JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2005
Star Wars: Revenge of the…Fairies?!
When one of these newfangled “Star Wars” movies comes rolling along, I expect the only question it will inspire is, “The role of the greatest villain in the greatest sci-fi epic of all time, and they can’t find someone who can actually act?”
Thus, when “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith” opened this spring, I, like the vast majority of folks, found something better to do.
Unlike the vast majority of folks, for me this meant reading Katharine Briggs’ delightfully eccentric “An Encyclopedia of Fairies” (1977), whose arcane scholarship bounds from abbey lubbers to the Chessmen of Lewis and beyond.
I was happy. But George Lucas was not to be denied.
Turns out, the book is replete with the word “sith.”
This does not refer to the masters of the Dark Side in Lucas’s mythos, but to the fairies, the supernatural little people of Celtic folklore. But the coincidence was fascinating, and suddenly, “Star Wars” was interesting.
Bewilderingly, sith was employed alongside similar words that appeared to be alternate spellings. E.g, the essential entry in the encyclopedia:
“Sidh, Sith,
or Si (shee). The Gaelic name for FAIRIES, both in
You surely know bean sí (“fairy woman”) from its Anglicized form: banshee. (You’ll note the use of the accented “i,” which Briggs’ book did not employ for whatever reason.)
More precisely, síth, et al. refer to mounds in the countryside—typically, ancient burial tumuli—wherein fairies were supposed to live. The word then came to be used for the fairies themselves.
For the early Celtic peoples, the “Otherworld” was underground, so it’s not surprising such mounds would be thought of as homes for supernatural beings. Indeed, it is likely síth originally referred generically to this “Otherworld,” then became attached to things subterranean.
Likewise, the mainstream theory of fairy folklore origin is that it is the superstitious leftovers of the once-great Celtic religion(s). The ancient gods were often said to have fallen in battles both physical and political and wound up lurking underground. It is easy to imagine them lingering on as the whimsical fairies. Revenge of the sith, indeed.
Well, I was intrigued—but, unfortunately, not brushed up on my Irish and Gaelic, nor their obvious spelling quirks.
Prof. Damian McManus, head of the School of Irish & Celtic Languages at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, helped guide me through the byways of this beautiful word.
The original, Early Irish version was síd (pronounced like “sheathe”). Síth and sídh are later spelling variants—though they would be retained into modern times, as we’ll see in a moment.1 The Modern Irish version is sí (pronounced like “she”). (The “Star Wars” word “Sith” is pronounced just like it looks, with a soft “i.”)
Things went a bit differently in Scottish Gaelic, where sìth (note the different diacritic) is the word today.
As an
interesting sidelight, síd and its later offspring always were
homonyms of identically spelled words meaning “peace.” There are good reasons
to suppose a direct etymological connection here. As McManus put it, the
“peace” meaning likely “reflects the belief that the
Otherworld was a land of peace and plenty, a Utopia, if you like.” This is
probably based not in the concept of fairies, but in the word’s roots in the
idea of a realm of semi-fallen gods.
Today, the words remain homonyms, but spelling orthography has altered them to keep them more distinct. In Irish, sí means “fairy” (noun and adjective) while síth means “peace.”2 In Scottish, sìth can stand for both, though sìdh is preferred for the “peace” meaning. (Both languages also have the unaccented sith, meaning a pace or a fast movement, for reasons that are less etymologically clear.3)
A word for “peace” surely would have no relation to something called “Star Wars.” But did Lucas borrow the name of the fairies for his villains?
The idea of Obi-Wan Kenobi wielding a lightsaber against a cane-shaking leprechaun does not sound inspiring. But fairy lore is more sophisticated than that, and as Christian influence grew, developed a dualism that would surely appeal to Lucas. There was the Seelie Court of benign fairies, opposed to the Unseelie Court of malignant ones—a very Jedi vs. Sith conception, and with arguably better names.
And can it be pure coincidence that Briggs’ book came out in 1977—the same year as the first “Star Wars” movie?
Well, yes, of course it can. And is. I haven’t found any official discussion of Lucas’ invention of his word “Sith” (Lucasfilm’s idea of public relations is demanding that questions be snail-mailed to a PO box, so an answer may be forthcoming c. 2060), but there’s no reason to believe it is any more complex than his usual babble-originated names (cf., “Greedo”). Surely, if it was something as interesting as Celtic fairy lore, Lucas would be saying as much in interviews. (The large contingent of critics of the recent “Star Wars” movies have suggested a different origin—an anagram of a less flattering word.)
But if the words are linked by coincidence, the concepts are linked by congruence, a kinship between ancient folklore and modern pop myth (of which “Star Wars” is surely the exemplar).
The fairy síth are fallen
gods who trick and scheme and confound from their underground burrows. The
“Star Wars” Sith—as elaborated more in spin-off books
and video games than the movies themselves—are the remnants and followers of a
fallen race consumed by the Dark Side, native to the rocky world of Korriban on which many Sith Lords
lie entombed underground in a kind of
Deeper into the mythos, one great Dark Lord of the Sith, Exar Kun, lies buried beneath the surface of a moon, where a lost, underground city also waits rediscovery.
It seems a world of unpredictable powers, remote yet lurking right beneath our feet, is always with us. It’s not surprising that in reaching for the words to describe such feelings, hands from different centuries occasionally meet.
1
Both variants arose in Old Irish.
2 Actually, síth tends to be a more literary usage, while síocháin is the more common usage. Síocháin is also rooted in sí, and hence in síth.
3 This word is etymologically separate
from the other síth words, I am informed by Prof. Dónall Ó Baoill, head of the
Significant sources not cited in the text include:
“The Semantics of ‘Síd,’” by Tomás
Ó Cathasaigh, “Éigse: A
Journal of Irish Studies,” Vol. XVII, Part II, p. 137-155; “Star Wars
Encyclopedia” by Stephen J. Sansweet; “Star Wars:
Knights of the