First trace
A handwritten fragment headed Journal of the Whills, Part I launches Lucas’s earliest known Star Wars writing.
An evolving Star Wars idea
The Journal of the Whills
A cinematic research report on George Lucas’s abandoned chronicle, its later microbiotic cosmology, and its unexpected survival as sacred language in modern Star Wars.
The Journal of the Whills endures because it keeps asking what stands behind the saga: who remembers it, what connects it, and how individual choices acquire cosmic meaning. Its power is not that it resolves every mystery. Its power is that it makes the mystery feel ancient.
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Journal
of the
Whills
of the
Whills
Executive summary
One name. Three distinct lives.
The Journal is not a single lost text that secretly explains the saga. It is a record of Lucas’s changing creative vocabulary: chronicle, cosmology, then cultural artifact.
The Journal of the Whills began as George Lucas’s earliest known Star Wars writing: a brief 1973 prose outline rather than a screenplay. It next became an abandoned framing device, suggesting that a wiser being or order had recorded the adventure as part of a much larger history.
Much later, Lucas reused Whills for a very different private explanation of the Force: microscopic beings beneath midi-chlorians, linked to an ecological model of symbiosis and cosmic will. Post-Lucas canon took another path, preserving the Journal as a revered and deliberately ambiguous religious text.
The decisive interpretive rule is simple: shared terminology does not prove a single, unbroken fictional species concept. The durable connection is thematic—the sense that individual lives sit inside an order larger than any character can fully see.
Core concepts
Draft-era chroniclers and later microscopic beings share a name but are not documented as one continuous species.
Classic mentions
No original-trilogy film names the Whills or the Journal in dialogue, crawl, credits, or on-screen text.
Years in motion
From the outline to modern anthology fiction, the term repeatedly returns in new narrative forms.
Part one · 1973–1976
Before the galaxy had a map
The Journal arrived before Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, or a finished Force. It was a dense proto-myth, set aside so that a clearer adventure could emerge.
Journal of the Whills, Part I was a compressed prose outline, roughly a page and a half to two pages long.
The surviving first page introduces Mace Windy, a high-ranking Jedi-Bendu of Ophuchi, and C. J. Thorpe—Chuiee Two Thorpe of Kissel—a young man who becomes Windy’s padawaan learner. Political suspicion, betrayal, trial, exile, Yavin, and Yoshiro crowd its unfamiliar world.
Almost none of that plot entered Star Wars (1977). What endured were creative habits: names such as Mace and Yavin, spiritual ranks, a master-and-pupil relationship, and the seductive notion that the audience was receiving a preserved account from a wider history.
The fragment. Lucas writes the early Journal outline; the available physical evidence contradicts later claims of a forty-page original screenplay.
A clearer route. After agent Jeff Berg finds the fragment too dense to pitch, Lucas writes The Star Wars, moving toward a more accessible structure.
Starkiller title page. The fourth draft calls the film The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the ‘Journal of the Whills’ — Saga I: Star Wars.
Skywalker revision. The revised fourth draft retains the Journal formula while the hero’s surname changes from Starkiller to Skywalker.
“A long time ago” works because the story already feels transmitted from a distant, authoritative past.Interpretive through-line
The 1973 posture owed much to Edgar Rice Burroughs, especially the transmitted manuscripts and recovered accounts of the Martian novels. Lucas borrowed an intermediary narrator’s authority: distant adventures could arrive like history rather than mere invention.
The often-made Tolkien comparison works only at this level of narrative posture. It signals recovered legend and mythic distance, not evidence of a fully elaborated textual apparatus in the two-page Whills fragment.
Lucas later explained that he dropped the observer-narrator device; its conceptual work migrated into the Force and into the opening crawl’s fairy-tale register. That is a transfer of function, not a literal conversion of chroniclers into an energy field.
Part two · comparison
The two Whills problem
The central source of confusion is a reused word. Place both concepts beside one another and the difference becomes clear.
| Dimension | Chroniclers / observers | Microscopic Whills |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1973 outline through the 1976 draft-title and novelization framework. | Late-1990s and prequel-era interview cosmology, especially articulated after The Phantom Menace. |
| Nature | Unseen, wise recorders: an implied intelligence or order without anatomy, dialogue, or a homeworld. | Single-celled beings, placed beneath midi-chlorians in Lucas’s illustrative ecological hierarchy. |
| Function | To record history and make an adventure feel like one selected saga from a vast archive. | To feed on the Force and, in Lucas’s language, transmit or determine its will at the smallest scale. |
| Location | Outside the narrated action: an archive, scripture, or authorial frame around events. | Inside living systems, connected through midi-chlorians rather than a visible galactic institution. |
| Evidence | Draft title pages, authorized prose framing, and Lucas’s recollection of an immortal observer. | Published Lucas interviews; the ontology is never presented in a released feature film. |
| Careful conclusion | The early and later meanings can be linked thematically as forms of superior agency. A single biological continuity, however, requires speculation the documentary record does not supply. | |
Chronicle
The Whills first grant a pulp adventure the gravity of an inherited record. A saga is not beginning; it is being disclosed.
Force
When the frame is discarded, its transcendence migrates inward. The Force supplies order, connection, and a will larger than the cast.
Ecology
Lucas’s later Whills metaphor turns the unseen order into symbiosis: humans live within layered systems and are not their masters.
Part three · public bridge
Present in print, absent on screen
The original novelization makes the Journal explicit. The classic films do not. Both facts matter when separating history from retrospective lore.
The 1977 novelization
Released ahead of the film and credited to George Lucas but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster, it opens with a political prologue framed as material from the First Saga of the Journal of the Whills. It is the most important public bridge to the early draft idea.
The released trilogy
Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi contain no spoken, written, crawl, or credits reference to the Whills. The Journal’s influence is tonal: ancient-story distance, destiny, redemption, and the larger metaphysical order of the Force.
R2-D2 and a Keeper
Prequel-era making-of accounts report Lucas privately imagining R2-D2 recounting the saga to a Keeper of the Whills about a century after Return of the Jedi. It is plausible, named-participant testimony—not a filmed ending, script scene, or confirmed canonical narrator frame.
Part four · unmade horizon
The microbiotic road not taken
Lucas described a final-trilogy direction that would have moved inward, toward midi-chlorians, Whills, and the underlying nature of the Force.
1999
Midi-chlorians enter the films
The Phantom Menace introduces midi-chlorians. The later Whills layer grows out of Lucas’s effort to frame the Force through interdependent life rather than empirical science.
2002–05
Private final-frame thinking
Production-era accounts associate R2-D2, a Keeper of the Whills, and a post-saga telling with Lucas’s continuing interest in an external chronicle.
Later
A world beneath the cell
In interviews, Lucas describes Whills as still-smaller beings beneath midi-chlorians, linked to the Force’s will. His ratios—about 10,000 midi-chlorians per human cell and 100,000 Whills per midi-chlorian—operate as imaginative world-building scale, not film dialogue or laboratory fact.
2012
Treatments, then a sale
Lucas develops sequel-story treatments and sells Lucasfilm to Disney in October. Public evidence supports treatments and broad ambitions; it does not support three finished, shootable Whills-centered screenplays.
2015
A different sequel route
The Force Awakens is developed by a new Lucasfilm team with new writers and directors. It does not dramatize a microbiotic realm or adapt a completed Lucas Whills screenplay.
Why this concept remained unfilmed
Three constraints frame the answer. The midi-chlorian explanation drew major fan and critical backlash; Lucas anticipated resistance to going even deeper into a microscopic realm; and he described the material as self-indulgent. The 2012 Lucasfilm sale occurred before he had written or filmed completed sequel features.
What should not be claimed
The available record does not establish a specific Whills set piece, villain, death, final shot, or episode-by-episode plot. It does not show audiences meeting “God” as a Whill on screen, a trilogy set primarily inside cells, or a Disney rejection of three completed Lucas shooting scripts devoted entirely to the Whills.
Part five · post-Lucas canon
From unused frame to sacred vocabulary
Modern continuity preserves the atmosphere of the Journal while declining to canonize the full microbiotic hierarchy.
A text for believers
Alan Dean Foster’s The Force Awakens novelization opens with a poetic epigraph attributed to Journal of the Whills 7:477. Reference material places the Journal among Force-believing traditions, including the loosely defined Church of the Force and the cultural world around Lor San Tekka.
Guardians of the Whills
Rogue One makes the terminology visible through the Guardians, a monastic martial order on Jedha associated with Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus, the Kyber Temple, and Force reverence. They are not identified as microscopic organisms or avatars of them.
Metafictional recorders
The From a Certain Point of View anthologies use Whills in playful framing stories: “Whills,” “The Whills Strike Back,” and “Return of the Whills.” Their celestial narrators debate crawls, episode numbering, and what a chronicle should include.
Ambiguity by design
Disney-era canon provides quotations, institutions, temples, Guardians, and narrative voices, but it never confirms Lucas’s full single-celled hierarchy. This returns the name to a productive mystery: something that can be revered, cited, interpreted, and disputed without being anatomically explained.
Evidence & interpretation
A guide to certainty
The Whills invite elegant theories. A good dossier distinguishes what documents establish, what accounts support incompletely, and what fan synthesis adds.
Confirmed
The January 1973 fragment; the Journal wording on 1976 title pages; the original novelization’s framing prologue; no on-screen original-trilogy reference; Lucas’s later Whills interviews; and modern Journal / Guardians terminology.
Plausible but incomplete
The unpublished second page of the early outline; the R2-D2-to-Keeper frame reported in making-of sources; and the precise overlap between Lucas’s microbiotic ambitions and the story treatments conveyed around the 2012 sale.
Unsupported or misleading
A forty-page 1973 Journal screenplay; one static Whills species since 1973; canonically narrated films by R2-D2; Guardians as organisms in human form; or three finished, rejected Whills sequel screenplays.
How to read the 1973 material responsibly
The first page is publicly documented; the second survives chiefly through summaries. Treat labels, names, and broad reported beats as early evidence, not as a fully accessible screenplay. The fragment establishes a densely named, quasi-historical apprentice narrative—not midi-chlorians, a Chosen One prophecy, or microscopic gods.
How to read the later interviews responsibly
Lucas’s later accounts are meaningful creator testimony about his cosmology. They are not retroactive scenes in the released films. The distinction matters because interview-level explanation can reveal intent while leaving on-screen canon and audience experience deliberately more open.
How to read modern canon responsibly
Modern books and films establish that “Whills” has religious, historical, and metafictional uses in the galaxy. They do not settle the literal identity of the Journal’s authors or require Lucas’s microbiotic organisms to be the same beings as every narrator or Guardian named by the term.
Part six · thematic reading
Myth by way of pulp and cell
The Journal’s afterlife reveals an artistic method: Lucas does not merely discard concepts; he repeatedly translates their functions into new story machinery.
Changing costume
Across five decades, a recurring idea changes shape. In the 1970s, a wiser observer keeps the record. In the finished saga, the Force binds a galaxy and grants destiny a metaphysical field. In later cosmology, layered life makes every creature a participant in an unseen ecology. In current canon, the same pressure becomes sacred tradition.
Function migrates
The chronicler’s transcendence becomes the Force’s omnipresence. The archaic manuscript frame becomes the opening crawl. A transmitted record later finds a strange biological rhyme in midi-chlorians relaying the will of an unseen order. The elements are not identical, but their narrative work recurs.
Closing transmission
Not a lost answer—an evolving question.
The Journal of the Whills endures because it keeps asking what stands behind the saga: who remembers it, what connects it, and how individual choices acquire cosmic meaning. Its power is not that it resolves every mystery. Its power is that it makes the mystery feel ancient.