So confession time, y’all! I finally got around to watching Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi last weekend. Now before you remind me that five months is a long time to go without seeing a new blockbuster movie, let me point out that, as someone who studied literature, my idea of “new” covers the last 700 years.
Also, I had like a dozen videos commenting on or making fun of the film that were in my “Watch Later” YouTube queue. (Of course, I wasn’t going to watch them before seeing the movie itself.) Figured it was about time to do something about that.
Anyway, there were some really neat parallels between Last Jedi and other stories, either deliberately or by chance. For instance, Luke’s account of the Force to Rey reminded me a lot of the Elric brothers’ epiphany in Fullmetal Alchemist when their teacher maroons them for a month, and maybe I’ll do a post on that in the future.
St. Columba
Today I want to point out a parallel between Luke’s self-imposed exile and that of an older tale of self-exiling: the story of St. Columba. Columba was a 6th-century Irish monk, and not, at first, particularly saintly. According to the legend surrounding his life, Columba had a friend from another monastery whose name was Finnian. One day, Finnian visited Columba and showed him his new book. Columba was in awe. Remember that in those days—before printing, paper, and movable type—books had to be written and copied by hand. With a feather pen. On vellum.
Vellum, as you may know, is a material made from the skin of an animal that can be turned into pages. The word itself comes from the Latin word for a calf. So every time someone wanted a new book, they had to kill a baby cow. (Or some other animal instead.) And as you can imagine, the process of turning a dead animal’s skin into usable writing surfaces was neither easy nor quick.
Incidentally, thirteen years ago I had the privilege of seeing first-hand the St. John’s Bible, the only book in modern times to be created in the old style. They used special ink, writing by hand, on—you guessed it—calfskin vellum. With some beautiful monastic illuminations, I might add. It took them years to finish. It’s an amazing blend of old and new, of medieval and modern.
All of which is to say that books at that time were valuable and rare, simply because they were hard to make. Like Bitcoins. 😛
So Columba decided he wanted a copy of Finnian’s book. But Finnian refused to let him copy it. Columba, undeterred, waited until the monks went to sleep for the night and then ‘borrowed’ the book, spending the rest of the night hurriedly copying it by hand. (I’m guessing they had some poor calf’s remains lying around ready for the purpose.) All I can say is, it must have been a really good book.
Although Columba finished his copying, Finnian found out about it and demanded that Columba turn over the copy to him. Of course, Columba refused. Angered, Finnian pleaded his case before the king. (Why call upon the 6th-century equivalent of the US Supreme Court over a book? Again, that’s how valuable books were.)
The king settled in Finnian’s favor. He proclaimed that, just as a calf belongs to the owner of the cow from which it was born, so too a book-copy belonged to the owner of the original book. When I first heard this, I thought sounded quaint and facile—until I realized that, at least in terms of material, the book pretty much was a calf. The royal panoyal* was actually making a nuanced legal argument.**
Anyway, in good monkish fashion, the future saint meekly accepted the verdict. Pffft! Just kidding! Columba called on the men of his clan to go to war with Finnian’s clan in retaliation.
That’s like starting the Civil War over a book. It must have been a really good book.
The two clans met in battle and spent an entire day slaughtering each other. (The monks didn’t actually participate, of course, but Columba was on hand to witness things.) At the end of the day, the story goes, there was just one warrior still alive, hardly able to stand. Since he was Columba’s kin, Columba had won.
Yay.
Given that the military power of a clan resided in its able-bodied men, this pretty much meant the annihilation of their entire fighting force and all of their fathers, husbands, and eligible bachelors. Think of the demographic nightmare that would result for both clans. Effectively it was a double genocide.
Over a book.
And Columba knew he was responsible.
Horrified (at last!) at what he had brought about, Columba decided to punish himself. After much consideration, he undertook the most painful thing he could think of: exile from his beloved Ireland. With a handful of companions he sailed off, and swore that he would never look upon Ireland again.
Columba made his way to the tiny island of Iona, near Scotland. There he and his companions eked out a living of bare subsistence for a number of years. Somewhere along the way, Columba developed a reputation for holiness and wisdom. Eventually a messenger came to him with terrible news: Ireland was in an uproar (I won’t go into the details of why, as this is getting long enough already), and only a wise and respected figure could work out a solution that would keep the peace. The king wanted Columba to come back and solve the crisis.
Remembering his oath, Columba refused—until he suddenly hit upon a solution. Technically, he had only promised not to look at Ireland—and not that he would never return. Happy and blindfolded, Columba went back to his homeland and solved the crisis. Then he returned to Iona, where he would eventually die. Later he would be honored as a saint.
The parallels between Luke and Columba
- Both were monks. (Jedi are monks in all but name: celibacy, self-discipline, religious meditation and faith, sacred scriptures, monastic robes, etc.)
- Both were responsible for regrettable slaughters that would have long-lasting terrible ramifications. In Luke’s case, he considered murdering Ben Solo and thus drove him to the Dark Side, which in turn caused all of Luke’s students to turn on each other.
- Both exiled themselves to remote islands, on their own volition.
- Both lived with monastic companions.
- Both were called to return to their comrades to resolve a dangerous crisis.
- Both initially refused.
- Both eventually agreed to return, but in such a way as not to violate their previous resolve.
- Both succeeded in saving their comrades from disaster.
- Both died afterwards back on their islands and, according to their respective stories, passed on to the ‘good part’ of the afterlife.***
Oh, and you know what? Guess where the scenes of Luke on Ahch-To were filmed: Skellig Michael, a 6th-century Irish monastery founded by St. Finnian of Clonard. This Finnian is not the friend of Columba mentioned above, but he was Columba’s teacher!
Notes:
* I made the phrase “royal panoyal” up, because I liked the sound of it.
** Of course, that raises the question, “What about the owner of the vellum on which the book was copied?” I think it’s intriguing, from a standpoint of economics, that the Irish king prioritized the intellectual content of the book over its physical components. If you cut down someone else’s tree today, and turned it into book pages and then wrote on them, you’d still be obligated to pay restitution for the stolen tree. But in this case, Finnian got the book-copy and didn’t have to pay anything for the valuable book materials that Columba and his fellow monks had worked hard to create. Not to mention that they’d paid for and/or raised the calf first.
The other intriguing economic point, at least to me, is that the king ignored the labor that Columba and his colleagues had put into making the pages and copying the text. Modern theories of economic value center on work. Modern capitalism has its roots in the thought of intellectuals like Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, who attributed the origin of value in goods to the effort (labor) put into producing them. Marxist theories, while reactions against capitalism, nonetheless place the highest value on the workers (laborers) who are supposed to bring about the social revolution and be the foundation of the new civilization. So either way, labor is at the center. Not so in ancient Ireland. Their sense of economics must have been very, very different from our own.
*** I’m not saying that Luke’s story was inspired by Columba’s—stories are more complicated than that. If you want to read a fascinating account of how and why the same tropes crop up again and again in different narrative contexts, check out the very readable On Fairy-Stories by JRR Tolkien (yeah, you know, that guy who wrote about hobbits and magic rings).