“The whole premise of Star Wars was that it was a romantic fantasy,” the director says in the featurette Birth of the Lightsaber. “So in developing a group of peacekeepers who were above everything and honorable and could make decisions and bring peace to the galaxy, I needed a weapon that was appropriate for those kinds of Jedi.”

Or, as Obi-Wan so eloquently said in Episode IV, “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”