Yoda is the Grand Master of the Jedi Order, introduced in Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back (1980), performed by Frank Oz. His species and homeworld have never been named in any official story — a deliberate Lucasfilm policy, maintained for more than four decades — and this dossier will not guess at either.
Teacher and administrator
The films show two Yodas and mostly decline to reconcile them. There is the swamp hermit who teaches Luke by contradiction, and there is the Council chairman of the prequels, presiding over an Order that has become a general staff. The books are more interested in the second. He is the person with the longest view in the room and he still does not see the Sith standing in front of him.
In the Clone Wars fiction
The animated series and its associated novels give him the era's most uncomfortable material: a monastic pacifist commanding a slave army. Watching him rationalise that is more interesting than any lightsaber duel he is given.
The High Republic Yoda
The High Republic publishing initiative put Yoda two hundred years earlier, at the height of the Order's confidence, and used him sparingly and well — usually as a teacher of children, which is where the character is warmest and least strategic.
Reading note
Yoda is the franchise's clearest test of whether you read the Jedi as heroes or as an institution. The books that take him seriously as the latter — Master & Apprentice is the clearest example — are consistently the better books.
