| Lyra Belacqua / Lyra Silvertongue |
|
|---|---|
| First appearance | Northern Lights/The Golden Compass |
| Last appearance | Lyra's Oxford |
| Information | |
| Aliases | Lizzie Brooks Lisa Ransom Alice |
| Species | Human |
| Gender | Female |
| Family | Lord Asriel (father; deceased) Marisa Coulter (mother; deceased) |
| Significant other(s) | Falls in love with Will Parry |
| Nationality | English |
| Age | 12 to 13 through the main trilogy, 15 in Lyra's Oxford |
| Date of birth | 1984 |
| Speciality | Can read the alethiometer |
Lyra Belacqua ( /ˈlaɪrə bəˈlɑːkwə/), also known as Lyra Silvertongue, is the heroine of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra is a young girl who inhabits a universe parallel to our own. Brought up in the cloistered world of Jordan College, Oxford, she finds herself embroiled in a cosmic war between Lord Asriel on the one side, and the first angel to come into being, called The Authority, and his Regent, called Metatron, on the other.
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Lyra Belacqua, age twelve at the beginning of the trilogy, is the daughter of Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter in an Oxford similar to our own. She was brought up at Jordan College, where the scholars, professors and servants largely treated her as an adopted daughter. She was raised believing that her parents had died in an airship crash, and that Lord Asriel was her uncle, and later learned the truth from John Faa, leader of the Gyptians. Lyra spends most of her time socializing with other children of the city, sometimes harmoniously, frequently mock-violently, and often by way of avoiding school-work. Her closest friend among the other children is a Jordan kitchen boy named Roger Parslow, whose disappearance early in the first book is Lyra's driving force throughout The Golden Compass.
Lyra is portrayed as dirty-blond-haired, with pale-blue eyes, thin, and short for her age. Lyra is unruly and tomboyish, and her complete disregard for her appearance and personal hygiene exasperates her adult caretakers. She receives a scant and haphazard education at the hands of Jordan scholars, being neither interested in scholarly study nor officially a student of Jordan College. However, she is highly intelligent, and is particularly talented at deceiving others; she is capable of making up complex yet plausible lies improvisationally. Initially she uses this talent to avoid punishment by her guardians, and to entertain and deceive other children, but later in the series employs it to save her own life and the lives of others. She deceives Iofur Raknison, king of the panserbjørne(armored bear in Germanic languages) of Svalbard, by suggesting that she can grant him a dæmon. Tricking a panserbjørne was a feat that her friend Iorek Byrnison had believed to be impossible for a human, and her success prompts Iorek to informally christen her "Silvertongue," which she adopts as a surname thereafter.
Lyra's dæmon, Pantalaimon (often called Pan), is still capable of changing shape at the beginning of the trilogy, and is portrayed as a cautious and level-headed counterpoint to Lyra's impulsive, inquisitive, and sometimes reckless character.
Lyra's original surname, Belacqua, is the name of a character in Dante's Divine Comedy, a soul in the ante-purgatory, representing those who wait until the last opportunity before turning to God.[1] The mood in the ante-purgatory is said to be one of helplessness, nostalgia and yearning — Belacqua and the other souls in ante-purgatory are caught between two worlds and lack clear understanding of themselves.[2]
Lyra's dæmon, Pantalaimon, is her dearest companion and the embodiment of her soul. She calls him 'Pan' as a nickname. In common with all dæmons of children, he can take any animal form he pleases; he first appears in the story as a dark brown moth. His name is that of a saint in the orthodox churches, St. Panteleimon, and in Greek means "all-compassionate". He changes into many forms throughout the series, ranging from a dragon to an eagle, but his favourite forms are a snow-white ermine, a moth, a wildcat, and a mouse. Lyra must be separated from Pantalaimon when she enters the World of the Dead, causing extreme pain to both of them; Pantalaimon avoids Lyra for a while afterwards. However, their surviving this separation allows the two to separate great distances from one another, an ability only witches and shamans possess. At the end of the trilogy, as Lyra is entering adulthood, Pantalaimon finds his final form when Will Parry touches him, a beautiful Pine marten, red-gold in colour.
In the first novel of His Dark Materials, Northern Lights (known in the United States of America as The Golden Compass), Serafina Pekkala tells of the prophecy of a girl who is "destined to bring about the end of destiny" at the expense of a great betrayal. The witches' prophecy states that this girl will be able pick the "correct" cloud-pine branch out of several, as indeed Lyra does. It transpires that Lyra's destiny is to be the second Eve and fall into the temptation of the serpent, represented by Mary Malone. Will Parry and the Dust in the abyss are corrected, and the universes start to work in harmony. However, in order to ensure the stability of the universes and protect people from the creation of Spectres, Will and Lyra must close all of the inter-dimensional windows with the help of angels and keep them closed forever - and since their dæmons cannot live outside of their own birth worlds, they must part forever. Despite this, however, they decide to sit on the same bench, next to each other, in the Botanic Gardens at Oxford each year for an hour at noon on Midsummer's Day, so that they might find themselves in each other's presence.
She fulfills her destiny to "bring an end to death" by leading the ghosts out of the world of the dead. Lyra's inevitable betrayal can be interpreted as two separate occasions and either occurs when Lyra leads her friend Roger to Lord Asriel on Svalbard at the end of the first book, in the chapter titled "Betrayal", or when Lyra leaves her dæmon on the shore of the lake in the Land of the Dead.
In the most recent edition of The Amber Spyglass released in the UK, the post-script 'Lantern Slides' section shows Lyra studying the alethiometer with Pantalaimon at age 18. She is excited to start picking up on a pattern in the readings, and Pullman tells us that this discovery of a pattern is the "second thing she said to Will next day in the Botanic Garden", implying that the next day was Midsummer's Day, when she and Will would be sitting on the same bench in their separate worlds, and that there was something else, presumably that she loved him, that Lyra said to Will (and perhaps would say every year) before telling him of her reading.
Letters written by Lyra included in the companion book Once Upon a Time in the North reveal that Lyra is researching her dissertation for a M. Phil in Economic History, indicating her to be continuing to study during her twenties. The title of her dissertation is 'Developments of patterns of trade in the European Arctic region with particular reference to independent balloon carriage (1950–1970)'. In the first letter, Lyra also mentions that she is continuing to study the alethiometer. Once she finishes her studies, she will be able to read the alethiometer not with grace, as she used to, but with certainty and knowledge.
In the 1999 unabridged audio production, Lyra was performed by the voiceover actress Joanna Wyatt.[3]
In a 2003 radio adaptation, Lyra was voiced by child actress Lulu Popplewell.
The National Theatre in London put on a two-part, six-hour-long adaptation of the novels. The play ran twice, in 2003 and 2004. Lyra was played by Anna Maxwell Martin in the first run and by Elaine Symons in the second. In July–August 2007, Scottish Youth Theatre performed the Scottish premier of the production with Kirstie Steele and Sarah Helena Ord playing Lyra in parts one and two, respectively.
In The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of the first book, Lyra is portrayed by twelve-year-old Dakota Blue Richards, who won the role after beating out 10,000 other hopeful candidates. British singer/songwriter Kate Bush wrote and recorded a song "Lyra" with choristers from Magdalen College School in Oxford.
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