Tars Tarkas is a fictional character in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. A great warrior and leader among his people, he possesses a sense of compassion and empathy uncharacteristic of his race. In the first novel, A Princess of Mars, with the help of the newly arrived Earth man John Carter, he becomes Jeddak, or king, of the Tharks. Tarkas is the first Barsoomian John Carter encounters when he appears on Mars. When Tarkas discovers Carter inspecting the Tharks' incubator, he attempts to kill Carter. The attempt fails, and Tarkas instead takes Carter prisoner and transports him back to the nearby dead city, in which a group of Tharks have taken up temporary residence. When Carter kills one of the Tharks in combat, Tarkas informs him he has gained his opponent's rank and possessions. Over the course of the next weeks, Carter comes to respect Tarkas for his abilities as a warrior and statesman. Carter also discovers that Tarkas has a secret: long ago he fellin love and had a child with his lover, Gozava, two actions punishable by death in the Tharks' culture. Tarkas and Gozava hidthe egg and incubated it in secret. Tarkas was ordered away on a long military expedition, and when the child finally hatched, Gozava managed to mingle her child with the newborn children from the communal incubator. Gozava's maternity was discovered, and she was tortured and killed by the Tharkian chieftain Tal Hajus for the crime of childbearing. However, even under torture she refused to reveal the name of the child's father. The daughter's name is Sola, and she befriends Carter and tells him the story of her birth and the identity of her father. When he learns this, Carter's sympathy and admiration for Tarkas increases, and he resolves to do all he can to help. Over time, the two become friends, and Carter, after escaping the Tharks in the course of his pursuit of Dejah Thoris, returns to them and helps engineer a duel between Tarkas and Tal Hajus, the Jeddak of Thark. Tarkas wins the duel, and according to Tharkian law becomes Jeddak. In exchange for Carter's help, Tarkas becomes one of Carter's closest allies. He appears in a number of the other novels in the series.
Film
Tars Tarkas was played by Matt Lasky in the 2009 direct-to-DVDfilmPrincess of Mars.
Willem Dafoe portrays Tarkas in the 2012 filmJohn Carter.
Tributes
The Finnish filmmaker Aarne Tarkas was an aficionado of the John Carter books and took his name from Tars Tarkas. In Kage Baker's novel The Empress of Mars, human colonists on Mars have a Christmas-like celebration, and a settler appears costumed as "Uncle Tars Tarkas", giving gifts to children as if he were Father Christmas or Santa Claus. The character TARS in the film Interstellar was named after Tars Tarkas.
