The Age of the Twins in Star Wars

In the early scenes of the TESB novel, Luke is said to be "barely" 23 (23.0 or so, in decimal form), with the note that he'd been a farmboy on Tatooine "three years ago". We might then be tempted to conclude that Luke was thus about 20.0 or thereabouts in ANH, and therefore ANH is 20.0 years after the end of RoTS. And indeed, in the ANH novel we hear that "Luke Skywalker was twice the age of the ten-year-old vaporator" he was working on. This was reflected in publisher copy on the back of the ANH novel from May 1977 says "Luke Skywalker was a twenty-year-old who lived and worked on his uncle's farm on the remote planet of Tatooine".

But, alas, it's not quite so simple. See, there's the fact that he's also eighteen in a script for ANH.

Thus, a common maneuver is to compromise by having ANH as being 19 years after RotS, but this compromise is a little sketchy. If Luke is 23.0 in TESB, and was a farmboy even, say, 3.9 years prior, then he would've been 19.1 years old. If he were actually 18.9 in the ANH script, then we're really only talking a couple of months difference . . . but that's still not very satisfying, since we've basically just stretched the "three years" beyond belief and still didn't get things right.

We could, of course, simply conclude that the ANH script would override the ANH and TESB novelizations even though the latter came later, but that's not the end of the story, either. At this point it behooves us to get more than a little particular with our sources.

See, above it is mentioned that the "eighteen years" comes from "a script for ANH". That it says "a script" instead of "the script" is no mistake, and refers to the fact that there were several drafts, and Luke's age changed several times. Indeed, depending on which 1976 "Revised Fourth Draft" you look at online, Luke may be either eighteen or twenty. Case in point, the January 1976 revision here has him at eighteen, and this carried over when the January 1976 script was published in 1979 in The Art of Star Wars as "the script" (indeed, I myself have used it as "the script").

However, here and here we have him in revised fourth drafts at twenty years old. What gives? Well, these works are referring to the March 15 1976 revision of the fourth draft, and that is what was used during filming (albeit still with tweaking from Lucas). Indeed, Starwarz.com has a "Connoisseur’s Guide to the Scripts of the Star Wars Saga" which goes over the script variations, with special note of the fact that the March version, and not the January one, was the final script before cameras rolled. Lucas obviously made some changes on-set, but the March 15 script is the most valid version for our purposes.

Thus, it seems that the idea of Luke being eighteen must be considered somewhat fallacious, as it comes from an earlier script version (however frequently it might be referenced). And, as such, the compromise of 19 years between RotS and ANH must also be considered unnecessary . . . 20 years separate Luke's birth and his departure from Tatooine to meet his destiny.