Background and Life
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 Northern Lights.
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. 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.
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