, to save his father from the plots of his identical evil brother.

The hero would wish out loud that he might see what his father was doing. "GRANTED!" a voice would say, and the black smoke would reappear. In the Water would now be seen a vision of the evil son preparing for war against his father--and Laiph himself, on his deathbed in his castle, dying of heartbreak over what he'd done.

The hero would ask out loud how this was possible. The black smoke would speak, revealing itself to be a genie of sorts, bound by a wizard long ago, with the power to grant its master three wishes. He had already used one, so he'd better think carefully about the others.

(The genie's appearance as a wisp of smoke is another riff on the Odyssey legend: the semi-divine Aeolus, master of the winds, gives Odysseus a bag full of wind to send him home quickly. Aeolus tells him in no uncertain terms never to open it all the way. Of course, his crew rashly disobeys that advice, and the entire bag is wasted. Here, though, the lone hero would be wise enough to do as he was told.)

Asking about the pool, the hero would be told that it was just a pool of water, as he knew. The real oracular pool was on the third island--the one which turned all it touched to gold. The hero asks the genie how he can waken his sisters, back on the island of the Lotus Eaters, and it tells him to bring them water from the pool, in his magical golden cup. (Therefore, it's essentially the Holy Grail.)

Having collected the water, the hero would use his second wish to teleport back to his sisters. He would give them the water from the Grail to drink, and wake them up. They would all agree to go back to their father Laiph immediately. The trio would use their last wish to return home instantaneously.

The smoke-genie would grant this last wish, and then depart the world forever, sensing the coming cataclysm. In Laiph's royal bedroom, in a scene lifted out of John Boorman's Excalibur, the heroes would revive their dying father with water from the magical golden chalice.

Laiph would lead his forces into battle against his son's army--but he would not win the day.

---

The two golden gems, and the Grail, would be placed on the three dead heroes' funeral pyre. The gems would survive, and become more radiant than ever, but the Grail would melt into a shapeless lump of gold.

Once the three murdered heroes came back from the dead, they would probably return with eerie, inhuman dead-white skin, the pallor of corpses.

When the hero's sister-wives were fully blinded, in the battle with the statues, the hero would give them his own blue sapphire eyes, inherited from Elora Danan, as replacements. He would then put the two magical golden gems into his own eye sockets, allowing him to see.

So in the film's finale, the two sisters would already have sapphire replacements for each eye the villain had torn out himself. But the blows of the statues, with fists far harder than human flesh, would crush each of their opposite eyes, leaving them both blind there. Their good brother would of course heal these blinded eyes in the ending. His sisters would grow new eyes in demonic colors equal and opposite to their new hair--and with misshapen pupils as well.

Lastly, the Grail itself, now a shapeless lump of metal, would very likely be fashioned into a golden replacement phallus for the castrated male hero, just as in the Osiris myth.

The hero's white hair, beardless face, dead-white skin, and golden eyes would indicate that he is not merely human, but an angelic figure of sorts. In fact, judging from the Moebius concept art, the exact same traits of white hair, dead-white skin, and yellow eyes were also intended for Bavmorda in Willow. She, too, was evidently an angel, albeit a fallen one in the vein of Tolkien's Morgoth or Sauron.

---

If all this is in any way correct, the Willow trilogy outlines may be the point where Lucas really began to consider using the Holy Grail as the central artifact in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, along with the plotline about Indy's estranged father.

In previous drafts for a third Indiana Jones film, outlined by Lucas in 1984, Indy had traveled to Africa to find the immortality-granting peaches of a Chinese monkey god. In the first-draft script as written by Chris Columbus, Indy himself dies and is resurrected. So evidently that really was a theme on Lucas's mind at the time.

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Postscript: There's no sign of evident incest in Willow... but then I remembered we don't know who Madmartigan's father was. According to the film's novelization, though, he was the adopted son of the king of Tir Asleen (that is, Galladoorn in the original story).

And, in the Norse legend of Sigurd, the golden-haired Sigurd is killed by the one-eyed, raven-haired knight Hagen of Tronje... who was fathered when the Burgundian king Gunnar's wife was raped by Alberich, king of the Dwarves. Hagen is therefore a half-Dwarf.

Plus, Arthur Rackham's famous illustrations of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle depict the Dwarves (the Nibelungs) as diminutive bearded creatures... about the same height, in fact, as the bearded Elves seen in Moebius's concept art for Willow.

Also, Moebius draws Madmartigan's royal armor in the blue and gold colors of Galladoorn... the colors of France, the modern country containing much of the ancient region of Burgundy, where Gunnar ruled in legend.

So.... dare I say it? Is Madmartigan secretly another son of the Elf King--making him and Sorsha yet another pair of incestuous half-siblings? It would certainly make sense, especially given their hair colors... as well as the fact that Sorsha, like Hagen, was going to lose an eye.

Even Madmartigan being speared through the shoulder by Kael fits the pattern--in the version of the story found in the medieval Nibelungenlied, Sigurd was killed when Hagen stabbed him in the shoulder from behind with a spear.

And of course there's the fact that Lucas repeatedly dressed up Madmartigan and Sorsha in the guise of famous pairs of heroes and villains of literature and cinema--such as Caesar and Cleopatra, or Aragorn and Gollum.

 

It's not very hard to bring the geography of the original Willow into line with the evident terrain in Trinity and The World's End.

The Nelwyns' village lies along the banks of a river. Let's assume that it's geographically analogous to the location of the Shire in Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and therefore in the west of the continent somewhere. Presumably the river, which flows alongside the ancient road Willow and Meegosh travel on, runs east-west.

The two Nelwyns reach the crossroads, where they find Madmartigan (fishing, originally, as befits a Grail King). Airk's knights ride by from another direction (presumably from Galladoorn castle--which, unlike in the final film, has yet to be destroyed), and take a third fork to go fight Bavmorda's army at Nockmaar. These two particular destinations are clearly not in the west, then.

After temporarily giving away the infant Elora, Willow and Meegosh have some adventures underground and upon the river, but soon end up back on land, reunited by the Brownies with Madmartigan and Elora. Most likely, they would end up on the eastern side of the north-south road that bisected the crossroads.

Directed by the Brownie sage, they would likely plan to go back west to the crossroads, and there take the southern fork. This is because Fin Raziel and her guardian jailor, the two-headed dragon, originally lived in a desert, presumably in the hot south. Not far along the way, just to the east of the crossroads, they would stop at a roadside village, and there evade capture by Sorsha.

Upon reaching the desert dunes, the heroes would follow the dragon's tracks to its lair--it was evidently returning from the north, which must therefore be the direction of Galladoorn. Madmartigan would slay the dragon, but then Sorsha would arrive and capture them all.

With all other directions accounted for, then, Nockmaar must lie in the east, like Tolkien's Mordor. So Sorsha's party of soldiers would presumably ride directly northeast, to a pass on the eastern road, leading through a range of mountains (like those around the perimeter of Mordor). Here, Sorsha would meet up with Kael in a camp guarding the midpoint of the pass--essentially, a version of Cirith Ungol.

(This is the point where, in the book version of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien implies that Frodo is sexually assaulted in captivity--so it's not terribly surprising that the early Willow likely included an implied rape scene at the same point.)

Upon their escape, the heroes, guided by Madmartigan, would ride first west and then north, toward the crossroads and then on to Galladoorn. Before reaching the crossroads, they would pass by the village where they escaped Sorsha earlier: now burned to cinders, probably by Kael's men on their journey straight east toward Nockmaar.

Galladoorn castle would be freshly destroyed when they arrived, with Airk and his surviving knights hiding out in its remains. Here, Madmartigan would find the charred skeleton of his adoptive father, the old king, still on his throne. He and Airk would bury him in the castle's crypt, located in its undercroft directly beneath the throne room. The crypt cellar remained intact when the rooms above burned. In fact, the castle was ruined by the very dragon Madmartigan slew earlier.

The king's twelve best knights would not have been killed by the dragon, but rather petrified beforehand by Bavmorda's magic; otherwise, they could have killed the dragon themselves. Willow restores them to life using the Philosopher's Stone. Madmartigan urges them to attempt a knightly deed never before accomplished: sail to Tir Asleen in the far western seas. But it would be Madmartigan's burial of his adoptive royal father, an act of filial piety, that truly convinced the knights to make him their new King.

(Here is the earliest anticipation of the finale of The World's End: Madmartigan enters an underground crypt, where he buries his foster father. In Trinity, Laiph and Elora enter the earthly mouth of the Underworld, and meet the ghost of their father Airk. And in The World's End, the heroes die in earnest, and meet the Lord of Death himself--who gives up his crown to the ultimate hero's foster father, Laiph.)

To reach Tir Asleen, Madmartigan and Willow (leaving Meegosh with Airk) would ride directly west, to a deserted fishing village on the northwest coast. Here Madmartigan, Willow, and his twelve knights would sail to the Elven island in the Uttermost West. In the sea-monster-guardian's attack, five of the knights would die, leaving seven to face the siege of the Elven city.

(An aside in Stardust describes a silver crystal flower as tinkling like the bells of "a tiny glass cathedral," which, judging from Moebius's concept art, is an exact fit for the white crystal city of the diminutive Elves.)

On the heroes' return from Tir Asleen, they would make landfall where Madmartigan and Willow embarked earlier, at the ruins of a fishing village. Their army would follow Kael east back to Nockmaar, but the pass would be guarded by Bavmorda's troops. Sorsha would lead the heroes over a pass only she knew--a rocky narrow defile, which would leave her bare feet scarred and bleeding.

This is exactly the role played by Gollum to Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings--albeit with a side nod to the betrayal of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, by a Greek renegade who led the whole Persian army over a secret mountain pass. (At this point, in fact, Sorsha, bald, missing teeth, and wearing only a loincloth, would pretty much be a dead ringer for Gollum visually.)

The final battle of Willow, then, takes place around the tower of Nockmaar, on the east side of the mountains. Afterward, Airk's funeral would take place at his home of Land's End: a coastal city standing on a peninsula on the western shore, with an impregnable wall guarding the only land approach. This is where Airk had hoped, in his earlier moment of despair, to hold out against Bavmorda's might.

With Galladoorn located west of the dividing mountains, Laiph and Elora in Trinity would have to cross the mountains, too, to reach the eastern coast. Presumably they could use the pass in safety after Bavmorda's journey. It might be the case, though, that the Three Witches would reside in a cave in the mountains along the way, like the Graeae whom Orpheus consults.

The two heroes would take a ship eastward from the main coastal city on the eastern shore, across the ocean to the island of the Archmages. Instead of the silver crystalline walls of Tir Asleen, though, the Archmages' palace would likely resemble the Emerald City of the Wizard of Oz, with spires built of green crystal.

The frost-giantess's castle would also be located high in the north-south mountain chain, but far to the north of the pass, where snow covered the land. On their way south and west from this castle, Laiph and Elora, heading toward the Sultan's southern kingdom, would meet the disguised Pan. Pan being a forest god, the encounter would take place as they traveled on the southern road passing through the forests.

We'd get to see some of the Sultan's city--possibly located upon another river flowing east-west, like Tashbaan, the Calormenes' capital in the Narnia books. The final battle would then return the action to Galladoorn castle in the north.

---

Madmartigan fights a two-headed dragon in Willow, and he later ends up marrying Sorsha--who may very likely, in secret, be his half-sister. Meanwhile, the siblings Marayar and Marazad would have to kill a three-headed dragon in Trinity--and Marazad ends up marrying Elora and her half-brother Laiph (on top of romancing Marayar, willfully defying the incest taboo). Going by incestuous analogy, then, it's likely that the dragon conjured by the villain in The World's End would have had five heads.

Notably, in Trinity, Marazad would fight three serpent monsters in succession: the Sultan's many-headed Hydra, the three-headed dragon, and the Basilisk. This implies her ultimate role as the divine prosecutor before Laiph, the new God of Death, in The World's End--essentially, the version of Satan described in traditional Judaism.

Maybe, also, the Hydra in Trinity would've had nine heads: a foreshadowing of the generation of children who would take center stage in the next film.

---

It's likely that, like Aragorn's regal green beryl brooch in The Lord of the Rings, Sorsha's royal necklace, inherited from her father, would have featured a green gemstone.

This is the point where the repeated opposition of the two colors green and red begins: Willow Ufgood's magic-making tool was originally the red Philosopher's Stone.

At the end of Willow, the image of the newly crowned Queen Sorsha, wearing her green jeweled necklace upon a bare bosom, would signal the victory of good over evil--but, with the red Philosopher's Stone still clutched in Willow's hand, evil would clearly not be gone forever.

In Trinity, by contrast, the image in the ending would be a deliberate subversion. Elora Danan's red hair and green eyes would both be replaced with blue ones. But this color's apparent meaning is that good and evil have been only temporarily balanced.

Meanwhile, Elora's conservative blue dress would give way to skimpy red attire, and Marazad's wardrobe would shift from green to purple: the colors of goodness giving way to those of the Whore of Babylon. This is the first point in the trilogy, after all, where the protagonists knowingly commit the crime of incest.

In The World's End, the red and green gems would turn gold instead of blue--the color of divinity, and the end product which the Philosopher's Stone was used to make. The binary opposition of good and evil, then, is smashed during the creation of the new world.

So the good son's white hair and golden eyes in the ending would indicate that, with the death of his externalized dark half, he has purged himself of all evil.

But his sisters' ultimate appearances, with each having one blue eye, and either red hair or one red eye, suggest that evil has not been forever banished after all. As in the Biblical story of Genesis, wickedness would one day re-enter the world through the agency of women.

 

At the beginning of Trinity, Elora Danan would likely have just turned seventeen years old: on the cusp of adulthood, but not quite fully grown. (Tristran Thorn is aged seventeen in Stardust, and in Harry Potter, the legal age of maturity for wizards is also 17.)

In the third film, The World's End, the obvious likeness of the Archmages' emerald castle to the Emerald City of Oz would probably be extended further.

In the heart of the city, guarded behind closed doors, would be its greatest treasure: a set of three enormous crystal hourglasses, all filled with brilliant red sand. Two would have run their course long ago, and been capped. The third would still be open, with its scarlet sands running--and, presumably, a worker standing by its open top, periodically pouring in more sand to maintain the flow. Willow Ufgood would reveal this portentous secret to the trio of third-generation heroes during their visit: these glasses measured the lifespan of the Three Worlds to have so far existed.

This spectacle mimics the hourglass full of scarlet sand used by the Wicked Witch in the 1939 Wizard of Oz film to threaten Dorothy's life. In the end, the enraged Witch shatters her own hourglass.

Here too, the gigantic hourglasses would be shown shattering at some point, perhaps in the wake of the heroes' departure, as Archmage Willow Ufgood looked on. Willow--by now no doubt sporting a long beard, every inch a miniature Moses--would know that this dark omen portended the imminent end of the current world.

Once again, the colors green and red are symbolically opposed, even within the city of the wise Archmages themselves.

Furthermore, the smoke-Genie, in its clear crystal bottle, would probably be red in color. Its hasty departure from the mortal world would provide a third ominous omen, after the shattering first of Elora's Crystal Crown, followed by that of the hourglasses.

Plus, when the male hero saw nothing happening when he first opened the bottle, except a reddish smoke pouring out, he would probably have shattered the bottle--freeing the Genie to depart forever once it had fulfilled his three wishes.

---

The three daughters of Laiph and Marazad, the trio of magical weaver-women, would probably be seen to be fond of swans, keeping a pair as pets. They would also be shown at intervals weaving a tapestry on a loom. During the final apocalyptic battle, the trio would use their weaving skills to make magical garments out of swan feathers. When they put these on, they would themselves transform into swans, like the swan-maidens of Germanic mythology.

In keeping with their status as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, the trio would likely take the forms of a yellowish-white swan egg, a black-feathered cygnet, and an adult (white) swan. These are actually anticipations of their final roles--the Maiden is still an unhatched egg, the Mother is a newborn, and the Crone is still a mother. With the adult swan holding on to her egg, the swan and cygnet would manage to fly safely above the world-consuming fire, and perch in the branches of the World Tree.

In Norse mythology, the three Norns (equivalents of the Greek Fates) were fond of swans, and kept two as pets--the parents of all swans in the world. And in Norse culture more generally, supernatural women such as Norns and Valkyries were popularly associated with the legends of swan-maidens who used feather dresses to change shape.

At some point early on, the original Three Witches from Trinity would reappear, only to fade away--as do the Norns in the opening of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung.

---

Meanwhile, it's likely that, instead of immediately turning into a fox, one of the villain's unfaithful sister-consorts in The World's End would actually be transfigured into an eagle. Thus, the two transformed sisters would each lead an army of bears and eagles into the final battle--a reference to the climactic Battle of Five Armies in Tolkien's The Hobbit.

It's also likely that, as the old world began to burn, it would be the wizard Willow Ufgood who transformed the two animal-women into smaller forms--a badger and a fox, respectively--to make it easy for them to climb up into the World Tree. His third and final act of transfiguration would be applied to himself, turning his mortal body into the enormous willow tree that would shelter the heroes.

(In the third book of the Earthsea series, the Archmage Ged makes a similarly momentous sacrifice: he journeys into the realm of the dead, where he heals the damaged fabric of the cosmos--at the price of giving up his own magic power forever.)

So the two transfigured women would change shape three times: they'd initially be turned, by the power-hungry villain, into enormous, powerful creatures; then, by the diminutive Willow Ufgood, into smaller, more agile creatures; and finally, by their good but impotent brother, into half-human hybrids, whose animal forms are prey for their initial beast shapes. Not only do you have a penance of sorts for their dalliance with the villain--there's also yet again a running motif of impotence.

In the finale, then, only nine beings would survive the end and rebirth of the world: the male hero, his two human and two part-animal sister-wives, the new Three Fates, and the World Tree himself, Willow Ufgood.

---

If a bunch of this sounds familiar to any veteran computer gamers, it may be because several of these details also appear in the 1990 Lucasfilm Games graphic adventure game Loom. There you have the Three Fates turning into swans; the juxtaposition of two female swans, a black cygnet and a white adult; the seventeen-year-old wizard hero transfiguring himself in the finale; and even--in a bit ultimately cut to save space on 3.5'' floppies--the three shattering hourglasses within the Emerald City.

Before joining George Lucas's game company, Loom's lead designer Brian Moriarty worked at Infocom, where in 1986 he wrote a text adventure about the history of the atomic bomb: Infocom's Trinity.

 

Let's see if we can't put a few names to these nine children who end the universe. It's so unwieldy without them.

The two twins would doubtless have a name derived from the twins in The Horse and His Boy (Cor and Corin), but also with a nod in the direction of Edgar and Edmund in King Lear. So... maybe, then, Corin for the good twin, and something like Corlaisz for the bad one.

The former name is a play on "cor-in," meaning that the good twin has his heart (in Latin, cor) in the right place. But his evil brother would be quite literally "cor-less."

Corin's three sisters on his mother's side, Elora's daughters, would have names modeled on Lear's three daughters in Shakespeare's play: Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia.

The youngest of the trio, Corin's first sister-wife, would very probably be named Cordella. This is another linguistic pun of sorts, this time in French: the words "coeur au-delà" literally mean "heart beyond." Cordella would therefore be the one to have her heart cut out by Corlaisz.

(In Harry Potter, Lord Voldemort's name is itself a French phrase, meaning "flight from death.")

Cordella's two older full-sisters would likely be named something like Guneril and Gunrai. The latter name, used for a villainess, anticipates the "Nute Gunray" pun of TPM.

Marazad's eldest daughter, Corin's second sister-wife, would likely be named Coravis. This refers to Aravis, the Calormene heroine in The Horse and His Boy, but equally to corvus, the Latin word for "bird." Coravis would be the one who had her throat slit by Corlaisz, and so inherited Marazad's talking bird.

The last three sisters, the eventual three Fates, would have names that punned on the Greek Fates (Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis) as well as the three Norns of Norse myth (Urth, Verthandi, and Skuld). Perhaps something like Corth, Matrandi, and Skalkesis. That's just a shot in the dark, though; they could equally instead have had significant Sanskrit names, rather like the slightly modified Sanskrit word daikini, or "sky-walker," used by the Nelwyns to refer to ordinary humans.

Still, those three names do have a certain appeal: they respectively suggest "birth," "motherhood," and "skull"--so are fitting names for a Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

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As far as a date on this trilogy of outlines goes....

The earliest works I could find that bear the evident influence of this Willow trilogy are both video games: Sierra's King's Quest III and Infocom's Trinity, both released in 1986. Infocom started work on Trinity in May 1985, while Sierra published King's Quest II (and presumably immediately began work on the sequel) that very same month.

Additionally, Chris Columbus' first-draft script for the unmade Indiana Jones and the Monkey King--whose climax features Indy dying and being resurrected by a god, an idea not present in GL's initial 1984 story outline--was completed in May 1985 as well!

So it seems the terminus ante quem for the date of writing on this trilogy is May 1985, and quite likely in reality a bit earlier. Thus, when Moebius came on board to do illustrations for Willow early in 1986, GL would already have abandoned the idea of a fantasy trilogy, and reduced the project's scope to a single film--while, in all likelihood, clandestinely passing his outlines around Hollywood, bound in the iron shackles of an NDA contract, for others to read in secret and draw on for their own works.

The latest film whose production GL had no hand in that apparently influenced this fantasy trilogy was 1983's Anglo-American venture Krull. Although Return to Oz and Labyrinth were respectively released in 1985 and 1986, GL was himself very involved with the production on both of these movies.

 

In my earlier post on names, I may actually have misnamed the villain of the third film. He may very well have been called something like Corsanz. This is another French pun, on the words sans coeur or "heartless."

Meanwhile, the names of Corsanz's two sister-consorts, Guneril and Gunrai, would echo the similarly alliterative names of Gunnar and Gudrun: the Burgundian royal siblings who, along with their half-brother Hagen, brought about the death of Sigurd.

Another correction: In the finale of The World's End, it's likely that the regrown hair of Cordella and Coravis would be just their pubic hair--leaving their heads bald, like Sorsha in the end of the original Willow. (In a similar vein, Corin himself, like the Egyptian Osiris, would adopt a golden prosthetic phallus.)

In addition, the two human girls' regrown eyes (equal and opposite in color to their respective regrown hair) would have the squarish pupils of a goat, providing another call-back to Sorsha.

Corin's cheek scar, meanwhile, would probably forever continue to bleed golden ichor, as a Fisher King-style would that would not heal.

Also, once they came back from the dead, the brands on the trio's foreheads (no doubt created by the magical attacks of Corsanz) would likely take on vivid colors. The rayed sun on Corin's forehead would turn golden, and the crescents on the foreheads of Cordella and Coravis would turn scarlet.

Given the evident physical appearances of Cordella and Coravis in the finale, it's interesting that a major character in the SW prequel-era EU (now under the "Legends" category) is the bald, albino-skinned swordswoman Asajj Ventress.

 

During the sea voyage in The World's End, there was likely a significant setup behind how Cordella and Coravis came to eat the black lotus flowers--obviously, they wouldn't do so for no reason.

First, the shipwreck of the three siblings' boat would probably have occurred, not on their way to the Archmages' island (as I suggested earlier), but after they'd left it, as they were were journeying to the second isle.

The boat would get caught in a terrible storm. A great wave would wash Cordella and Coravis overboard, so that they washed up on the island beach. Cordella, like Elora in Trinity, would lose her shoes in the water.

With the ship foundering, the crew and Corin would take to the lifeboats. All but Corin, however, would decide to return home, as these eastern waters were believed to be unsafe for mortal men. So Corin would set out alone in a single lifeboat, and make for the island of the black lotus.

This second island would be full of rocky, barren, mountainous terrain. As Cordella and Coravis set out to explore it, they would be attacked by two vicious harpies, like those seen in Ray Harryhausen's film Jason and the Argonauts. The harpies would viciously claw both of them--Cordella on her back, and Coravis on the front of her chest.

One of the harpies would then seize Coravis, and fly off with her up into the air. Cordella would pick up a stone and throw it at the harpy, causing it to drop Coravis--resulting in Coravis badly breaking her leg, leaving her in great pain, and eventually with a permanent limp.

Cordella would pick up Coravis and carry her, looking for something on the island that might give them relief. Crossing the mountains, her bare feet, like Sorsha's and Elora's before her, would become badly cut and bloody from the sharp rocks. So upon finally finding the black lotus flowers, they would both eat them in order to ease the pain of their wounds. This would plunge them into an unbreakable deep sleep, the state in which Corin would find them.

This scene clearly continues the motif of wounds that recur in all three Willow stories (and plus, each girl is wounded thrice, if we count the eating of the lotus).

Once again, though, its details appear to have made their way into an old-school adventure game: Sierra's King's Quest V, from 1990, features a harpy attack, on an island which the protagonist and his lone animal companion reach by boat. The player character, King Graham, finds his owl companion lying injured on the ground, and has to carry him to safety (for medical treatment, even).

(In Stardust, young Tristran Thorn, on a date with Victoria Forester, tries to impress her by vowing that to win her hand, he would go to "far Cathay" in the East, and bring her back, among other things, a boat full of opium.)

 

In Trinity, the Guardian of the first Crown piece, whose lair was in a stone crypt beneath the Archmages' city, was likely a black Minotaur statue, stone-skinned and invincible. Thus, Elora could not defeat it even with Laiph's sword, and it would knock out her front teeth with its stone fist. But once she admitted defeat, the stone Minotaur would reveal itself as her own doppelganger. (Back in Willow, Sorsha would be equated to the sacred ram of the Golden Fleece.)

So, each film in this trilogy evidently involves ominous stone statues as antagonists, but only in The World's End can the heroes successfully kill them.

The earthly entrance to the Underworld would itself lie beneath the stony crypt of the Emerald City. This gate would be guarded by a three-headed saber-toothed tiger, whom Elora would pacify by calling in a bird to sing to the beast. (Both the black Minotaur statue and the saber-toothed tiger guarding a sacred place come from Ray Harryhausen's 1977 film Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.)

But in Trinity, Laiph and Elora would not pass far enough into Hades to cross the River Styx. That act, an irreversible passage into Death, would be saved for The World's End, when the deceased Laiph, Elora, and Marazad were all ferried across in Charon's boat. As they crossed, they would look down, and see that the river was inky black, and full of corpses (like the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings).

Later, when Laiph and Elora fell from their slain winged unicorn into the ocean, they would probably have been attacked underwater, by mermaids intent on dragging them down into the depths. The merfolk presumably, and mistakenly, believed that all humans were like Marazad in wanting to kill them.

One of the mermaids would grab onto Elora's leg, and come away with one of her shoes--forcing her to discard the other, and leaving her barefoot. (In Willow, Sorsha would've lost a shoe in a struggle with an Orc as it fell into the castle moat.)

---

In The World's End, Cordella would likely retain her shoes when she and Coravis were washed ashore on Harpy Island. Then, when Coravis was carried off by a Harpy, Cordella would throw one of her shoes at the creature, saving her sister's life. But Cordella would then be forced to hike barefoot over the sharp island rocks, as she went in search of medical aid for the wounded Coravis.

Meanwhile, when Corin got to the final island at the World's End, the way to the "oracular" pool would be guarded by two enormous serpent statues with glowing eyes. This is of course based on the guardian sphinxes in 1984's The Neverending Story. The stone serpents' eyes would generate an invisible force field between them, which destroyed any matter in its path--as Corin would see for himself, by throwing a rock between the statues.

To get past the statues, Corin would use his power of speech with animals (inherited from Elora) to call upon a bird. The bird, at his request, would peck out the statues' eyes with its beak (like Fawkes the phoenix attacking the basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). So Corin would pass safely through to the pool. But once he had, the snake statues' eyes would regrow themselves, and the bird would be incinerated. He would have no way back--save for the bottled genie.

An additional source of inspiration for this scene: the twin demonic Watcher statues guarding the gate to Cirith Ungol in The Lord of the Rings. Sam Gamgee uses the Phial of Galadriel to temporarily disarm their lethal gaze, but the forcefield immediately snaps back on once he passes inside.

Tolkien's Watcher statues each have bodies, with three vulture-like heads and six arms--a detail that likely would reappear on the three statues conjured by Corsanz later in The World's End. (And it's likely, too, that Sorsha's stone statue opponents back in Willow would have numbered nine.)

When Corin, Cordella, and Coravis returned home and healed Laiph with the Grail, Laiph would stand up and immediately prepare to make war upon his rebellious son. But Corsanz would come in, backed by an army, and take them unawares. He would arrest and imprison his father Laiph, and Elora and Marazad too, cementing his coup.

Corin, Cordella, and Coravis would resist--as Laiph and Marazad did not when Valerius captured Elora in Trinity. The result would be their own bloody deaths at the hand of Corsanz. His acts would be revolting enough to turn his own sister-consorts against him.

In the castle dungeon, Laiph and Elora, heavily bound with ropes, would call upon the mice in their cell, to chew through their bonds and Marazad's. The trio would escape their ropes, but would have no way to leave their cell--until they were set free by Corsanz' two sister-wives. In retribution for this, Corsanz would later transfigure his sisters into, respectively, an eagle and a bear.

Once freed, the parental trio would gather their children's bodies, and the treasures accumulated from their journey. They would lay their dead children, with a sword on each one's chest, and their goods beside them, on a funeral pyre. As the flames blazed, the three parents would jump in the fire themselves, joining their children in the Realm of the Dead.

When Laiph appeared before the Lord of the Dead, he would initiate his challenge by throwing down a "gauntlet" of sorts--his prosthetic right hand, the loss of which is yet another symbol of impotence.

And once again, many of the above ideas (the hero making a predatory beast give up its prey by throwing a shoe at it; the escape from a dungeon with the aid of a mouse; and the two stone serpent guardians whose eyes must be destroyed in order to pass) reappear in yet another old-school fantasy adventure game from Sierra: King's Quest V, from 1990.

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The Neverending Story came out in the USA in July 1984. Meanwhile, the first works that evidently derived inspiration from this unmade Willow trilogy (both video games: Sierra's King's Quest III and Infocom's Trinity) both began production in May 1985. So it would seem that, if these outlines for a Willow trilogy really do exist in some vault deep in the Lucasfilm archives, they must date to the period between July 1984 and May of the following year.

PS: The name of Bavmorda in Willow quite clearly derives from the demon Baphomet... who is usually depicted with the head of a goat.

 

Given everything I've said so far, it's likely that one other major modern fantasy film stands indebted to this unmade trilogy: Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

We've already got the magical crown sundered into three pieces, and the beardless, white-haired, golden-eyed albino prince. So there might be some additional influence at work, in del Toro's depiction of the Elven prince Nuada's father: Balor, the one-armed King of Elfland.

Balor is an aged and decrepit monarch, who now spends most of his days sitting on his throne. Aside from his silver hand, he is visually quite similar to his son; both bear the divine traits of white hair, albino skin, and golden eyes. But King Balor has a beard, and a crown of antlers that grows out of his own head. Additionally, he has a circular mark on his forehead, symbol of his royal status.

In the course of the film, Prince Nuada kills his own father, and takes from him the first piece of the Crown of the Golden Army. So, if there is indeed a connection between Hellboy II and this unmade trilogy, it's likely that Balor's appearance would match up with the God of Death seen in The World's End.

The Lord of Death in the world of Willow, then, would have white hair and albino skin; a beard; blankly golden eyes; a crown of naturally growing horns; and a circular mark on his forehead--likely a golden rayed sun, matching Corin's own mark. Death would naturally also have a prosthetic right hand--since, after all, he once was a man in Laiph's exact position.

The horns in particular are notable. They correspond to the horns of the Celtic deity Cernunnos, the Horned God, who, though little understood, is often believed to be associated with death and rebirth. Cernunnos is also frequently associated with both stags and serpents.

So when Laiph replaced the old Lord of Death on his throne, he would grow a fresh pair of horns of his own as he sat down--his divine crown. Eventually he too would one day look exactly like the old incarnation of Death.

Meanwhile, the three stone statues conjured by Corsanz evidently draw additional inspiration from the devilish figure of Tash in CS Lewis' final Narnia book, The Last Battle. The gigantic Tash is very similar in appearance to Tolkien's Watchers: he has black skin, a vulture's head, and four arms. Plus, his very name is a Turkish word for "stone."

Additionally, it's quite possible that the three hourglasses in the Emerald City would begin to shatter at the very moment when Corin passed beyond the guardian serpents at the World's End. They would therefore be the heralds of the End of the World, in both a geographical and a temporal sense.

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A few additional thoughts:

The diminutive Elf King's name in Willow would probably be something like Auberic.

This name is a fusion of two variants on the same mythological character. One is Oberon, the benevolent King of the Faeries in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Shakespeare's play, Oberon feuds with his wife Titania over which one of them should raise a human child (as the Elf King and Bavmorda fight over Sorsha).

The other is Alberich, the evil King of the Dwarves in the legend of Sigurd (and, especially, in Wagner's Ring Cycle). It was Alberich who raped the Queen of Burgundy, fathering the one-eyed black knight Hagen. It was Alberich who, according to Wagner, forged the evil Ring at the heart of the legend. And it is Alberich who urges his son Hagen on to the murder of Sigurd/Siegfried.

Meanwhile, the Lord of the Dead in The World's End would likely actually be called the Erlking. This is a legendary mythological figure of evil, a wicked Elven-king whose appearance portends death.

The Erlking was most famously dramatized in the poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which bears his name. But he also appears as the impossibly ancient King of the Elves in Poul Anderson's fantasy novel The Broken Sword. Anderson's Elves, like Guillermo del Toro's, are all white-haired albinos.

The "erl" in Erlking actually derives from the name of the alder tree, or the closely related elder tree--as in the powerful and sinister "Elder Wand" from Harry Potter.

 

In Lord Dunsany's 1924 novel, The King of Elfland's Daughter, the protagonist Alveric enters the kingdom of the Elves in search of a fairy bride. Alveric is a prince of the mortal world, and his father is the King of the realm of Erl.

It may be that the name of the Elf King in Willow was actually Auberon--mostly following after Shakespeare's Faerie King, to illustrate the character's largely benevolent nature. But the re-spelling of the initial vowel sound hints at the darker side of Alberich: the Elf King, after all, evidently did beget Madmartigan on a mortal queen.

Auberon is also the spelling used by Neil Gaiman, in the Sandman comics universe, to indicate the actual King of Faerie (as opposed, in-universe, to the spelling "Oberon" used by William Shakespeare).

Incidentally, I hadn't mentioned it before, but Laiph's appearance at the end of Trinity evidently harks back to the original concept for the Nazi Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark: black-uniformed, with a cyborg-prosthetic right hand, and eyeglasses containing one cybernetic lens. This character design later reappeared with the cyborg Nazi officer, Gutterbuhg, in Chris Columbus' script for Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.

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Postscript: In the finale of The World's End, there would likely be nine instances of Corin using his power to heal the wounds of himself and his four sisters.

Corin would regrow his own hair (now in white), and his sisters' lost hair, missing eyes, and missing teeth. But while Cordella and Coravis would each have their pubic hair grow in with a color to match the other's regrown eye, the new hair on both of their heads would presumably be black.

Given their albino skin and respective hair colors, Corin would look angelic, and his sisters vampiric: in other words, exactly like the Light and Dark Elves of Norse mythology

They have also in a sense exchanged places, since Corin would've been born with black hair, whereas Cordella and Coravis respectively had angelic blue and white tresses. (Their having mismatched hair colors in the finale, moreover, calls back to Elora Danan at the end of Trinity.)

Next, the hero would heal his two transfigured sisters in animal shape, Guneril and Gunrai, making them into half-human hybrid creatures.

Finally, he would symbolically--but not truly--heal his own impotence, by taking up the melted, lumpen Grail and reshaping it into an Osiris-style golden phallus.

If this sort of trippy Jodorowsky-esque finale was what GL intended for his more "esoteric" movies, it's no wonder that it took 30 years for the SW sequel trilogy to get made.

 

Update: in The World's End, it's likely that Corsanz wouldn't brand symbols on his three siblings' foreheads when he murdered them. Instead, their three forehead marks would appear as colorful tattoos, once they were reborn as albinos (after dying, being immolated on a pyre, and returning to life).

Instead, Corsanz would likely cut off their ears--both of Corin's, and one each for Cordella and Coravis. He would make a necklace out of their severed ears and eyes, like the severed-head necklace worn by the Hindu goddess Kali.

So in the finale, Corin would regrow his own ears, and those of Cordella and Coravis. Their new ears would all be pointed, like the pointy Elf-ears Sorsha had.

Corin's new ears would both be pointed, but his sisters, Cordella and Coravis, would each have retained one of their human, non-pointy ears. Furthermore, both of them would have one blue (divine) eye, and one beastly eye with a goat's pupil--making them too half-beasts of a sort, albeit to a lesser degree than Guneril and Gunrai.

(Sorsha, too, would've lost one ear-tip back in Willow. However, the symbolism of deafness in Trinity would instead involve Marazad's loss of her natural voice, and subsequent use of a clockwork bird's cry to speak instead.)

This would bring the total wounds healed by Corin in the finale to fourteen: the ten instances I mentioned above, the three cases of severed ears, and his own bleeding slash on one cheek. When he healed that wound, it would leave a golden scar-line. The repeated number 14 ultimately corresponds to the fourteen pieces into which Osiris' body was torn by Set in Egyptian lore.

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After his death and resurrection, Corin would've lost both eyes and both ears, while his sisters would have just one eye and one ear each. The sightless Corin would take up Elora's sapphire eyes from the ashes of their pyre, allowing him to see the past and the future.

Cordella and Coravis would then both be blinded in the trio's duel with the triple-bodied vulture statues. They would be able to hear, but not see, while Corin would be able to see, but not hear. Corin, using his prescient sight, would learn how the trio could ignite their swords and defeat the statues, and would be able to tell his sisters what to do.

After the battle, Corin would give each sister one of his mother's blue eyes. For himself, he would then take up the two golden gems dipped in the golden pool near the World's End. So he would be able to see in the present; one sister would see into the past; and the other, into the future.

 

At the beginning of The World's End, the aging King Laiph would be seen with partially gray blond hair and mustache. When he drank from the Grail, his hair would lengthen and turn fully white, and his beard, now also white, would once more grow back in full. This is a symbol of the restoration of his potency, and an anticipation of his ascent to godhood. (Nevertheless, the old scar on Laiph's cheek would remain, hindering the growth of beard in one spot.)

The Erlking, too, would be white-bearded, with pointed albino ears. He would also have once been attended by two women--fulfilling the roles, as Marian Intercessor figure and Satan-esque prosecutor of the deceased, that Elora and Marazad would soon themselves take on.

But only one of these women would still be present: the female prosecutor, a terrifying figure who spoke through the voice of a raven on her shoulder. The Intercessor would have fallen into evil long ago, and returned to the mortal world, seeking dominion over men. Her name, therefore, was Bavmorda--the fallen-angel villain of Willow.

Bavmorda's fall, then, would have signified the decay and corruption of the current world. Only with the restoration of the Intercessor figure--in the new guise of Elora herself, the one ultimately responsible for Bavmorda's destruction--could the new world be made just and righteous once more.

Presumably Bavmorda's fall came about because, like Cordella--and unlike Elora--she literally and figuratively lacked a heart.

So, with Bavmorda gone from the Netherworld, the cosmos was "out of balance," tilted toward evil. With the dawn of a new world, the proper balance between good and evil is evidently restored--as seen in the mismatched physical attributes of Cordella and Coravis. There is now, if you will, a proper "balance to the Force."

Additionally, the three heroes' trio of flaming swords, used to kill the obsidian stone statues, likely had flames of blue, red, and yellow--the three primary colors, symbolically using light to destroy darkness.

 

To complete the symbolism of the balance of good and evil: in the finale of The World's End, the emblem on Cordella's forehead would likely have been a golden rayed sun, the symbol of goodness shared by her brother Corin. Coravis, meanwhile, would have a red crescent on her forehead. But set against this, Cordella's single regrown eye would be red in color, and her sister's would be golden.

It's also likely that while Cordella's regrown hair on her head would be black, her new pubic hair would actually be white. Coravis's new head hair, by contrast, would likely be blue, and her pubic hair red. The two sisters would thus exchange their respective original hair colors of blue and white.

Elora's daughter Guneril, who would have started out with symbolically "evil" red hair, would end up as a blonde mermaid (like Daryl Hannah in the 1984 film Splash). And her sister Gunrai, who was born with "good" blonde tresses, would become a red-haired harpy, like those in Ray Harryhausen's film Jason and the Argonauts.

The symbolic balance continues if we compare Cordella with Bavmorda from Willow. According to the Moebius concept art, Bavmorda too was originally going to be a white-haired, yellow-eyed albino. But her emblem would have been the black sun--a symbol of goodness corrupted, and the inversion of the proper order of the universe.

Over the course of The World's End, Guneril would be transformed in succession into a bear, a badger, and a mermaid; and Gunrai would become by turns an eagle, a fox, and a harpy. Guneril's initial animal form, and Gunrai's second, are both common predators of the animal halves (a fish and a bird) of their respective final shapes.

In fact, each major realm in the world of Willow would have its own emblematic animal.

Galladoorn has the French imperial golden eagle on a blue background; Land's End, the English golden lion on a red field; the diminutive Prussian-esque Elves, a black badger on yellow; and in the south, the Sultan would likely use a white snake on a green field.

(If none of that sounds familiar to you, allow me to ask: where have you been these last 17 years or so?)

Bavmorda's normal emblem would be a black sun on a red field, but--given her connection to Baphomet--her emblem animal would certainly be a goat. Meanwhile, the frost-giantess would be represented by a wolf; fittingly, she'd have been the one responsible for turning the cursed Prince of Trinity into a hound. And Dark Elora's sigil, later inherited by her son, would be a scarlet three-headed dragon on a black field.

 

Additionally, the horns of the Erlking in the Netherworld would probably be the antlers of a deer, like the deer-horned Celtic god Cernunnos--thus making the stag the sigil animal of the Realm of the Dead. If the Erlking had a flag, it would probably feature the stag in black on a white field (or vice versa).

The horns of King Balor in Hellboy II are stag antlers as well.

The flag of the frost-giantess, if she had one, would likely be a gray wolf on a white field (the same banner used by House Stark in A Song of Ice and Fire).

A small correction: Dark Elora's emblem animal would likely be a red three-headed serpent on black, a creature suitable for adaptation into a triskelion. But dragons and serpents are equated extremely often in folklore.