Q&As About 'Star Wars': In A New Hope, why does Obi-Wan call Lord Vader 'Darth' as if it's a first name and not a title?

In A New Hope, why does Obi-Wan call Lord Vader 'Darth' as if it's a first name and not a title?

Lord Darth Vader enters the captured Rebel Blockade Runner after its capture by an Imperial Star Destroyer above the desert planet Tatooine. © 1977 20th Century Fox Film Corp. 

You have to understand that in 1977 when Star Wars was originally released, Darth Vader was the character’s given name. It wasn’t a “Sith” alias; it was just a name, on par with “Luke Skywalker” or “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Now, in George Lucas’s original screenplay and the novelization, Vader is said to be a Dark Lord of the Sith, but 42 years ago, audiences and readers were not told what the Sith were or even how many of them existed in the Star Wars universe during the Empire’s reign. The most information that was given to us - and that was in Alan Dean Foster’s novelization - was that “fear always followed in the wake of a Dark Lord’s passing.” No details about Darth Bane’s Rule of Two or that the Sith Order had been “extinct” for nearly 1000 years were given then; those came later.

Fan art depicting two Darths: Sidious (Emperor Palpatine) and Vader (Anakin Skywalker)

The notion that Sith Lords often had dual identities - such as Sheev Palpatine = Darth Sidious and Count Dooku = Darth Tyranus - was retroactively added by George Lucas in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he revisited his space fantasy tale set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ in the Prequel Trilogy. Once every onscreen Sith Lord called himself Darth This or Darth That, ancillary materials such as The Star Wars Visual Dictionary or The Star Wars Encyclopedia “explained” that Darth is not a first name; it’s a portmanteau of “Dark Lord of the Sith.”