JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
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 Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland, as in
the BEAN SI or the DAOINE SIDH.”
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