Merlin, as his legend has grown since the ancient Celtic days of Britain, was one of the closest figures we have had to a Jedi, along with Taleisyn and the pre-Irish DeDanan. It was Merlin who was given the legendary sword Excalibur by the Lady of the Lake and eventually put it in the hands of Arthur, founder of Camelot.

Because of Excalibur, one of the most legendary artifacts in world history (although never found to date), as well as other examples, magic-infused swords have held an iconic place in our storytelling tradition ever since warriors started carrying them, in nearly every culture.

No one can blame George Lucas for making swords and sorcery, after a fashion, part of the Star Wars mythos. It's just great stuff, and it's given plenty of old stories great mileage. After all, we still tell the stories of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere and the rest, and it's been well over a thousand years. The fantasy-meets-science-fiction milieu Lucas has given us is an absolutely perfect setting in which to hand out, to those dedicated enough to learn the ways of those grand sorceror-warriors known as Jedi and Sith, the most fantastic swords human mythology has devised yet: lightsabers.

The moment Obi-Wan Kenobi handed Luke his fallen father's lightsaber, it became a retail success and a weapon every imaginative fan has wanted, somewhere in his or her heart of hearts, to master. It's just too cool.

It's really too bad that no one is ever likely to find Excalibur, the Singing Sword. Where is it? Is it at the bottom of some long-dried-out lake in southwestern England or Wales? Is it in some long built-over burial mound amongst a jamble of relic bones too old to identify as any individual - except for its attendant artifacts? Would any archaeologist realize what they had if they found Excalibur?

The answer is moot. The legend has already grown beyond even the English-language canon of mystical folktales. It has seen retelling by the Japanese, all the way on the other side of the planet, more than a millennium later. Even if Excalibur never truly existed; even if, as many believe, Merlin was merely a composite of different individuals eventually rolled together into one entity by that famous grapevine of Word of Mouth and by the passage of more than ten centuries, it simply doesn't matter. The legend itself has been more than enough, and now we have an enduring story of a Singing Sword that only may be wielded by a righteous king.

Now, flash-forward to our modern, multimedia storytelling tradition of Star Wars: lightsabers, for certain, do not exist. Nonetheless, we can make them appear to exist in videogames and film, and their fictitious nature is well-known even to people who have never watched Star Wars movies. Virtually everyone knows what they are supposed to be. The legend has been more than enough. They are even imitated in other stories, and they will persist in peoples' minds even if Star Wars, somehow, does not. It's just like transporters and laser weapons: the original stories may not survive but these ideas are now indelibly part of sci-fi storytelling. They'll be borrowed again and again, just like Excalibur. They're now iconic.

A little less iconic, perhaps, than swords is the talisman, and that can be virtually anything. It can be something like the Holy Grail (a chalice), or it could be a Ring of Power, or it could be a sinister Rubic's Cube that summons an evil man with pins all over his face (ala 'Hellraiser')... or it could be, in our modern tradition, a Force Holocron.

A Holocron is something like a magic mirror or oracle, because it contains wisdom and power. Holocrons especially jibe with the concept of a magickal artifact because it projects a 3D holographic image on the air and produces sound. Anyone unacquainted with how such a thing would work would certainly attribute its power to magick. We of course understand holograms and broadcast sound, and we're well-accustomed to the increasing miniaturization of all kinds of technology. Add all of this to the power of the Force and the traditions of Jedi and Sith who store information in them, sometimes leaving them to be discovered thousands of years later in archaeological digs and by chance, and you've got Holy Grails lying all over the galaxy waiting to be found. The knowledge and power contained in almost any one of them is more than worth the investment and risk of a grand quest, even if the party has no Force user present. They can always sell it to one side or the other.

There are always special locations, or sites containing great power, places filled with mystical energies accessible only to those steeped in arcane lore. A Native American Shaman can draw power from the Devil's Tower in South Dakota; a druidic believer knows that Stonehenge has been drained of much of its power by commercial tourism; sacred places abound for the Aboriginal peoples in the Australian Outback. In Star Wars, there was the temple of Exar Kuhn, there are worlds where young Jedi find crystals for their sabers, there was the cavern on Dagobah where Luke encountered the Dark Side of the Force as part of his training by Yoda. In fact, mystical places in Star Wars have become almost too many to enumerate. It's a big galaxy.

Star Wars' storytellers have made excellent use of all of these storytelling elements. I noticed this most profoundly while playing Knights of the Old Republic I and II, finding armor and equipment and saber crystals that had belonged to specific great individuals, The right combinations of these will buff a character out powerfully. Of course, this is a game-mechanics tradition that comes down through roleplaying games (both social and computer-based) from the beginning, connecting Star Wars again to earlier myths and storytelling techniques.

It goes without saying that Star Wars has made powerful and famous use of mystical creatures throughout the saga. What's really special about Star Wars in this regard is its successful use of robotic characters as protagonists, antagonists, background characters and even artifacts. Fans will remember that R2-D2 himself became something of a Holy Grail once Leia loaded him up with the plans for the Death Star, another sacred item and the subject of a wide-ranging search by a mystical character known as a Dark Lord of the Sith. Droids and parts of droids were artifacts in KOTR, and some of the most interesting characters in any of Star Wars' media have been droids, who are like pets and people at once. They're like mascots; they're loved, put upon, depended upon, abused and valued all at once. They're a unique kind of character only possible in a science-fiction milieu.

Star Wars artifacts have so completely captured the imaginations of fans that they desire to own even simple effigies of these things, making Hasbro rich and creating a whole new community of collectors spanning generations.

What will people in future generations think when they dig upon our bones and, perhaps, find large hoards of Star Wars merchandise? Will they wonder 'what in the world it could be?' What if aliens find Star Wars collectibles amongst the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Earth? What will they think we were doing with them?

Perhaps they'll realize we were a people who wanted to partake of a great adventure but managed it only in our dreams; perhaps they'll realize that we did partake of that great adventure because we can dream, with just a little help from a few tangible representations of magick in a galaxy far, far away.