For more than three-and-a-half decades hundreds of writers and artists expanded the Star Wars universe beyond the story told by George Lucas in Episodes I thru VI. However with the very real possibility that Episode VII would undo that Expanded Universe, especially in the period after Return of the Jedi, Lucasfilm announced on 25th April 2014 that all previous Expanded Universe stories would now be known as Star Wars Legends. In essence Legends stories now have a non-canonical status within the Star Wars universe meaning that their stories may or may not have happened.
From that date, all new stories, approved by the Lucasfilm Story Group, and including Episodes I thru VI and The Clone Wars film and TV series ("the immovable objects of Star Wars history"), now form a new, official continuity - what this website terms the Star Wars Saga*.

This means that there are now two Star Wars timelines or chronologies. The first is the official continuity: those stories approved by the Story Group. The second is the Legends timeline.
Since the official continuity only constitutes stories told between The Phantom Menace (32 years before Episode IV: A New Hope) and The Rise of Skywalker (35 years after) its chronology is just 67 years long. By comparison, after 37 years and around 700 published stories and with stories set as far apart as 25,000 years before the Battle of Yavin (the destruction of the first Death Star in Episode IV: A New Hope) to almost 140 years after it. As such, the Legends timeline is subdivided into Eras of Adventure to make it more manageable.

• Star Wars Saga is not a Lucasfilm endorsed term to describe the new official continuity, it was created by this website to differentiate between Legends stories (the former Expanded Universe) and new canonical stories.

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