Lyra Belacqua

Lyra Belacqua, also known as Lyra Silvertongue, is the heroine of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. In His Dark Materials Lyra is a young girl who inhabits a universe parallel to our own. Brought up in the cloistered world of Jordan College, Oxford, she finds herself embroiled in a cosmic war between Lord Asriel on one side, and a deity figure known as The Authority and his Regent, Metatron, on the other. Lyra also features prominently in the subsequent trilogy The Book of Dust. Background and life Lyra Belacqua, aged around eleven at the beginning of the trilogy, is the daughter of Lord Asriel and Marisa Coulter in a fictional Oxford, similar to our own. She is being brought up at Jordan College, where the scholars, professors and servants treat her as an adopted daughter. She has been raised believing that her parents died in an airship crash, and that Lord Asriel is her uncle; she later learns the truth from John Faa, leader of the Gyptians. Lyra spends much of her time socialising with other children of the city, sometimes harmoniously, frequently mock-violently, and often in order to avoid schoolwork. Her closest friend among the other children is a Jordan kitchen boy named Roger Parslow, who disappears early in Northern Lights. The search to find Roger, and other children, is Lyra's motivation throughout much of Northern Lights. Lyra is described as having wavy dirty-blonde hair and pale-blue eyes, and is thin and short for her age. Lyra is unruly and tomboyish and her complete disregard for her appearance and personal hygiene exasperates her adult carers. She receives a scant and haphazard education at the hands of Jordan scholars, being neither interested in study nor officially a student of the college. However, she is highly intelligent, and is particularly talented at deceiving others; she is capable of making up complex yet plausible lies on the spur of the moment. 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 ("armoured bears" in Danish) of Svalbard, by suggesting that she can become his dæmon if Iofur defeats Iorek in combat.