BTS Moebius's Willow and TPM

The apparent storyline of the second Willow film suggests that Dark Elora would start out as an insubstantial wraith. Only by sacrificing her good counterpart in a magical ritual could she become fully corporeal. (Think of the ghostly Tom Riddle and his relationship with Ginny Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; by killing her, he will become fully flesh and blood.)

During the finale, Dark Elora would begin the ritual: presumably it would be meant to finish with her cutting out Elora's heart. While she certainly wouldn't get that far, Dark Elora would probably have an attendant cut off one of Elora's nipples, and then most likely immolate it over a fire. This rite would give Dark Elora enough corporeality to wear the restored Crystal Crown, and finish the ritual herself--or, at least, to be a threat to Laiph and Shahrazad once they arrived.

In the film's final scenes, after Dark Elora's defeat, Elora would be seen wearing a prosthetic golden nipple. (Most likely when her mother Sorsha, having just arrived for a visit, unwittingly walked in on Laiph, Elora, and Shahrazad in flagrante.)

Compare Dark Elora's ritual with A Song of Ice and Fire, and the sorceress Melisandre's method of magically killing "false kings" from a distance: she applies leeches to the genitals of Edric Storm, an illegitimate son of the old King, and roasts the blood-filled leeches over a fire as proxies for her victims.

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Actually, this gruesome detail further underlines the manifold Arthurian connections of the story of Willow.

Of the many "continuations" to Chretien de Troyes' unfinished medieval romance about Perceval, the Grail Knight, the First Continuation stands out in particular. This coda by an unknown writer introduces the lengthy story of Sir Caradoc, a Knight of the Round Table. Young Caradoc, ostensibly the son of his father of the same name, is actually the illegitimate child of the sorcerer Eliavres. Caradoc confronts the wizard to restore his family honor, but Eliavres conjures a snake which wraps itself around his sword arm.

After long travel, Caradoc and his beloved lady Guignier learn how this dark magic can be undone. Caradoc sits in a bath of vinegar, while Guignier sits in a tub of milk. The snake untangles itself from Caradoc's arm, and latches on to one of Guignier's breasts. Caradoc takes his sword and kills the snake--but cuts off Guignier's nipple in the process.

Although now out of danger, Caradoc is left with one arm permanently maimed, as a result of which he is nicknamed "Briefbras" (Short-arm). Guignier, meanwhile, receives a new nipple made of gold.

In fact, this tale evidently dates back to the earliest Welsh legends of King Arthur, since in the medieval Welsh Triads (lists of important trios of Arthuran legend), mention is made of Caradoc and his unimpeachably faithful wife Tegau Eurfron ("Tegau Golden-Breast").

There also survives another folkloric variant of the tale, collected as "Sheen Billy" by John Francis Campbell in the 1860 book Popular Tales of the West Highlands. In this version, the heroic prince is given a magic shirt by an evil sorceress, which turns into a snake around his neck. The princess, in saving him, loses her hair in addition to her right breast; as with Guignier, her severed breast is replaced with a golden prosthesis.

 

During Elora's duel with the beautiful but deadly frost-giantess (let's call her Brunhild), Elora would probably have managed to behead Brunhild in their initial combat. However, Brunhild would not die, and would merely replace her head upon her shoulders. The giantess would then use her magic fire to sear Elora, burning out her eyes but failing to kill her.

Calling upon her own magic, Elora would summon up a vision from Laiph's eyes, as he lay pinned immovably to the castle wall by Brunhild's spear. Using this magic sight, Elora would notice a large, prominent mirror--the means by which Brunhild earlier detected Laiph, even hidden under his invisibility cloak. Though she looked beautiful to mortal eyes, Brunhild would appear in the mirror in her true form of a hideous old crone.

Elora would smash the mirror and its reflection, killing Brunhild. Thus she would inherit the second piece of the Crystal Crown. Immediately afterward, though, Elora would collapse of injury and exhaustion.

If there was indeed such an important mirror in Brunhild's castle, I was probably wrong in my earlier post when I said that the Guardian/doppelganger-Elora in the Archmages' test would emerge from a mirror. This later scene, after all, would render it a redundant plot device.

Elora using Laiph's vision to replace her own missing eyes in combat is taken straight from Dune Messiah, where the blinded Paul Atreides uses his newborn son's vision to allow him to kill the nefarious Tleilaxu ambassador Scytale.

Meanwhile, Brunhild's ability to survive decapitation may come from Return to Oz. At the midpoint of that film, Dorothy travels to the castle of the sorceress Mombi, who can lead her to the palace of the Nome King. Unfortunately, Mombi turns out to be evil. She has a collection of women's heads, which she substitutes for her own at whim; most of the heads come from petrified female citizens of Oz, who are now headless statues. Mombi covets Dorothy's head, too, but Dorothy and her friends escape before she loses it.

Additionally, Elora fighting an invincible opponent, and defeating her foe by destroying its life-sustaining talisman, is another detail modeled on Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series. In the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, Taran fights the evil wizard Morda, and is unable to kill him until he breaks a small bone, which he'd earlier found hidden high in a tree, against Morda's body. The bone was Morda's little finger joint, imbued with his life force; when cracked against his body, it breaks, and Morda perishes.

In this case, however, Brunhild's mirror owes just as much to Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Interestingly, a very similar Dorian Gray reference appears in Brian De Palma's film Phantom of the Paradise: the slimy record producer Swan has made a deal with the Devil, granting him immortality. While Swan stays youthful, his image on the videotaped record of the infernal contract ages. Swan must watch the video once a day, or else the deal will break. In the end the Phantom, Winslow Leach, destroys the tape in order to kill Swan, though doing so also means his own certain death. (Whereas in Wilde's original novel, Dorian Gray destroys his own painting in a suicidal fit of self-loathing.)

(Also.... Horcruxes, anyone?)

After Elora's defeat of Brunhild, she would likely fall into a swoon of sickness. Laiph would put her on a horse and lead her south, in the direction of the Sultan's palace, to seek the final piece of the Crown. Elora would remain delirious for nine nights and nine days before recovering. During that period, she would probably be too sick to control her bowels; Laiph, dutiful as ever, would have to clean her up. (Much like Brienne does for Jaime Lannister when he loses his hand in A Song of Ice and Fire.)

Later, during the finale, Shahrazad too would lose bladder control, out of fright when she saw her brother Shahrayar petrified and killed by the Basilisk. Laiph, as well, would soil himself in fear, after losing three fingers during his duel with Dark Elora's invisibly-cloaked lieutenant. Both of them would then go on to defeat their opponents.

This (admittedly rather gross) idea uses bodily waste as a symbol of ichor, the golden blood of the Greek gods--which is itself a waste product of sorts, being created by ingesting the divine food and drink, nectar and ambrosia. (Apparently, real Greek gods never need to go to the bathroom.) Thus, Laiph, Elora, and Shahrazad are all represented as symbolically divine figures, like Madmartigan and Sorsha in the early draft of the first Willow film.

(This symbolism too recurs in Stardust. Look carefully at anyone seen to be urinating in the text--it's invariably the royal princes of Stormhold, or else Tristran Thorn himself, the eventual heir to the kingdom.)

Lastly, it occurs to me that GL may have passed some of the ideas for this second Willow film onto Timothy Zahn for his Thrawn trilogy. In the finale of The Last Command, Mara Jade closes her eyes and uses the Force to see through Princess Leia's eyes as she duels Luuke Skywalker, a villainous clone of the Luke we know.

 

A few more refinements to the storyline of the apparent second Willow film:

Shahrazad and Shahrayar's probable reason for being present on the eastern coast when they rescued Laiph and Elora was because they were out hunting incognito. Most likely their prey would be a flying horse of some sort--the same one which Laiph would later take from the Sultan's stables, and use to fly back to Galladoorn in the finale.

As a parting gift, Shahrazad would give Laiph and Elora their hunting dog. The hound (which could probably talk) would stick by them until the treacherous Galladoorn noble, Dark Elora's lieutenant, finally caught up with the duo, at which point the dog would bolt.

When Dark Elora's Galladoornian lieutenant (shall we call him Valerius?) arrived at the Sultan's palace to seize Elora, Shahrazad would try to stop him. Valerius would hit her, causing her to lose a tooth. Shahrazad would be angry enough to kill him, but Elora would restrain her, and submit to Valerius--since, otherwise, everyone in the palace would die at the hands of his soldiers. In the film's ending, Shahrazad would have the single lost tooth replaced with a true-silver one.

Another correction: I was probably wrong about Shahrazad and Shahrayar using a flying carpet to ride to the castle of Galladoorn. Instead, they more likely would've used some sort of mechanical wings, like Daedalus and Icarus--no doubt visually fashioned after the wingsuit seen in Terry Gilliam's film Brazil (1985).

As Shahrazad and Shahrayar flew toward Galladoorn, they would be intercepted and attacked by a guardian beast: most likely, some sort of three-headed wyvern (a legless dragon). Shahrayar would slay the creature, but Shahrazad's wings would be irreparably damaged in the fight. She would fall to the ground, badly breaking her leg and leaving her with a permanent limp. (Yvaine in Stardust breaks her leg and gets a limp when she falls from the sky.) Despite her injury, Shahrazad would stagger on toward the castle, while her brother flew there ahead of her. When Shahrazad finally arrived, she would find her brother inside, already petrified by the Basilisk.

Besides the legend of Icarus, the use of wings to fly seen here also incorporates a reference to the Norse legend of Wayland the Smith. Wayland was captured and imprisoned by King Nithad, who hamstrung him so he couldn't escape, and forced him to craft potent magical objects. In revenge, Wayland murdered the King's sons, and raped and impregnated his daughter. Wayland then built a pair of mechanical wings, which he used to fly away and escape. (Wayland is name-checked outright at one point in Stardust.)

As Shahrazad fought the Basilisk, Laiph's climactic duel with Valerius would take an unexpected turn. Using his shield to defeat Valerius's invisibility cloak, Laiph would give him a seemingly fatal wound. But using the sorcery granted to him by Dark Elora, Valerius would transform himself into a ferocious werewolf. At this point, Shahrazad's dog would return and attack wolf-Valerius, tearing his throat out but itself incurring fatal wounds.

As part of the magic ritual to bind Dark Elora to the mortal plane, the sorceress's acolytes would probably first cut off Elora's hair (permanently, with a cursed blade), and then one of her nipples, burning the severed bits over a fire. The third and final component of the ritual would be Elora's heart--but Dark Elora would never get to complete it, since Laiph and Shahrazad would interrupt her. (In Harry Potter, the dark ritual that re-embodies Lord Voldemort also has three components, the last of which is Harry's own blood.)

Dark Elora would use her magic to assault the pair--branding their foreheads with her insignia, which almost certainly was a three-armed triskelion--but would be unable to kill them, due to their protective talisman. When this failed, Dark Elora would attack them physically, slicing statue-Shahrazad's throat and stabbing Laiph in the groin. But before she could administer the coup de grace to either of them, the good Elora would seize the Crystal Crown and use its power to reclaim her dark half.

Dark Elora's emblem, the triskelion, would have a double meaning: it stands for both Dark Elora's favorite pet, the three-headed dragon, and the trinity of heroes who defeat her. (Compare A Song of Ice and Fire, where the sigil of the Targaryens is a three-headed dragon, and their dynasty was founded by King Aegon I and his two wives.) Of course, a triskelion is basically a three-armed variant of a swastika: a symbol both of ancient sun worship and good luck, and of ultimate evil as embodied by the Nazis.

Additionally, in the storyline as here reconstructed, Elora, Laiph, and Shahrazad are each wounded seven times. Elora and Shahrazad in particular suffer wounds that are intentionally similar--one apiece to the hair, eyes, legs, teeth, and chest. Meanwhile, Sorsha in the early version of the first Willow film would have suffered two wounds in all of those very places (save only her teeth--but Madmartigan too would lose a tooth).

The storyline of Shahrazad's talking dog, and his defeat of wolf-Valerius, is modeled on the role of Huan the talking hound in the tale of Beren and Luthien in The Silmarillion.

Huan was the loyal pet of the brothers Celegorm and Curufin, sons of Feanor, who encountered the beautiful Elf-maiden Luthien while they were out hunting. When Celegorm plotted to imprison Luthien and forcibly marry her, Huan switched his allegiance and aided Luthien's escape. Luthien and Huan traveled to the castle of Sauron, where her mortal lover Beren was imprisoned. Sauron, who was at this time the second-in-command of the greater Dark Lord, Morgoth, came forth in the guise of a werewolf to fight Huan, but he was soundly defeated and forced to release Beren.

Later, Huan died in battle with the rampaging wolf Carcharoth, but slew him also, after Carcharoth attacked Beren as King Thingol's hunters closed to kill the mad wolf. (It was Carcharoth, it should be noted, who had earlier in the story bitten off Beren's right hand.)

Of course, GL himself is a noted dog lover: both Chewbacca and Indiana Jones's dog were modeled on Marcia Lucas's Alaskan malamute. It may be significant that, in the film GL made immediately after Willow--that is, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade--Indy's childhood dog shows up on screen for the first time. (And naturally, in the Young Indy expanded universe, we learn that Indiana, the dog, died saving young Indy from a poisonous snake.)

I'll refrain from elaborating on the fact that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban features both a werewolf (Professor Remus Lupin) and a were-dog (Sirius Black, the titular Prisoner).

 

The talking dog I've proposed for this conjectural second Willow film probably had a backstory of his own. In all likelihood, he was once a prince, who long ago fell in love with a beautiful and powerful sorceress. But he was unfaithful to her, and so she cursed him to live forever in the shape of a dog.

There would probably have been a running motif of the dog being shown as cowardly. He would run away when Laiph and Elora reached the frost-giantess's icy palace. After they defeated Brunhild, the dog would rejoin them, only to run away again once Valerius's men bore down on them. Ultimately, though, he would save Laiph's life at the cost of his own, by returning in the climax to kill Valerius in wolf form.

In fact, the dog would have hid himself from Brunhild because she was the very same sorceress who cursed him all those years ago, as he would subsequently reveal. So too, his flight from Valerius would ultimately let him track his soldiers in secret back to Galladoorn castle. The dog would give his life to save Laiph, because Laiph proved more faithful to Elora (despite the temptation to run off with Shahrazad) than he had been as a human to Brunhild long ago.

Obviously, this story thread, with its core of a cursed prince in animal form learning the error of his ways, carries clear inspiration from Beauty and the Beast.

There also may be some influence from the 1983 fantasy film Krull. Midway through that film, the hero Colwyn's aged mentor, Ynyr the Old One, visits an old woman known as the Widow of the Web. He seeks advice from her on how to reach a Dark Lord's fortress and rescue Colwyn's kidnapped fiancée. It turns out that the Widow is Ynyr's old lover; he abandoned her to pursue magical studies full-time. Angered by his rejection, she killed their newborn child, and retreated into the Web: a cave guarded by a deadly spider, which can be temporarily pacified only by turning a magic hourglass full of red sand.

The Widow's name was once Lyssa, just like the hero's betrothed Princess. For the sake of the new Lyssa, Ynyr convinces his old lover to smash the hourglass, calling off her deadly spider--at the cost of her own life--so he can return to Colwyn with the vital information he needs. But Ynyr, too, pays a price, as he will die when the last of the magic sands run out. Ynyr reaches Colwyn, tells him how to penetrate the Dark Lord's fortress, and dies.

As far as influences on later works go: Sirius Black in Harry Potter is a were-dog, although his transformation is of course voluntary.

As well, the tragic love story I've tentatively reconstructed above has very obvious parallels with the backstory of Davy Jones and Tia Dalma in the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Given that series scriptwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have been working in Hollywood since the early 1990s, it wouldn't be surprising that--if this second Willow script/outline does indeed exist on a shelf somewhere--they did read it at one point and drew a few ideas from it.

 

And a few more additional thoughts on the second Willow film:

It's likely that the Three Witches would have made a series of sharp bargains with Elora, when she visited them in their forest lair. First, she would have to learn from them what would be needed to undo the curse on Madmartigan and Sorsha. To obtain this information, and learn about the Crystal Crown, she would likely have to give away her royal necklace as payment. But when Elora asked where to find it, the Witches would tell her only where to find the first of the three pieces of the Crystal Crown. To learn even that, Elora would have to hand over something else, likely her royal signet ring.

The witches would then offer Elora a magical egg, apparently rotten, which would create a storm when cracked--something vital to her upcoming journey, as they well knew. In payment for the egg, Elora would have to give up her last item of royal insignia: her golden tiara. A startling trade, that--a crown for a rotten egg!

I was probably wrong in my earlier posts in guessing that "normal" Elora would use spell-casting abilities; more likely she'd remain mostly mundane. Thus, the magical storm-brewing egg (which Elora would use to divert her hired ship to the Archmages' island) would be a present from the Three Witches. Later, when Elora was blinded during her fight with Brunhild, the immobilized Laiph would glimpse Brunhild's true form in her magic mirror, and verbally guide Elora to the mirror so she could smash it. (There'd presumably be no use of Dune-style prescient vision, therefore.)

The detail of the stormy egg, given by a magician as a present to the heroes, is another concept taken from Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain books; in The High King, the fifth and final book, the Fair Folk watchman Gwystyl gives such eggs to Taran and his friends, to help conceal them from the servants of Arawn Death-Lord.

The Archmages' island was presumably a recycling of the overall idea of Had Abbadon, and the Emperor's palace, from the early drafts of ROTJ: a fantastically tall castle built atop a subterranean underworld of lava. It is in this latter area, a sinister underground world of red light, that Elora would face the Guardian of the first Crown piece.

The same subterranean cavern would actually be, quite literally, an entrance to the Underworld. Once Elora had obtained the first Crown piece, she would need to learn where to find the second. So she and Laiph would proceed further into the Underworld, where they could speak with the one person who knew where the second Crown piece was.

The duo would use a boat to cross an ominous river (implicitly, the Styx), on the other side of which they would be greeted by the shades of dead men. They would have to shed blood, as food of sorts for the dead, in order to speak to them. Among these ghosts would be Laiph's late father, Airk Thaughbaer, who would presumably urge his son to protect Elora. (This is rather reminiscent of Father Skywalker's cameo in the Leigh Brackett draft of ESB.)

At last Laiph and Elora would see the person they sought: the good sorceress Fin Raziel, who had died in the interval between films. She would tell them that the frost-giantess Brunhild, living in a castle far in the icy north, was the one who held the second piece of the Crown. Having obtained the knowledge they came for, Laiph and Elora would leave, with a group of ghouls hot on their heels as they raced back to the land of the living.

This whole scene basically comes straight from Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus enters Hades to learn how he can finally appease Poseidon and return home to Ithaca after years of wandering. He must there shed blood to speak with the shades of the dead. Among those he sees are his fallen comrade Ajax, who died in the Trojan War. The ghost who gives Odysseus the information he needs is that of the blind seer Tiresias, who also appears as a major player in the story of Oedipus while still alive and well on Earth.

(Also.... remember that ominous Horcrux cave, guarded by a blood-hungry door, and with a lake of corpse-infested water, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Just saying...)

(Additional small side note: Neil Gaiman has noted on occasion that the one story from Stardust he has yet to tell involves Tristran Thorn flying to Hell in a hot-air balloon. Make of that what you will.)

After Elora kills Brunhild, the talking dog (who was once a prince, until transfigured by Brunhild) would rejoin the heroes, having earlier run away from the giantess's castle. The human heroes have no idea where to look for the final piece of the Crystal Crown, but the dog knows: it's in the possession of his former master, the Sultan. Thus he is the one to set them on the way to the Sultan's palace in the desert-strewn south.

The magical sapphire eyes given to Elora by Shahrazad would not be used for ordinary vision, but rather for mystic gazing: one orb would look into the past, and one into the future. (Like the Mirror of Galadriel, or for that matter, Force visions: "The future... the past. Old friends long gone.")

As far as her present surroundings went, Elora would still remain quite blind. However, it is implicitly the visions she sees with her new eyes that convince her to submit to Valerius--she can see, with her future vision, that her friends will rescue her in the end.

I noted earlier that, as part of her magical ritual, Dark Elora would likely immolate severed bits of "normal" Elora's body in a fire. In fact, she is likely to have done so in a cauldron--like the sinister Black Cauldron which Arawn uses to breed his evil minions in the Prydain books (or, for that matter, the cauldron which Peter Pettigrew uses to resurrect the bodiless Lord Voldemort).

Also of note: a throwaway passage in Stardust referring to "a mechanical bluebird which sang" (in the same breath as "two blue-white diamonds," just like Elora's new eyes) may indicate that the mechanical bird seen in the finale, and used by Shahrazad as a substitute voice-box, was in fact a bluebird, not a nightingale.

Plus, given the aptitude of the Sultan's court for clockwork automata (such as the Icarus-style wings, and Shahrazad's mechanical bird), the flying horse Laiph rides to Galladoorn in the finale was very likely a mechanical affair after all, like the clockwork flying horse presented to the Sultan of Basra in the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad.

In which case, the beast hunted by Shahrazad and Shahrayar on the eastern coast must have been something else--perhaps a white stag, like the one the four heroes hunt in the ending of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The stag in question would almost certainly be seen served as the centerpiece of the Sultan's dinner feast when Elora finally reached his palace.

And given how the feast would end, the main course may have been an extremely macabre pun of sorts on the idea of a "stag dinner." That's really terrible, I know, I'm sorry.

 

Most probably, the chief Archmage of the wizards (who would, naturally, dress in white robes) would have been a black man. This would be a tip of the hat of sorts to Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, where practically all the main characters (including the protagonist and future Archmage, Ged) are people of color. This character would also anticipate the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, second-in-command of the Jedi Order, in the SW prequels.

Laiph, meanwhile, would likely start the film with long blond hair and a short golden beard. However, as part of his and Elora's attempt to avoid scrutiny on their quest, Laiph would presumably shave his beard. (In Stardust, Lord Primus of Stormhold does the same, to avoid being found and murdered by his brother Septimus. And in A Song of Ice and Fire, golden-haired Jaime Lannister inverts this when he shaves his head, and grows a beard, to avoid being recognized while traveling through enemy territory with Brienne.)

I suspect, though, that Laiph would leave his blond mustache in place. This would provide a subtle visual reference to Victorian fairy-tale illustrations, such as those in Andrew Lang's colored Fairy Books, which typically followed popular fashion of the day by depicting the princes in their stories with impressive mustaches. (Much the same idea shows up in the Brothers Hildebrandt's 1970s illustrations of a mustachioed Aragorn for The Lord of the Rings.)

Formidable mustaches are likewise stereotypically worn by ancient Germanic warriors, such as the Franks and Gauls (including the famous fair-haired Astérix of French comic book fame).

Of course, Laiph's blond mustache, combined with the scars he receives--a three-armed triskelion branded on his forehead, and a slash on one cheek--would also make him look like a stereotypical Nazi officer, with blond hair, a mustache, a dueling scar, and prominent swastika imagery. This is naturally a villainous image, used in deliberate contrast to Laiph's status as a hero.

There may additionally be one other idea at work here: a desire on GL's part to resurrect the idea of a mustachioed hero that nearly found expression in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the famously mustached Tom Selleck was initially cast as Indiana Jones. After all, in the 1920s and 1930s, quite a lot of cinematic leading men--including megastar Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., of Thief of Bagdad fame--invariably sported mustaches in their outings on the silver screen.

It may be notable in this regard that in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, young Lancel Lannister, who greatly resembles his cousin Jaime, sports a mustache.

Postscript: I may have been right after all when I initially proposed that Laiph would sire seven daughters, instead of eight, with Elora bearing him three girls rather than four (plus one son fathered by the late Shahrayar). In Stardust, as I've already mentioned, the dying Lord of Stormhold has seven sons and one daughter.

And in Harry Potter, the same pattern shows up with Voldemort's Horcruxes: he planned to divide his soul into seven pieces, with six of them contained in magical vessels, and the seventh remaining in his body. However, he accidentally created seven Horcruxes, resulting in an eight-way split. The unplanned seventh vessel, naturally, is a crucial plot point in the final book.

 

After Dark Elora's defeat in the finale of the second Willow, Elora would use the Crystal Crown to heal her friends' grievous wounds: she'd restore Shahrazad to human form, and heal Laiph's groin injury. Then, most likely, her attention would turn to her own injuries: namely, her missing hair. So Elora would try to use the Crown to regrow her hair, which had been sacrificed as part of the dark-magic ritual.

But, just as Dark Elora's evil red eyes matched her red hair, so Elora would undoubtedly find that her new hair grew in... blue, like her blue sapphire eyes. (As Strong Bad says, ya gotta have blue hair.)

In Stardust, as a young boy Tristran Thorn owns a cat from Faerie which has blue fur, the only one of its litter of three (!) kittens to have this unusual color. And in the books of A Song of Ice and Fire, the roguish mercenary captain Daario Naharis dyes his hair and beard bright blue, matching the color of his eyes. (Notably, though, Daario's mustache is colored gold instead--another sign, perhaps, that Laiph would have ended up with a mustache.)

In the final scenes, it would seem likely that, of Laiph's three daughters by Elora, each girl would have a different hair color: one red, one blonde, and one blue. Laiph's four darker-skinned daughters from Shahrazad, meanwhile, would be split evenly, two girls having white hair and two with black tresses. And Elora's son sired by the late Shahrayar would most likely have his father's black hair.

 

While Laiph would most likely start out the film with long, flowing blond hair, his locks would probably be shorn much more closely at some point in the film. His opponent would, naturally, use a cursed blade, so as to prevent it from ever growing back as long as it was before. (Madmartigan, too, would've had his long hair permanently cropped in the first Willow film as originally outlined.)

This injury probably occurred during Laiph's final duel with Valerius. While still in human form, Valerius would wound Laiph twice--once on the cheek and once by cropping his hair. Then, after his initial defeat and subsequent transformation into a werewolf, Valerius would bite off three of Laiph's fingers. This is the point at which the talking dog (and ex-prince) would come in and save the day.

(Notable here is the fact that the werewolf apparently bites Laiph--suggesting that he too would, more likely than not, become a werewolf, albeit a heroic one. Is this the genesis of Remus Lupin?)

Additionally, when Valerius arrived at the Sultan's palace to seize Elora, it's probable that Laiph and Shahrazad would both physically resist his efforts to take her away. In the scuffle, Laiph would get a broken nose, and Shahrazad would lose a tooth.

This brings the total number of Laiph's wounds to nine, exactly the same as the count sustained by Madmartigan in the early version of the first Willow film. On the other hand, I miscounted Sorsha's injuries. Her total actually adds up to 14--the number of the Stations of the Cross in Catholic iconography--or twice times seven, the count sustained apiece by Elora and Shahrazad in this projected sequel.

Laiph's traumatic loss of his golden hair derives, in part, from the ancient superstition among the Merovingian kings of France that their royal power lay in their long hair. The best way to dethrone a Merovingian monarch, therefore, was to tonsure him, and several claimants to the throne did this in order to seize power themselves. (Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, cut their hair regularly as a sign of fealty to their king.) The most famous instance of coup-by-haircut was perpetrated by none other than Charlemagne, who used this means to rid himself of a son who plotted against him.

The same idea shows up in A Song of Ice and Fire, where a Dothraki warrior's prowess is measured by the length of his hair (i.e., the time between forcible haircuts). Khal Drogo's extremely long hair proclaims him to be his tribe's greatest warrior, an undefeated champion. (Drogo, too, has a mustache, I should perhaps note.)

Laiph's short blond hair in the film's final scenes would further his resemblance to a Prussian army officer, for whom short hair was the de rigueur style. But given the Merovingian connection, it also is one more symbol used to advance the motif of the maimed Fisher King from the legend of the Holy Grail.

 

This conjectural Willow sequel would self-evidently not be called Willow II; for one thing, Willow Ufgood would only appear in it for an extended cameo. The film therefore needs its own name. Judging by its apparent plot and themes, the most likely candidate for a title would be something on the order of Trinity.

The name Trinity has deep symbolism, both religious and atomic. In respect to the latter meaning, it's worth remembering the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was inspired, on seeing that first-ever nuclear explosion, to quote the Hindu scripture known as the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." The line in question is spoken by the normally benevolent god Vishnu. As an epigraph for the film, the quotation well fits the explicit duality of Elora Danan's character.

 

In the opening of Robert E. Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon, the dark sorcery of the evil wizard Xaltotun paralyzes King Conan in his tent, just as he is about to lead his kingdom's troops into battle against an invasion by a neighbor country (with a brash new king, crowned after Xaltotun killed the old one). With Conan effectively out of action, his army is forced to carry on without him. Its substitute leader, dressed in Conan's armor, pursues the apparently retreating enemy into a narrow rocky pass--where Xaltotun uses his magic to bring down the cliffs upon the heads of Conan's men.

Something similar would very probably happen in the opening battle scene of this second Willow film--only updated to reflect the influence of the likely title. Madmartigan and Sorsha would be petrified by evil magic just as they prepared to lead their army into battle, to repel an invasion by the newly crowned Sultan of the southern lands. Their troops would charge into battle without them. But their assault would be foiled, most likely by one of the Sultan's favorite clockwork devices, this one imbued with Dark Elora's sorcerous power. An atomic weapon, detonated in a terrible explosion unlike anything ever before seen, which would annihilate the vanguard of Madmartigan's army.

All would not be lost; the surviving royal troops in the rear would retreat, and later join up with the additional forces of Galladoornian nobles who remained loyal to Madmartigan. (Such characters are seen in The Hour of the Dragon in the persons of Pallantides, Prospero, and Count Trocero.) It would be this force that Madmartigan and Sorsha led against the armies of Valerius and Dark Elora during the finale, while the film's principal heroes raced to save Elora Danan from her evil counterpart.

The use of a nuclear device in a fantasy battle recalls Saruman's use of a "blasting fire" (i.e., a gunpowder explosive of some sort) in the battle at Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings. It also harks back to the 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars, in which the Empire used nuclear bombs in its initial assault on the peaceful planet of Aquilae.

Also... I wonder if this might explain GL's evident keenness to squeeze a nuclear bomb test into the fourth Indiana Jones movie (it's a plot point that shows up in every known script, as far back as the Saucer Men from Mars days).

 

In the climactic battle of Frank Herbert's Dune, Paul Atreides uses his family cache of "atomics" in order to breach the rocky Shield Wall surrounding the capital of Arrakis, allowing his Fremen warriors to ride in on sandworms and surprise the Emperor's massed troops. When the Emperor protests that Imperial law prohibits the use of atomic weapons in war, Paul coldly replies that he merely "used atomics against a natural feature of the desert," and thus technically did not violate Imperial norms.

Given the element in The Hour of the Dragon of the falling rock walls being used to trap Conan's army, and the similar use of "blasting fire" to breach the wall at Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings, it's probably safe to say that this was more or less the use to which the atomic weapon would be put here. By blowing a hole in the rock walls, it would allow a reserve army to come out and surprise the soldiers of King Madmartigan.

Much later, in the scene when Laiph arrived at the Sultan's palace, the Sultan would probably direct Shahrazad to offer him a cup of wine to refresh himself. Unbeknownst to Laiph, however, the Sultan would tell Shahrazad to put poison in the cup. Shahrazad would balk at poisoning an unsuspecting stranger, however--and she already loathed her father. So on arrival, Laiph would take the cup from her, and drink it, without apparent ill effect. The Sultan, however, watching him and sipping from his own wine goblet, would suddenly collapse in agony and fall down dead. Shahrazad chose to poison her own father rather than kill an innocent man.

Enraged by this act, the Sultan's sons would open a trap door, flinging both Laiph and Shahrazad into the pit of the Hydra. At this point, Shahrayar, seeing his brothers effectively sending his twin sister to die, would take up arms against his siblings. One of them would join his side in the affray, but would be killed himself--and in the end Shahrayar would be the last man standing.

The motif of a woman offering a poisoned cup to an arriving hero comes from the legend of Sigurd in Norse mythology. There, encouraged by her father, King Gjuki, and her brother Gunnar, the princess Gudrun greets Sigurd with a cup of wine when he arrives as a guest in their hall. The cup in question contains a love potion, which causes Sigurd to forget about his true love, the Valkyrie Brynhild. (Actually, Shahrayar and Shahrazad are pretty good analogues of Gunnar and Gudrun overall.)

On the other hand, the detail of the King drinking from the poisoned cup intended for the hero derives from the end of Hamlet. During Hamlet's duel with Laertes, Claudius intends to give him a chalice of poisoned wine if he should survive the duel. However, Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, who does not know of the plot, drinks out of the cup to toast her son's health, and immediately drops dead. Ultimately, the dying Hamlet (who has suffered a wound from Laertes' poison-coated sword) uses the poisoned chalice to kill Claudius, forcing the foul wine down his throat.

In neither source, though, are there two chalices, of which only one is poisoned. That last idea probably comes from the 1955 film The Court Jester. In that movie, hero Hubert Hawkins is about to compete in a joust. Tradition calls for the champions to drink a toast before battle, but the evil vizier has poisoned the cup intended for Hawkins. Fortunately, however, neither Hawkins nor his opponent can remember just which cup has the poison, so the toast is called off.

(In Stardust, the witch of the Lilim tries to use a poisoned drink to kill Tristran Thorn, but he is saved when a unicorn detects the poison. And of course, in A Song of Ice and Fire, a king being fatally poisoned at his own wedding feast is a crucial plot point.)

As for Laiph becoming a werewolf in the end.... in Harry Potter, werewolf Remus Lupin ends up marrying Nymphadora Tonks, who has striking purple hair. Their son's hair, though (why am I not surprised?), is blue.

 

A couple new thoughts on Laiph's final battle with Valerius in the apparent second Willow:

Laiph and Valerius would first clash as man to man, using swords. As I earlier noted, Valerius would slash Laiph's cheek and cut off his long hair with his cursed sword, but Laiph would get the better of him. But then, once transformed into a werewolf, Valerius would regain the edge. With a swipe of his forearm, he would break Laiph's sword, and, with his mighty jaws, bite off the last three fingers of Laiph's right hand. Lying on the ground, facing death, literally soiling himself in fear, Laiph would be saved by the timely intervention of the talking dog.

As the dog threw itself upon wolf-Valerius, it would tell Laiph that only silver could break the werewolf's magical power. Laiph would then use the magic silver rope--given to him by Willow Ufgood and the Archmages, much earlier in the film--to bind Valerius, while the hound tore into the wolf and kept him at bay. With Valerius unable to overcome the binding power of silver, Laiph would use his sword to behead the werewolf. The talking hound, too, would then die as a result of its wounds.

The motif of a wolf biting off a man's hand, even as that wolf itself is bound and restrained, is a deliberate allusion to the story of the wolf Fenrir in Norse mythology. In the Norse legend, the Gods of Asgard knew that the wolf Fenrir would one day kill them all, unless he were safely bound. But Fenrir would only submit to be bound if one of the Gods dared to put his right hand in the wolf's mouth. The god of war, Tyr, volunteered to do this. Tyr put his hand in Fenrir's maw, and the Gods bound the wolf. But once they had bound him, they refused to let him free, and in his anger Fenrir bit off Tyr's right hand.

Since Laiph was apparently the one to kill Valerius, this means that he would likely not become a werewolf after all: traditionally, the only way for an infected werewolf to undo his curse is personally to kill the wolf who infected him. Like Bill Weasley in Harry Potter, though, Laiph would likely come away from his werewolf encounter with a new-found taste for eating raw meat. (Plus, in A Song of Ice and Fire, there's that whole Dothraki ritual of eating raw horse hearts....)

Laiph's loss of his sword, and subsequent use of Valerius's cursed blade to dispatch its owner, is another small reference to the final duel in Hamlet. Hamlet's opponent in the fight, Laertes, uses a poisoned blade, with which he gives Hamlet a seemingly trivial wound that is in fact deadly. But in the course of the duel, Hamlet uses his expertise with a sword to trade blades with Laertes, and inflicts on him a similarly fatal slash with his own poisoned weapon.

One other Hamlet reference presumably would exist, in how the current Sultan (the one invading Galladoorn at the start of his story) came to the throne: by poisoning the previous Sultan, his childless older brother.

Laiph and Elora, during their visit to the Underworld, would learn about this from the ghost of the deceased Sultan himself. Elora, in turn, would later tell Shahrazad, who likely loved her departed doting uncle much more than her cruel biological father. The revelation would in turn be a major factor in Shahrazad's decision to poison her own father.

In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet's uncle Claudius poisons his father and usurps the throne. Hamlet's quest for vengeance begins when he is visited by his father's ghost, who tells him about the murder by poison.

Claudius's ascent to the throne in Hamlet is awkward in terms of traditional hereditary monarchy: why does Hamlet himself not inherit? The real answer is that the story of Hamlet/Amleth dates from the Dark Ages, and the days of elective kingship.

GL's solution to the problem, by contrast, was evidently to make his Hamlet characters (Shahrazad and Shahrayar) into the children of the Claudius analogue, as opposed to the offspring of Hamlet Senior.

This goes hand-in-hand with the underlying motifs of fatherhood in the SW saga. As Lucas himself has acknowledged, both Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi are fathers of a sort to Luke Skywalker. Vader is Luke's biological father, but Ben Kenobi is a foster father and mentor figure. When Vader strikes down Obi-Wan, Luke burns with the desire to exact vengeance on him. While Luke ultimately abandons his quest for revenge, he does in the end bring about his own father's death.

 

In the first Willow film, Sorsha's character arc takes her from evil to good. By contrast, Elora's journey in the apparent sequel (Trinity?) would involve acknowledging her own sundered dark side. So, while the color of Sorsha's wardrobe over the first film would shift from ominous red in the beginning, to more kindly shades of blue and white by the end, Elora's outfits would likely undergo the reverse progression: from blue to red.

In both cases, though, the female character undergoes a sexual awakening of sorts. (It's often said that that's what all fairy tales are about, when you get down to it.) This would presumably involve a different kind of wardrobe shift, from completely concealing outfits all the way into partial nudity--along the lines of what GL first proposed for Leia Aquilae in the 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars. So Sorsha would go from wearing head-to-toe black armor, to dressing like Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments.

For the second film, Elora would probably start out wearing a traditional princess dress, fabulous in style and blue in color. Like Princess Leia's outfit in SW 1977, It would be conservatively cut, with long sleeves and floor-length skirts. This would get progressively more disheveled over the course of the movie. During the magical ritual in the finale, Elora would end up stripped entirely naked (like the heroine Valeria at the end of Robert E. Howard's Conan story Red Nails).

In the film's final scenes, where Elora would appear as a queen in Shahrazad's kingdom, she would probably wear something quite revealing, taking after the Elvish fashions of her mother. So she'd wear only the Crystal Crown, a luxurious red cape over her shoulders, and a metallic loincloth with front and rear panels of golden scales. (This latter detail goes back to early costume designs for Slave Leia in ROTJ.) As well, Elora would have one single golden breast-shield, affixed in place over her damaged breast.

In other words, Elora would start the film with a blue dress and red hair, and end it wearing a red cape, contrasting with her blue hair. Not bad color-contrast there--redheads really shouldn't wear red, after all.

Laiph, meanwhile, would start out in the silver armor and winged helmet that appears to have typified the famed soldiers of Land's End, his home city. (This costume was likely based on the white armor of the elite Swan Knights of Dol Amroth in The Lord of the Rings.) But in the finale, as Lord Protector of Shahrazad's kingdom, he would probably wear a black military uniform of some sort. This light-to-dark transition echoes Luke Skywalker's costume evolution over the SW OT.

Not only does this transition to a black outfit further Laiph's eventual physical resemblance to a stereotypical Nazi villain (in sharp contrast to his heroic demeanor), it also boosts his connection to Hamlet, who invariably wears black, as specified in the text of Shakespeare's play.

Shahrazad (who is, after all, based on the fantasy princesses of the Arabian Nights) would probably start out wearing a green dress, a color sacred in Islamic tradition. In the finale, though, she'd be seen wearing a blue dress instead. This color transition echoes the way that Elora's green eyes are burned out and replaced with jeweled blue ones.

Shahrazad's green dress probably owes a debt to the Lady of the Green Kirtle, the villain in CS Lewis's Narnia book The Silver Chair. The Lady, a beautiful and evil enchantress, has kidnapped Prince Rilian of Narnia, and brainwashed him into becoming her pliant lover. Notably, Rilian wears mourning black out of respect for his deceased mother, and Lewis's narrator explicitly compares his appearance to Hamlet.

Additionally, the costumes Elora and Shahrazad would wear in the final scenes owe a pretty major debt to Arthur Rackham's early 20th century illustrations for Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.



In Wagner's opera, as in the original Norse legend, Siegfried and Brunnhilde are lovers who plight their troth, but are separated by the machinations of the Burgundian princess Gudrun and her brother Gunnar.

Brunnhilde, as depicted by Rackham in her Valkyrie armor, wears a helmet, a red cape, golden scale armor, and circular breast shields.

Wagner's story, drawing on the Norse legends, has Siegfried find Brunnhilde lying in a magical sleep atop a mountain, surrounded by a ring of fire. Not recognizing this figure encased in armor, Siegfried thinks it is a man, and uses his sword to slit open "his" mail-coat. This fails to wake the sleeper, but now Siegfried realizes she is actually a woman, so he proceeds to wake her with a kiss.

Notably, Rackham's illustrated rendition of this moment shows Brunnhilde with one breast bare--essentially what Elora too would have, given her single breast shield.



Here, Siegfried meets Gudrun for the first time, after parting from his beloved Brunnhilde and going off to seek adventure. Gudrun welcomes Siegfried to her brother's hall with a cup of wine--a cup laced with a sinister love potion, which erases all memory of Brunnhilde in Siegfried's mind when he drinks it. As a result Siegfried ends up married to Gudrun, and Brunnhilde is wedded to Gudrun's brother Gunnar: a tragic situation that culminates in quite a lot of bloodshed.

Note Gudrun's blue dress as drawn by Rackham, something essentially along the lines of what Shahrazad would wear in the finale of Trinity.

In Rackham's illustrations, Siegfried changes his facial hair over the course of the story: he goes from a beardless youth in the third opera, Siegfried, to a bearded young man in the finale, Gotterdammerung. Laiph, too, would probably change his style of facial hair, only in the opposite direction, by shaving his beard. (Amusingly, Rackham's drawings also suggest that Siegfried, who dresses in bear skins as a boy, later "borrows" Brunnhilde's armor.)

By transplanting the character of Gudrun from the story of Siegfried to the fairy-tale setting of the Arabian Nights, GL evidently came up with a novel resolution to this famous, tragic love story of Norse legend: just let the hero marry both women. Not the sort of thing which would please Western moral guardians.

On the other hand, somebody like Arthur C. Clarke, for instance, clearly wouldn't have had a problem with it: the protagonist in his 1973 SF novel Rendezvous with Rama is Bill Norton, a spaceship captain with two wives, each on a different planet. Clarke makes clear that everyone in the relationship is quite okay with the arrangement; Norton's two families remain separate mainly because of the different gravities of Mars and Earth, which makes interplanetary travel very difficult for non-professionals.

Interestingly, Clarke's hero, Commander Norton, also suffers from fertility issues. The astronauts in Rama have all been sterilized, to avoid contamination of their sperm and eggs by cosmic radiation. So whenever Norton is given permission by the government--which regulates fertility--to have a child, one of his wives is artificially inseminated with frozen sperm he'd donated to a storage bank before entering space.

 

A major source for the plot of this apparent Willow sequel was Robert E. Howard's Conan story A Witch Shall Be Born. In that story, the evil witch Salome replaces her twin sister, the good Queen Taramis, on the throne of the realm of Khauran.

At one point Howard gives a detailed description of Salome's attire as Queen:

Note in particular the scarlet cloak and jeweled breast-plates--details consistent with Elora's final on-screen outfit, as I described it above. And, if Elora's metallic loincloth was modeled on the loose meshes of woven coins used in typical belly-dancer outfits, that too would live up to Howard's description of Salome's indecently transparent attire.

Salome is distinguished from her good sister Taramis by a vivid red crescent mark between her breasts. Of course, in Trinity, it would be the "good" Elora who ended up bearing that mark on her forehead, and so she, not her sundered dark half, would be the one to dress like the evil Salome in the Conan story.

Lucas has always enjoyed dressing his heroes up in the guise of villains. For instance, in the 1974 rough draft of The Star Wars, he based Leia Aquilae's clothing damage in the third act on the attire of the False Maria/Whore of Babylon in Metropolis.

In the opening of Howard's tale, Salome's first act as the Queen of Khauran signals her depravity: she lets her captain of mercenaries, Constantius, rape Taramis. Poor Elora would suffer a similar fate. (For that matter, so did Leia Aquilae, implicitly and off-screen, in the 1974 SW rough draft--but in the case of Trinity, much less would be left unsaid, given Elora's resulting pregnancy.)

In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, Tristran Thorn's original clothes are severely damaged during his escape from a deadly serewood. He procures replacements in gaudy colors: "crimson and canary" cloth. In fact, Charles Vess' accompanying illustrations indicate that Tristran's shirt is red, and his pants are yellow--the same general colors, in both hue and arrangement, of Elora's apparent queenly wardrobe in Trinity.

Also: when Valerius departed the Sultan's palace with Elora as his captive, they would've in all likelihood teleported away instantaneously, via magic, in a burst of green fire. This is a shout-out to Maleficent's dramatic entrance and exit in the opening of Disney's 1959 Sleeping Beauty.

Teleportation powered by fire appears both in Harry Potter (with Floo powder) and Stardust (with the Babylon candle). In Harry Potter the Floo fires are green, just like Maleficent's flames in the Disney film, while in Stardust the Babylon candle's flame ranges from yellow to blue.... in between which, of course, is green.

 

Continuing the apparent theme of unusually-colored body parts:

I mentioned earlier that Shahrazad would be blinded in one eye by the Basilisk's venom. To repay Shahrazad for her earlier gift of sapphire eyes, Elora would no doubt try to heal this wound later, with the Crystal Crown. She would restore Shahrazad's sight--but, while Shahrazad's undamaged eye was dark in color, her newly healed eye would most likely have a purple iris.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the nearly-albino Targaryen dynasty is marked by its purple eyes, as well as white hair (another trait Shahrazad would acquire). And in Stardust, Tristran Thorn's mother, Lady Una of Stormhold, has black hair, olive skin, and violet eyes.

---

By the time of the third-revision script of Willow, it's clear that Lucas had made the decision to put Trinity on the shelf, and to rewrite Willow itself as a far more family-friendly affair in the vein of SW. However, he apparently wanted to salvage a few of the visuals from the abandoned second film.

For one thing, the final version of Sorsha, now a human instead of a half-Elf, inherited the red hair originally slated for teenage Elora Danan. Meanwhile, Madmartigan's royal armor--initially envisioned as gold, as it is in the final film--became for a time silver in color instead, like Laiph's armor.

Additionally, the magical passage to Tir Asleen, originally made by a sea voyage, was transformed into an underground tunnel lit by infernal rivers of lava, with its earthly end-point located directly beneath Bavmorda's fortress. This derives from the mouth of the very Hadean Underworld, located directly beneath the Archmages' castle, in the unmade Trinity.

By the time of the shooting script, this particular set-piece had changed once again: now Tir Asleen was an entirely Earthly castle, barricaded in a maze of stony valleys whose inner end was blocked by a wall of thorns (another homage to Disney's Sleeping Beauty). In the finished cut of the movie, this whole subplot was deleted.

 

During their visit to the Three Witches early in Trinity, Laiph and Elora would be given a meal by the three old crones. Though repulsed by it, the heroes would dutifully eat it. In fact, the meat in question would be the heart of a dragon--which, when consumed, lets one understand the speech of birds.

Later, when Laiph and Elora ventured into the Underworld beneath the Archmages' castle, they would have to face some sort of guardian beast at its outer gate. Not exactly like the mythological Cerberus--that would be too obvious--but something similar, perhaps a three-headed saber-toothed tiger instead of a dog. (A saber-toothed cat guards a sacred shrine in Ray Harryhausen's film Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.)

Like Orpheus with his lyre, the heroes would have to use music to subdue the beast enough to pass by it. Thinking quickly, Elora would call a bird to her, and get it to sing long enough to put the beast to sleep.

In the ending scenes, when Shahrazad used a mechanical bird to speak after having her throat slit, the bird would actually speak in tinny-sounding bird-song. Having eaten a dragon's heart, Laiph and Elora would be able to understand and translate her words for others. The effect would essentially be like the interactions of Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, or Han Solo and Chewbacca, in the SW movies.

This subplot is another idea derived from the Norse story of Sigurd (Siegfried). Sigurd slew the dragon Fafnir at the behest of Fafnir's brother, the dwarf Regin. Afterward, Regin asked Sigurd to cut out Fafnir's heart and cook it on a spit, so he could consume it. As Sigurd cooked the meat, he burned his thumb on the dragon's bloody heart, and licked his wound. As soon as he ingested the dragon's blood, he could understand the speech of the birds in the trees above. They spoke of Regin's intent to kill him--so Sigurd preempted his plan, by killing Regin first.

(Among the various safeguards of the Philosopher's Stone in the first Harry Potter book, the first is Fluffy: essentially a straight-up version of Cerberus. Later on, there is a chamber with a locked door, and a large flock of birds apparently flying overhead. In fact, the birds are really winged metal keys, and one of them unlocks the door.)

Another correction: Instead of a griffin, the flying beast that Elora and Laiph rode back from the Mages' island would likely be some sort of winged unicorn. This makes a certain amount of sense--at this point in the story, both of them are still virgins.

It's most likely that Valerius would not be the one to shoot it down after all. Most likely, Shahrazad, out hunting on the shore, would spy the beast; not seeing its riders, she would shoot it down with her bow and arrows (a hint at the trio's eventual romantic linkage). She would therefore be the one to help Laiph and Elora back to shore. The dead unicorn would later be the centerpiece of the feast in the Sultan's palace.

(In Stardust, Tristran and Yvaine encounter a unicorn and ride it for a while. The unicorn is killed by the witch of the Lilim, from whom Tristran saves Yvaine, incurring a serious injury as he does--an act of heroism which cements the pair's budding relationship.)

With a winged unicorn present so early in the film, it's not likely that Laiph would ride a winged horse in the finale. Instead, he would most probably take a winged hippogriff from the Sultan's stables, and ride it to Galladoorn castle to save Elora. Hippogriffs, after all, don't care about the virginity of their riders.

 

When initially summoned out of the Void, Dark Elora would almost certainly appear like an unearthly being, scarcely recognizable as the evil half of the Princess of Galladoorn. Transparent and ghostly, bald and featureless, she'd have dead-white skin and the anatomy of a Barbie doll. Possibly her bones would even show intermittently through her transparent flesh. Only her eyes--terrifyingly red in color--would belie this pallid, lifeless appearance.

But during the climactic magical ritual, her appearance would change. By sacrificing Elora's hair, Dark Elora would take on her other half's original face; by taking a nipple, her sexless body would become that of a real woman. Though still slightly transparent, Dark Elora would now plainly be identical to Elora as she looked in the story's beginning. When she used her black magic to assail Laiph and Shahrazad, though, Dark Elora's green eyes would revert to their original red hue.

The monstrous initial appearance of Dark Elora evidently comes from the original novel version of Metropolis, written by the film's screenwriter Thea von Harbou (who was Fritz Lang's wife at the time he directed the movie). In Lang's film, the Robot Maria, whose creator Rotwang molds it into the image of the virtuous heroine, is initially presented as an automaton: the obvious ancestor of C-3PO. But in Harbou's novel, the machine-being is an eerie creature, with transparent dead-white skin, visible crystalline bones, a featureless bald head, and terrifying inhuman eyes.

Of course, this description also puts one in mind of Lord Voldemort's appearance--white-skinned and hairless with red eyes--once he is given a new body via a magical ritual, midway through the Harry Potter series.

 

In the ending scenes of Trinity, Shahrazad's speaking clockwork bird would be controlled by a cord, which plugged into a metal socket on her throat. Not dissimilar to the idea behind modern electrolarynx devices. Still, this case is rather reminiscent of the way Vincent Price's character speaks, by plugging the cord of an old-fashioned gramophone into a plug socket on his throat, in the 1971 horror film The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

(In Stardust, the dark-haired, olive-skinned Lady Una is enslaved by a witch, and trapped most of the time in the form of a bird. Said witch prevents Una from running away, in both human and bird form, by keeping her securely attached to a silver chain.)

Also: it may be that the Three Witches would not have been depicted as three old crones, as they appear in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Instead, in keeping with the motifs of duality that permeate this story, they may have appeared as the traditional representations of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, or the Norns of Norse legend: that is, Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

(Neil Gaiman deliberately avoided using this trope in Stardust, perhaps because he had already used a version of the idea himself, in the Sandman comic series.)

 

I was probably right in suggesting earlier that Shahrazad's dress would be partially torn off by the Hydra's claws, leaving her topless and wearing only a long skirt. Later, when she was petrified by the Basilisk, her bare-breasted statue form would incorporate an allusion to the famous statue of the Venus de Milo. (In fact, Leia Aquilae's similar state of undress in the 1974 rough draft of SW was meant on one level to invoke Eugene Delacroix's famed French Revolutionary painting Liberty Leading the People.)

(Also, there's an art-history joke here: the Venus de Milo as it survives today has no arms. GL evidently thought it would be fun for the complete version of the Venus statue to be holding a sword, as statue-Shahrazad does to fight the Basilisk.)

In the final scenes of Trinity, Shahrazad's blue outfit would also likely be merely a skirt, so she would continue to be naked to the waist. This may be another allusion of sorts to a Robert E. Howard Conan story: Queen of the Black Coast, in which Conan falls head over heels in love with the raven-haired Semitic pirate queen Belit. The first time Conan sees her, Howard tells us that Belit's "only garment" is "a broad silken girdle," so she's not wearing anything above waist level--something you won't find in the Marvel Comics adaptation of the story.

Plus, just as Sorsha's outfit in the finale of Willow as first written was evidently a riff on Yul Brynner's wardrobe in The Ten Commandments, Shahrazad's final costume in the sequel might have homaged Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in the 1924 Thief of Bagdad. Fairbanks, a star known for his daring physical feats, spends most of that movie clad only in a pair of baggy Arabian pants.

(Shahrazad's final outfit would still be slightly less risqué than Elora's. The regrown hair on Elora's head would be blue, but if her wardrobe was accurate to Robert E. Howard's description of Salome in A Witch Shall Be Born, her red pubic hair would be visible through the linked metal discs of her loincloth.)

Meanwhile, I ought to make a few amendments to Laiph's catalogue of wounds. First of all, Laiph would most likely not have shaved his beard for a disguise: he would keep his beard and long hair intact. Long hair and a beard would be important symbols of martial prowess to the men of Land's End, just as they were to the Frankish Merovingians--or to the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire.

When Laiph was captured by Valerius and his men, they would permanently shave off his hair and beard with a cursed blade, in order to symbolically unman him. They would then sexually abuse him--but would not, though, bother to flog him. Afterward, when Laiph made his escape, he would quite possibly be clad only in his winged helmet, boots, and a stolen cloak--thus evoking the image of the Greek god Hermes, who traditionally went naked save for a winged helmet, winged sandals, and a long cape.

(To complete the trinity of classical allusions, Elora in the finale might try to cover her nakedness in front of her friends, striking a pose that referenced Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus. In that painting, interestingly, a female figure is about to cover the newborn Venus with a red cloak.)

During Laiph's one-on-one duel with Valerius, Laiph would only sustain a slash on his cheek before he won the sword fight. Once in werewolf form, though, Valerius would badly claw Laiph's back, before proceeding to bite off the last three fingers of his right hand.

Finally, as part of her use of the Crystal Crown to heal her friends' injuries, Elora would restore Laiph's hair and beard. Still, they would not grow as long as they had once been. Laiph would now have short hair, and a mustache instead of a full beard--the hairstyle of a Prussian military officer.

 

I suggested quite a while ago that the evident inspiration for the armor of Galladoorn's soldiers would be the bronze muscle armor of Roman army officers. This would mean that Valerius, a treacherous noble of Galladoorn, would be seen wearing such a set of armor. As a result, he would physically embody the well-known Roman statue of Emperor Hadrian dressed as the Capitoline Mars: the god of war, held in high esteem in Rome's martial society.

Is there a riff on Gustav Holst's The Planets in here somewhere? In the film's climax, we have a villain dressed as Mars, "the Bringer of War," two Venuses, "the Bringer of Peace," and a heroic Mercury, "the Winged Messenger," flying in to rescue the heroine.

For the ending of Trinity, Elora and Shahrazad would end up dressed in outfits evoking Richard Wagner's Brunnhilde and Gudrun. Laiph, on the other hand, would begin the story looking like the operatic Siegfried--dressed in silver armor with a winged helmet, and with long blond hair and beard. By the end, though, he would be clad in a black uniform, with short hair and a mustache, a dueling scar on his cheek, and a triskelion branded on his forehead: a fantasy-world version of the stereotypical cinematic Nazi. Without question, this is an allusion to the way Hitler's Nazis so eagerly latched on to the Wagnerian image of the world-redeeming blond hero.

(There may also be a small poke at Lucas's old friend John Milius, a noted political conservative, whose 1982 film Conan the Barbarian was replete with Wagnerian allusions.)

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Incidentally, the three animal forms which Fin Raziel takes in Willow before regaining her true form are actually reflections of the three principal heroines of the original Willow duology.

Raziel's third form, a goat, symbolizes Sorsha, whose original golden (pubic) hair was, quite literally, the legendary Golden Fleece. And her second form, a bird, represents Shahrazad, who used a clockwork bird to replace her lost voice in Trinity.

Fin Raziel's initial animal form, a mouse, must therefore in some way stand for Elora Danan herself.

Elora's initial contact with Willow Ufgood occurs because, as with the abandoned infant Moses in the Old Testament, the river sends her floating raft to Willow's farm. So it's probable that, in the original outline for Willow, the diminutive mouse-eared Brownies, being water sprites, ensured that Elora arrived safely on the doorstep of a dependable guardian, and thus went on to fulfill her destiny.

In the final version of Willow, all this symbolism was ruined: the Brownies lost their connection with water; the Golden Fleece subplot was axed for not being family-friendly; and the plan for the sequel movie with Shahrazad was abandoned, quite possibly because resolving the film's central love triangle with a menage a trois wouldn't play well in Peoria.

 

Given Laiph's evident lack of clothing in the finale of Trinity, Dark Elora's groin attack would probably turn into a full-on castration: he'd lose his "meat and two veg" in one swoop. This also further expands the reference to Botticelli's Birth of Venus: after all, Aphrodite was born from the sea when Zeus castrated his own father, the Titan Cronus, and threw his severed member into the ocean.

Elora would use the Crystal Crown to regrow Laiph's lost bits. However, it's likely that, as with her other efforts at healing, this one too would go slightly amiss. So, while Laiph had previously been quite well endowed, his regrown organ would be unusually small. Not that it'd stop him from fathering seven daughters, one at a time--though never any sons.

This particular detail finds an echo in another book series that evidently drew on Trinity: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. One of the protagonists, the vagabond Jack Shaftoe, had his reproductive organs permanently maimed--leaving him unable to have normal intercourse--as a result of a syphilis treatment gone awry. (Meanwhile, another major protagonist in that series, scientist Daniel Waterhouse, develops kidney stones which leave him unable to control his bladder.)

In addition, Laiph's shaven face, resulting from his capture by Valerius, would serve to increase his resemblance in the climax to the Greek god Hermes, who is invariably depicted as a beardless youth.

Postscript: It's likely that Elora's impregnation by Shahrayar would have actually resulted in her giving birth to two sons, twin boys. Thus she'd have "an heir and a spare," and there'd be a total of nine children (five being Elora's, and four Shahrazad's) in the heroes' family. This detail recalls the characters of Cor and Corin, the twin sons of King Lune of Archenland, in CS Lewis's Narnia book The Horse and His Boy.

(In the epilogue of the last Harry Potter book, Harry and Ginny have three children: the older two are both boys, and the youngest is a girl.)

 

Another update on Trinity: Shahrazad would probably have been traveling on a ship when she shot down Laiph and Elora's unicorn, and subsequently pulled the two from the water. She would still have been out hunting, though, for some sort of marine delicacy to bring home. Very likely, she'd hoped for a giant squid, a favorite prey of Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Jules Verne's sequel novel, The Mysterious Island, established that Nemo is originally from India.)

Like Nemo (whose very name is Latin for "Nobody"), Shahrazad would have been traveling incognito: she'd be in disguise as a fierce, bare-breasted, renegade Pirate Queen. This is the origin of the reference to Belit from Robert E. Howard's Queen of the Black Coast.

As Shahrazad and all her crew would be dressed like common sailors, with ragged clothes and bare feet, she would not be able to replace Elora's lost footwear--so Elora would end up with freezing and bloody feet, once she and Laiph reached the snowy mountains of Brunhild's castle. By way of apology, Shahrazad would give the duo her hunting dog when she let them off onto the eastern shore.

Shahrazad's ship also derives in part from Prince Caspian's vessel in CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's Caspian who pulls Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace out of the Narnian sea in the beginning of the story. (Lucy loses her shoes in the ocean, but no suitable replacements are to be had on Caspian's ship with its all-male crew.)

Additionally, to avoid becoming a werewolf after being bitten by Valerius, Laiph probably would've taken the precaution of cutting off his own right hand, thus removing the contagion. In the ending scenes, he would wear a tight black glove over a clearly mechanical prosthesis, as does the evil black-clad scientist Rotwang in Metropolis. (Perhaps Albus Dumbledore should've taken this approach when his right hand fell victim to an infectious curse.)

Moreover, Laiph's injury suffered in the scuffle with Valerius in the Sultan's palace probably wouldn't have been a broken nose, but rather a nasty swollen-shut black eye. The eye would heal, but remain permanently weakened--very probably resulting in Laiph wearing a monocle in the ending scene, completing the stereotypical image of an aristocratic Nazi officer.

It may be the case, then, that Dark Elora's triskelion emblem would be magically burned, not into Laiph and Shahrazad's foreheads, but rather into one of their forearms--the location of the swastika armband on Nazi uniforms. In Shahrazad's case, this represents the very visible forearm tattoo sported by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in the 1924 Thief of Bagdad.

 

It would seem that Trinity had an additional historical connection to pirates that I hadn't yet considered.

The most famous female buccaneer in the Caribbean was Anne Bonny, who went to sea as a pirate with her lover, the ship's captain, Calico Jack Rackham. During one of their raids on merchant shipping, one of the defeated crew members who joined the pirates was Mary Read, a woman disguised as a man. Supposedly, Anne only discovered Mary's true identity when, mistaking him for a man, she invited "him" to her bed and attempted a seduction, at which point Mary revealed her true gender.

Like most pirate crews, Calico Jack's came to a sad end, as a Royal Navy vessel attacked and boarded their ship. Jack and all the male crewmates were lying drunk in the hold, so only Anne and Mary remained on deck in a vain effort to resist the English boarding party. As Calico Jack lay in a prison cell on Jamaica, sentenced to hang, Anne is said to have told him, "Had you fought like a man, you needn't be hanged like a dog."

The obviously fluctuating gender dynamics among the trio of Anne, Mary, and the relatively supine Jack have naturally led to much speculation about their sex lives. In modern times, more sensational accounts depict Anne and Mary as routinely boarding enemy ships bare-breasted, in order to distract their male opponents. (Anne, who was Irish, is almost invariably described as a redhead, despite no historical proof whatsoever.)

Another famous pirate of Caribbean legend was the very successful Dutch freebooter Laurens de Graaf. Although modern scholars have speculated that he might have been a man of color, historical accounts describe him as blond, with a prominent mustache.

De Graaf had two wives: one was a colonial Spanish woman (so likely a woman of color) named Francisca Petronila de Guzmán. The other was a hot-tempered Frenchwoman, a transported convict nicknamed Anne Dieu-le-veut. (That is, "God wills it," because she was so headstrong that challenging her was like arguing with God.) Anne is said to have introduced herself to de Graaf by threatening to shoot him, after he'd killed her previous husband in a duel.

The latter part of "Elora Danan" certainly sounds like "Anne." And since Lucas evidently liked to garble his fantasy names, in order to distance them from their real-world inspirations, "Shahrazad" was probably not that character's exact name.

So it's possible that Shahrazad's actual name might have incorporated a phonetic allusion to the sound of "Mary Read." This is also plausible on the grounds that many Indian names feature the initial consonant M (nicely ominous, as Tolkien well knew). One really famous such case is Mara, a Buddhist demon who famously attempted to lure the Buddha away from the path of Enlightenment, by offering him his attractive daughters.

So... is it possible that my "Shahrayar" and "Shahrazad" were in fact named Marayar and Marazad? That last name sounds really, really familiar...

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And if Shahrayar was really Marayar, that'd likely be a slightly tweaked phonetic reference to the Ramayana, the most famous epic poem in Hindu literature. It tells the story of the hero Rama, the seventh earthly incarnation of the god Vishnu. As a young man, Rama is unjustly forced into exile from his father's kingdom, and his devoted wife Sita joins him despite Rama ordering her to stay behind.

The most famous episode in the Ramayana begins with Sita's abduction by the evil king Ravana. Rama fights a war against Ravana for many years, before finally defeating him and rescuing Sita. But Rama and his kingdom's people fear that Sita was molested by Ravana. Rama forces her to bathe in a divine fire, which does nothing to harm her, proving that Sita is still "pure." (In one version of the story, Sita actually had a shadow twin, who was abducted by Ravana while Sita herself went safely into hiding.) Hindu legend also says that Sita eventually bears Rama two twin sons, Kusha and Lava.

All that sounds... awfully familiar. (With the significant exception of the outcome of the fire test for purity--Elora is not unharmed by Brunhild's fire, and she doesn't remain "pure" when she becomes a prisoner. So her twin sons aren't fathered by her husband.)

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In Laiph's first encounter with Marazad (shall we call her that, then?), on her pirate ship, she'd evidently be walking around bare-breasted. This is the point where Laiph first becomes attracted to her--mirroring the fact that, in the original version of Willow, Madmartigan first really falls for Sorsha when he sees her sleeping bare-chested in her tent.

During Laiph's subsequent journey with Elora, he'd keep thinking about Marazad. This is one reason why he'd avoid sleeping with Elora on the road, even though she'd very likely try to bed him in a moment of despair after being blinded.

When Laiph arrived at the Sultan's palace, Elora would be on display as a prisoner. Most likely, her dress would be in tatters after her ordeal; like Leia Aquilae in the 1974 SW rough draft, she'd be reduced to wearing nothing but a ragged skirt. Laiph would be struck by the sight of Elora, wounded and vulnerable, and it would remind him of his unaltered love for her.

This is the point at which Marazad would offer him the poisoned cup. In fact, she likely would have poisoned it, regretfully and at her father's behest, like Gudrun giving Sigurd the love potion--but Laiph, seeing Elora, would refuse the drink. (A symbolic reversal that results in a happy ending, rather than the Old Norse saga's tragic outcome.)

With Laiph and Marazad plunged into the deadly Hydra pit by the Sultan, her outraged twin brother Marayar would take up the poisoned chalice--still lying on the banquet table, where Laiph left it--and force its contents down his father's throat, just as Shakespeare's Hamlet does to Claudius.

Four of Marayar's brothers would take up arms against him on seeing this act of combined parricide and regicide--but the fifth would take his youngest brother's side, and ensure Shahrayar's victory, at the cost of his own life.

This last brother is evidently something of a Laertes figure: a formidable opponent who ultimately changes sides to defend the cause of justice. In fact, in Shakespeare's play, Laertes' primary motive for trying to kill Hamlet is that he holds Hamlet responsible for the death of his sister Ophelia.

 

Another inspiration for Marazad's character, almost certainly, was Leigh Brackett's pulp SF novel The Sword of Rhiannon. Transported back in time to an ocean-covered Mars, fair-haired Earthling tomb robber Matt Carse ends up as a slave on board the galley of Ywain, the raven-haired princess of Sark. Ywain's royal ship usually travels in disguise as a typical corsair vessel, to shield her from the depredations of Sark's enemy kingdoms.

In true pulp fashion, Carse and Ywain first declare their inevitable love by giving each other permanent facial scars. Carse, trying to escape from captivity, hits Ywain in the face with his sword-hilt, and later, in revenge, Ywain kisses him and bites his lip deeply enough to scar it over.

This motif appeared in the original draft of Willow, where Madmartigan and Sorsha are introduced by breaking each other's noses. So the idea likely also showed up in Trinity--in which case it must have become a reciprocal three-way scar party.

By shooting down Elora's winged unicorn, Marazad would cause Elora to get permanent scars on her feet, when she journeyed barefoot into the rocky, snow-covered mountains. And after being hauled on board the pirate ship, the furious Laiph would likely punch Marazad, knocking out a tooth. She'd retaliate by hitting him in the eye. It would remain swollen shut until the days after Brunhild's defeat--so, in that battle, Laiph could only use one eye as he guided the blinded Elora to destroy the giantess's Magic Mirror.

(This therefore means these two injuries were not incurred when Laiph and Marazad together resisted Valerius to defend Elora in the Sultan's palace.)

And then, in the finale, Dark Elora would leave grievous wounds on the other two, cutting Marazad's throat and castrating Laiph. "Normal" Elora could partially heal these wounds, but not completely--after all, they were really her own doing.

But to complete the pattern, then, Laiph must be responsible somehow for leaving a scar on Elora. Most likely this would happen in the Archmages' test, in the cavern beneath their island castle. Like Luke in the cave on Dagobah, Elora would be told that she should enter the Underworld cavern unarmed. But Laiph would offer her his sword, inherited from his late father Airk, and she would accept it. Elora's ineffective use of this weapon on her masked doppelganger would result in the loss of her own front teeth.

Evidently, Airk Thaughbaer's sword was a remarkably ineffective weapon, whose failure to save its owner in Willow was just the beginning. It would fail to defeat the magical Guardian in the Archmages' test; when Elora used it on Brunhild, it would fail to kill the immortal giantess; it would fail to kill the Hydra permanently, since the beast could only be slain by cauterizing its severed necks with fire; and it would fail to kill Valerius, who would ultimately break the sword and force Laiph to seize his foe's weapon.

This running motif evidently symbolized Laiph's journey toward stepping out of his late father's shadow. Laiph would truly become his own man, a capable warrior, only when he acquired a sword of his own. Like Sigurd, he would have inherited his father's sword. But like Luke Skywalker, he would only become a true man when he lost that sword (along with his sword hand), and got his own weapon.

In The Sword of Rhiannon, Matt Carse also comes into possession of a fabulously antique sword, once the property of the ancient Martian techno-sorcerer Rhiannon. The sword brings Carse as much trouble as opportunity, however, and he ultimately does not use it when he finally defeats his enemies.

This is yet another idea that filtered into Harry Potter. Neville Longbottom is shown as a terribly ineffective wizard for five books, until his wand is broken in a life-and-death battle. Only afterward, with a new wand, does his magical skill improve. In fact, his old wand belonged to his father, who was left a permanent invalid by Voldemort's henchmen. As each wand is usually fitted to a particular wizard, this inheritance severely hampered Neville's power.

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Postscript: Besides the other influences (Rackham and Howard) I mentioned above, Elora's outfit in the ending scenes would obviously take additional inspiration from the False Maria's dancing attire in Metropolis. That costume consists entirely of a shiny headdress, a long cape, a flimsy skirt of long, flexible metallic fringe, and a couple of pasties.

Plus, Laiph's black uniform might have had a sleeveless Japanese-style shirt, in order to reveal his branded left arm and mechanical right hand. Not only would this sleeveless style fit the overall Arabian Nights mood; it would also pay homage to Ralph McQuarrie's 1975 sketches of Ben Kenobi wearing a sleeveless kimono.

Worth noting too is that Laiph would lose only his right hand, like Luke Skywalker, whereas Madmartigan would have lost his right arm at the elbow, like Anakin in the prequels. This was actually the original plan for Luke's injury in ESB (albeit, initially, for his left arm instead), but it was altered due to the limitations of practical effects of the era.

 

A small correction to the details of Marazad's attire in the ending of Trinity:

It's likely that Marazad's skirt would have been not blue, but rather purple--matching the color of her magically healed eye. Like Elora, she would have also worn a cape, this one made of cloth-of-gold.

These details come from the appearance of the False Maria, as seen in a vision by Freder in the novel version of Metropolis:

Elora's final costume, based on those of Arthur Rackham's Brunnhilde and Robert E. Howard's Salome, would surely have a scarlet cape. So Marazad's wardrobe, for contrast, would likely feature a golden cape and a purple skirt--both the colors of royalty, and both also associated with the literary Metropolis's Whore of Babylon.

Harbou's novel includes a detail absent in Lang's film: the word Babylon, graven on the False Maria's forehead. Howard's Conan story The Hour of the Dragon heavily suggests that Conan's Salome is an ancestor of this very same Biblical character. So it's hardly surprising that Salome's distinctive mark, the red crescent, should end up tattooed on Elora Danan's forehead in the way Harbou describes.

(Meanwhile, Marazad's white hair is probably taken from Freder's father, Joh Fredersen, whose dark hair goes instantaneously white in the finale of Metropolis, as a symbol of his moral redemption.)

In the second book of A Song of Ice and Fire, the white-haired, purple-eyed Targaryen princess Daenerys is given a green dress when she arrives in the city of Qarth. Later in the book, she changes out of this garment and dons a purple dress instead.

Also... if I'm right here, it just might be significant what color Mara Jade's lightsaber blade is.

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PS: it's interesting to me that Madmartigan's arm injury anticipates Anakin's lost arm in the SW prequels, whereas Laiph's wound harks back to Luke in the OT.

This may provide some tentative support for my theory that--in contrast to the blond Luke Starkiller, who was the protagonist from the 1975 SW second draft onward--Lucas initially envisioned the Annikin Starkiller of the 1974 rough draft with black hair and blue eyes, like Madmartigan.

Further supporting this theory, Lucas let Sebastian Shaw, who had dark hair and blue eyes, play the ghost of Anakin in the 1983 theatrical cut of ROTJ.

This probably means that, in the end of Trinity, Laiph's black uniform was not sleeveless after all. Instead it'd be closely modeled on Luke's black outfit in ROTJ--right down to the sinister black glove on his right hand. (Even their names are similar: "Laiph Thaughbaer" and "Luke Skywalker." Also compare "Airk" to "Anakin.")

As another consequence, it's likely that Doug Chiang's initial concept paintings for TPM--featuring a black-haired Obi-Wan who looks strikingly like Madmartigan--represent a major change in Lucas's conception of the first prequel film.

The principal hero of the chronologically earliest SW film would evidently always have looked more or less like Willow's Madmartigan. But, with the relegation of Anakin to the status of a young slave boy in the final storyline of TPM, his originally intended appearance instead shifted to the replacment hero: Obi-Wan Kenobi. In turn, Anakin himself took on the outward aspect of Annikin Starkiller's fair-haired younger brother, Deak, in the 1974 rough draft.

The evident change in Anakin's hair color, as much as anything else, may explain Lucas's decision to replace Shaw with the dirty-blond Hayden Christensen in the 2004 special edition of ROTJ.

Of course, if Anakin Skywalker had turned out to have dark hair, Padme would have to be a blonde, and so pass her hair color onto Luke. In other words, she'd resemble the Elvish version of Sorsha in the original concept for Willow.