If you’ve watched Attack of the Clones and paid close attention to the Lars homestead, you’ve probably noticed something strange.
There are three graves outside the moisture farm. We all know Shmi Skywalker is buried there – Anakin held a whole funeral for her. But who’s in the other two?
Here’s what I’ve found out.
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Shmi’s Grave Is Obvious
No mystery here. Shmi Skywalker died in Attack of the Clones after being kidnapped and tortured by Tusken Raiders.
Anakin found her just before she passed, and he brought her body back to the Lars homestead. She was buried with a simple black headstone, the most distinct of the three.
That part’s clear.
But there were already two graves there before she was buried.
The Other Two Graves Were Likely Cliegg Lars’ Parents
The most logical answer? Cliegg Lars’ parents were buried there before Shmi.
It makes sense – Tatooine is a remote desert world, and moisture farmers weren’t exactly making trips to a city graveyard. It was common to bury family members on your own land.
Since Cliegg’s family had been running the homestead for generations, the graves were probably his parents’ resting place.
And here’s something else – when Anakin stood at Shmi’s grave, Cliegg, Owen, and Beru were all still alive, standing there with him.
So none of them were buried yet. That rules out the idea that Owen and Beru were in those graves, too.
No, It’s Not Cliegg’s First Wife or a Lost Child
Sometimes people throw out the idea that maybe Cliegg’s first wife, Aika Lars, or a lost child is buried there. But neither of those theories hold up.
- Aika Lars wasn’t even on Tatooine when she died. According to official sources, she and Cliegg met on a Core World, got married, and had Owen. She died when Owen was still a kid, and Cliegg took his son back to Tatooine. If she died off-world, she wouldn’t have been buried at the farm.
- Cliegg didn’t have any other kids. Some think maybe he had another child who died young, but canon confirms he only had Owen. That smaller grave? Probably just an old, weathered headstone.
So that leaves us with the simplest and best answer – Cliegg’s parents were buried there before he even met Shmi.
The Graves Didn’t Just Disappear – They Were Removed
By the time of A New Hope, the graves were gone. Not buried under sand, not destroyed by time – removed on purpose.
Here’s what happened. After Shmi was buried, Cliegg eventually passed away and was buried next to her. The graves were still there when Luke was a kid.
But at some point, Owen and Beru removed the headstones – most likely to keep Luke’s identity hidden.
If anyone had come snooping around and found a grave with “Skywalker” on it, things could’ve ended badly.
And this part’s wild – Darth Vader himself came back to Tatooine looking for answers about Luke.
This was after their fight in The Empire Strikes Back, when he had just found out Luke was his son.
When he got to the homestead, the graves were gone. The fact that he couldn’t find anything only made him angrier.
Owen and Beru really did their best to erase any trace of Luke’s connection to his real family.
Fast forward to The Rise of Skywalker, and the Lars homestead is just an empty, abandoned ruin when Rey shows up.
She buries Luke and Leia’s lightsabers in the sand, symbolically closing out the Skywalker legacy in the place where it all started. By then, the original graves had long since disappeared.
