Turns Out Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy Was Built on a Very Familiar Planet

The extra we get to study the way forward for the Force in a publish Return of the Jedi, publish Rise of Skywalker period for Star Wars, the extra we’re getting echoes of its long gone—and due to the newest novel from the galaxy far, distant, Luke’s makes an attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order have much more connection’s to the franchise’s oldest previous.

Adam Christopher’s Shadow of the Sith, the newest Star Wars novel, has change into the primary piece of canon media to explicitly contact on simply the place Luke’s Jedi Academy—glimpsed being torn down in The Force Awakens, and constructed up in The Book of Boba Fett—is definitely positioned, and it seems it’s on a planet very acquainted to a sure period of Star Wars followers: Ossus.

This isn’t the primary time Ossus has been namechecked within the present Star Wars continuity. It was first “returned” to Star Wars canon within the brief story “The End of History,” by Alexander Freed, within the December 2014 situation of Star Wars Insider, however its largely been untouched since—though we now know we’ve technically been seeing it through the years within the sequel trilogy, Book of Boba Fett, and in comics like The Rise of Kylo Ren. The planet originated within the traditional Dark Horse Comics sequence Tales of the Jedi, which ran from 1994 to 1998 and coated 1000’s of years of historical past of the traditional Republic, and the conflicts between the Jedi and Sith, between roughly 5,000-4,000 years earlier than the occasions of the Star Wars films.

In Tales of the Jedi, Ossus was house to very important repositories of Jedi information, house to the Great Jedi Library, and had hyperlinks as one of many first worlds past Tython that essentially the most historic variations of what would change into the Jedi would go to and set up roots on. Although largely laid to waste throughout the Great Sith War when Sith magics by chance precipitated a supernova in a close-by star cluster, Ossus would change into very important to the Jedi as soon as extra 1000’s and 1000’s of years later after the occasions of the Yuuzhan Vong conflict, when Luke’s New Jedi Order would construct a brand new Academy on the world to interchange the one misplaced on Yavin IV.

Tales sits at bizarre relationship with continuity with present Star Wars. Like its personal religious successor Knights of the Old Republic earlier than it, the comedian sequence is ready in a time effectively far sufficient earlier than the flicks—even effectively far sufficient earlier than Lucasfilm’s present ‘ancient prequel’ setting, the High Republic—that it’s probably not mattered whether or not it’s canon to present continuity or in any other case. The occasions and characters of Tales of the Jedi technically have some presence in present continuity due to the presence of an artefact within the Fantasy Flight Star Wars roleplaying sport, the Qel-Droma Epics, a purported historic doc loosely describing the occasions of the comics as a set of historic poetic epics and tales. It’s additionally meant we’ve been in a position to get obscure references right here and there to its occasions and characters from Tales that, whereas not outright sufficient to notably re-canonize occasions and tales, paint a broad sufficient image that, for those who actually wished them to have the burden of that canonical connection, you would select to suppose as such and go on about your merry Star Wars fandom approach. They’re legends, fables, spoken of solely in rumour. Which is form of what it needs to be like, actually.

It’s laborious to say what precisely Star Wars will do with this connection going ahead. After all, we all know that Luke’s academy is fated to its premature destruction, and it’s maybe unlikely we’ll get to go to Ossus past that context any time quickly. And this wouldn’t be the primary time Star Wars has namechecked a really outdated and intriguing idea or place from the EU after which performed nothing a lot with it past a reputation, both—Tython, one of many ancestral properties of the Jedi earlier than the Jedi even existed, received namechecked as a vastly essential place in The Mandalorian’s second season in any case, and all we received was Grogu being kidnapped off of a rock when it really confirmed up.

Maybe Tales of the Jedi will, for now, largely exist in relationship to present Star Wars canon because it has because the Epics of Ulic-Qel Droma have been first touched upon within the pages of Star Wars Insider just a few years in the past—a supply for fables and references right here and there, however nothing notably revisited. Hell, proper now Star Wars is within the technique of lifting its very title to make use of for an animated anthology that’s far, far faraway from these historic tales of the Knights of the Old Republic. But possibly, simply possibly, as we begin attending to see extra of this time period after and past the Skywalker Saga, it could possibly be an opportunity to revisit a few of these legends once more.

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