Saga Jedi Knights and Literary/Historial Influences

What specific works of literature or historical nonfiction influenced Lucas’s conception of the Jedi Knights?

We know there was a strong Eastern influence, especially via Kurosawa’s films. But European medieval knights and the chivalric code seems to have been closer to the heart of how Lucas imagined the Jedi.

But we live in a time very different from the one Lucas grew up in. There have been so many book, TV, and movie depictions of medieval knights that have watered down and altered the image of knighthood that may have been clearer to Lucas growing up.

So I’m trying to figure out what specific works, whether literary or academic, could have helped Lucas develop his idea of the Jedi Order. All of this is to get a better understanding of the Jedi as seen by Lucas.

 

As he once said, the warrior-monk idea that represents the Jedi has the historical inspiration of both the Buddhist shaolin monks and the Christian knightly orders like the Knights Templar. Both merge the monastic/spiritual and warrior/martial art elements.

 

For tales of knights with a spiritual/supernatural twist, it's hard to beat the quest for the holy grail (no, not the Monty Python version, check out Thomas Malory's La Morte d'Arthur, and my favorite more modern retelling, The Once And Future King).

Orlando Furioso, one of the books that drove Don Quixote mad, is another possibility. Spenser's The Faerie Queene is a similar tale of questing knights and their fantastic foes and adventures.

Going back to an earlier era, Sir Gawaine And The Green Knight is a quest of the mind and soul more than the physical journey and battles. JRR Tolkien did an excellent translation from the Old English.

 

Thank you!

Lucas has a real skill for synthesis. He takes from all that he reads, watches, and observes, and he creates something unique and truthful. He earnestly conveys the wisdom he’s learned from many different sources.

I wish we had the full picture of what he was developing in his sequels. But we got plenty from his six movies and his TV series. So I’m grateful for that!

Perhaps we should rename this thread, because I’m curious about more than just the books he read that resulted in the Jedi. I know we got a few glimpses at his library in an Episode I documentary. But I envy whoever has access to the full thing. That would be a very well-rounded education.

Short of that, are there any good books that talk about some of the things that he has been influenced by and which he’s synthesized in his work?

 

In the trivia section on the IMDb for JJ Annaud's 1986 The Name of the Rose, a film in which the characters are Medieval monks (based on a novel by Umberto Eco), it says that

No source for this is given--at least I can't find any--and I certainly can't find any Lucas quotes on the film. It's however not unlikely given the similarities (perhaps the novel moreso than the movie. It was a bestseller for a while.).



Regardless of whether it's true or not, Lucas' inspiration for the Jedi knights isn't just Eastern monks and Western knights, but Western monks as well. (And, as pointed out above, Eastern knights as well).

 

Yeah, it seems like baseless speculation, there's nothing exclusive to that movie to jump to the conclusion that it was an inspiration for Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan.

Of course, the samurai and arthurian knights were inspirations for the Jedi, but the warrior-monk concept was taken from historical eastern (Buddhist) and western (Christian) warrior-monks, Shaolin monks and the Knights Templar respectively:

 

Do others get the sense that the physical powers of the Jedi and Sith tend to get overemphasized in other media and especially in the sequel trilogy?

I was rewatching Episodes II and III the other week, and while there are definitely feats of telekinetic power, both Jedi and Sith primarily act as normal (though very skilled and intelligent) people would. The Sith hatch plots that involve secretive manipulation of existing power networks, and nothing they do could not be done by a very astute and visionary person with no Force ability. The Jedi operate similarly as they investigate various mysteries and try to maintain or restore galactic peace. Rarely do they resort to anything overtly mystical or magical, with the Force seeming to mainly enhance their perception and insight, and of course their fighting ability when it comes to it.

This struck me especially with Palpatine. We know he’s a strong fighter and is able to peer into the future. But most of his action takes place in the political realm. This reminds me how Lucas said in an interview that his interest was not so much in science fiction ideas as it was in anthropology. And both the Sith and the Jedi seem to operate primarily on that more “human” realm, though of course aided by their insight from the Force.

 

I think that's just the nature of more people wanting Star Wars to go into the more High Fantasy aspect these days (And even in older EU stuff) really emphasize the idea that these are Space Wizards.

Emphasis on the Wizard.

Personally it's why I like the Sequels the best because I want more that High Fantasy wizard stuff than what the Prequels were going for.

 

Yes, and it specially comes through with their basic misunderstanding of the Force. They see the Force as nothing but a power that you can get, and Lucas saw it as something natural that is part of nature and all life, biologically and spiritually, something that (if you have the talent and training) you can connect with learn to use. The Jedi and the Sith "specialness" is meant to be above average, not outright fantastic like a superhero or a sorcerer/mage.

Their wizard archetype is tied to their wisdom, like Tolkien's, not magic like in modern fantasy.

 

That makes sense. And I agree that works of fantasy have themselves followed this pattern of making feats of magic more spectacular, compared with the less visible magic seen in works like the Lord of the Rings. Of course there’s always been exceptions, such as animal transformations. Though even that has been taken to more visual levels in the past few decades, perhaps because of the growing dominance of visual media.

In the first two Star Wars trilogies, would the greatest displays of power be the Emperor’s lightning attack in Jedi and Yoda’s raising of the X-Wing in Empire?

It’s interesting that one of the guiding questions for the filmmakers of the sequels was “What is the Force?” or “How powerful is the Force?” yet they did not seem to really answer that in a way that’s clear to me. They did repeat some of the wording we’d heard before, but I don’t see a clear connection between that and what’s shown, with the possible exception of the bond between Kylo and Rey.

 

@Sauron_18

I think at the end of the day the Force is going to be "Whatever the author chooses it to be" and that's just something every fan has to kinda grapple with as we move away from the Lucas storytelling and to new territory

 

That’s one way of seeing it, though it’s not really a new thing. Other writers have been doing it for decades. The EU and Disney’s canon are not fundamentally different, except one has much more Lucas material to work with. But beyond reading new stories, I’m also curious about the opposite.

Lucas’s ideas come from somewhere. He built them into entertaining stories, but he synthesized concepts from many other sources, from a long history of thinking and storytelling. In most cases, these can be complex ideas that relate more to the real world than to anything purely entertaining. But seeing them through entertainment first is a gateway to engaging with the ideas themselves more fully by finding their older manifestations.

The stories that came after Star Wars, the ones built as part of the franchise, created many assumptions that framed how I viewed Lucas’s works themselves. It’s certainly been a fun ride, and still is for the most part, but looking back I can see that there’s much I haven’t noticed before. In this particular case, it’s my EU-based view of the Jedi that I’m trying to “unlearn” so that I can take a look at them with a slightly new (to me) perspective and get a potentially clearer idea of what all is contained within that symbol.

Part of that is based on my feeling over the years that not every writer who followed on Lucas’s footsteps really got what he was saying or alluding to. Clearly some also openly disagreed. But beyond that, and independent of preferences, I’m curious about the primary source and the ones that preceded it. In other words, I’m curious about what this particular author was trying to say about the Force and what his influences were.

 

@Sauron_18

Well to open a can of worms I always felt Last Jedi and Rian Johnson (Who I think got the Force spot on) has a very Circle of Life mentality to it.

Death is not darkness...It is the Light

Light is the Circle of Life...Death Decay and Rebirth.....All things natural.

Compared to what we see on Exegol (TROS) and the UNNATURAL, creating a clone body to put one's essence in and life forever even if it's in a broken down corpse husk. It's one of the thing I visually like about Exegol is


Tim Zahn on the other hand I felt treated the Force a bit to much like a Superpower for my liking, and something that can be countered with the Yslamari


Kevin J Anderson and some of the Early 90's stuff (And honestly Return of the Jedi so Lucas did this too) treated it like a blood thing ala Harry Potter

Luke says in RETURN OF THE JEDI (WRITTEN BY LUCAS) : The Force is strong...IN MY FAMILY....so the bloodline thing sadly goes back to Return of the Jedi.

I mean heck you could argue it goes back to A New Hope too.