Stardust

“Had you mentioned Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps, for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.”

In his introduction, Neil Gaiman states that he wanted the book to sound as if it was written in 1922; however, the narrator of the novel is looking back on events that have already happened. In this moment the narrator solidifies the events of the story as being set in the mid-19th century. Here they illustrate a discordance between science and magic, with writers and artists like Charles Dickens struggling to bridge the two.

“Dunstan touched it to the iron nail on the cottage door, checking for faerie gold, then he bowed low to the gentleman and walked off into the rain.”

Dunstan Thorn is portrayed as practical and level-headed. To the people of Wall, Faerie is not a superstition but a reality of life. This small detail illustrates how the villagers have grown up with these precautions and utilize them in their daily lives, seeing them not as polarizing belief systems but as common sense.

“[…] the village folk, who were often tempted by the foods being sold to the folk from Beyond the Wall but had been told by their grandparents, who got it from their grandparents, that it was deeply, utterly wrong to eat fairy food, to eat fairy fruit, to drink fairy water and sip fairy wine.”

This marks one of the few times the text uses the spelling “fairy” instead of “faerie” or “Faerie.” Notably, it’s used not once but four times consecutively. Because this moment is referencing stories in the “long ago” rather than the “here and now,” it may represent a divide between the fairies of hearsay and legend against the faeries of the very real world just beyond the Wall.

“I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience.”

Prophecies and convoluted promises are a mainstay of the fairy-tale genre, so the author utilizes that trope in this moment. The speaker, Una, shows no sense of despair over this seemingly impossible condition; instead, she trusts in the magic of her world to one day bring this about, even if she doesn’t know exactly what form it will take. By the end of the novel, the reader understands this prophecy to mean that Yvain, being a star, is the moon’s daughter and that the space between her coming to Earth and the resolution of the novel is about a week since the impossibility of a two-Mandy week is revealed to be the moment when Mr. Monday finally gets his Mrs. Monday in Victoria accepting his proposal.

“The guards on the wall were for people, not cats; and Tristran, who was twelve by this time, never saw the blue cat again. He was inconsolable for a while. His father came into his bedroom one night and sat at the end of his bed, saying gruffly, ‘She’ll be happier, over the wall. With her own kind.’”

This moment both parallels and foreshadows Tristran’s own journey “over the wall” where he finds his true purpose and sense of self. His father’s acceptance of the cat’s disappearance also highlights his understanding of the two lands and their relationship, and his knowledge that one day he will lose his son in the same way.

“Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then—our cities and towns cast too much light into the night—but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.”

Yvaine’s appearance is foreshadowed early in the novel as Tristran looks up at the stars in the sky—not knowing his future queen is among them. This moment again brings the narrator to the forefront, rather than hiding them behind the events of the plot. This is a style that was more popular around the time the novel is set and has largely fallen out of fashion (contemporary fiction favors invisible narrators); however, this was a deliberate choice on the author’s part to convey a specific time, place, and literary tradition.

“East. His father nodded. There were two easts—east to the next country, through the forest, and East, the other side of the wall. Dunstan Thorn knew without asking to which his son was referring.”

There are several places where the novel uses focused capitalization as a literary device to draw attention to an idea, such as “Heart’s Desire.” In Dunstan Thorn’s internalized thoughts, he uses this capitalization to differentiate two related ideas. While highlighting the author’s use of this literary device, the moment also highlights more of Dunstan’s character, his acceptance of the world around him, and his relationship with his son.

“But Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is now, by the time that we come to write of it, a most huge place indeed, constraining every manner of landscape and terrain). Here, truly, there be Dragons.”

This exposition accomplishes several things in the novel: It allows the landscape of Faerie to encompass any and all fairy tales and fictional stories, creating a world where truly anything is possible; it allows the world to take shape within the reader’s mind, stripping it of narrative limitation; and it invites the potential for Neil Gaiman’s other works to be considered part of the same universe.

“He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.”

This is the first hint of personification in the stars, which lays the foundation for Yvaine’s appearance shortly after. The moment also symbolizes the gradual broadening of Tristran’s world as he begins to see the wide expanse of life outside his home village; throughout his journey, he goes from believing himself to be the center of his world to seeing himself as one small part of limitless possibility.

“The only ones who ever come [into Faerie] from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad.”

This flippant comment reveals a much broader truth about Victorian and pre-Victorian fairy literature. Countless sagas and ballads (some of which are featured in Charles Vess’s The Book of Ballads, the artist who illustrated Stardust) feature all three of these character archetypes crossing over into Faerie. In this moment, Gaiman acknowledges the novel’s literary heritage and allows the novel and its predecessors to exist in one world.

“They said nothing: had alliances been possible, Tertius might have sided with Primus against Septimus. But there were no alliances that could be made.”

This small moment reveals several layers of the Stormhold brothers’ family relationships and upbringing. Tertius considers his best maneuvers as well as the nature of each brother and where to best place his energies. However, the line also reveals the way the brothers were raised to eschew any sort of love and compassion within their family, knowing that they would one day be set against each other. It reveals a snapshot of what their lives could have been under other circumstances.

“The lion clambered off the prone body of the unicorn and began to pad, silently, about the clearing, its head raised high.”

This section of the novel utilizes the symbols of the lion and the unicorn, motifs that have echoed throughout literature and history. Notably, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass includes a battle scene between the two beasts. Traditionally, the lion symbolizes England, and the Unicorn symbolizes Scotland, with the lion’s victory representing England’s dominance over the United Kingdom. Here, because of the unicorn’s relationship with Yvaine, the battle may represent the way Faerie has been pushed out by the modern world.

“‘You may call me Morwanneg,’ said the witch instead. It was, she reflected, almost a joke (for Morwanneg means wave of the sea, and her true name was long since drowned and lost beneath the cold ocean).”

The origins, and even the true nature, of the Lilim are a mystery. Mythologically, Lilim are believed to be children of the demon-goddess Lilith. Here, however, the witch gives herself a Welsh-inspired name that alludes to creatures of Celtic myth. A variety of cultures feature demonic women who are reborn from the sea after a tragic or traumatizing loss, such as the Hispanic La Llorona.

“Tristran felt there was something almost sacrilegious about the idea of riding a unicorn: it was not a horse, did not subscribe to any of the ancient pacts between Man and Horse. There was a wildness in its black eyes and a twisting spring to its step which was dangerous and untamed.”

Here the narrator again uses targeted capitalization to create a bigger idea out of a smaller one. Tristran internally uses the words “Man” and “Horse” to encompass not only the entire species but their entire relationship and understanding of each other in the world he knows. The unicorn is utterly at odds with this foundation, which supports the idea of the unicorn as a metaphor for Faerie itself.

“Things inanimate have always been more difficult to change than things animate. Their souls are older and stupider and harder to persuade.”

The idea of Physical and Spiritual Transformation occurs repeatedly throughout the novel, and here the witch alludes to the relationship between physical form and the soul within (an idea echoed by Lady Una later on). While she sees their souls as “stupid,” it is more likely that inanimate things simply have a solid and deeply ingrained sense of self—a confidence and comfort in their own shape as their inner truth that people, who are constantly searching and questioning, do not.

“The burning golden heart of a star at peace is so much finer than the flickering heart of a little frightened star…But even the heart of a star who is afraid and scared is better by far than no heart at all.”

Yvaine is constantly objectified across the novel by the numerous parties who have taken an interest in her. Here, the witch examines her heart as if it were a commodity past its sell-by date, reflecting that it’s better than nothing. Like Tristran’s initial assessment of Yvaine, this strips her of her humanity and turns her into something to be won.

“Tristran was relieved to be back on something attached to solid ground, and yet, in some way he could never have put into words, he felt disappointed, as if, when his feet touched the earth once more, he had lost something very fine.”

Tristran’s experience of disembarking the ship mirrors the experience of closing a powerful book and leaving its story behind. Although he is still in Faerie, he has passed an internal threshold and left the ship a different person than who he once was. The “something” he lost refers to the adventure and immediacy of his experiences with the ship’s crew but also the innocence and youth he has shed along his travels.

“He wished he was more of a magician—he had some of the locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now…”

This small moment is buried in the text but foreshadows a major reveal later in the novel. Septimus references his “locating ability,” which the reader has already seen displayed in Tristran. This hints at the truth about Tristran’s heritage and the path his life will ultimately take.

“He could almost taste in his mouth the memory of Mr. Bromios’s best ale, although he realized, with a guilty start, he had forgotten the color of Victoria Forester’s eyes.”

Here Tristran begins to understand the difference between Love, Infatuation, and Desire. Upon his homecoming, the memory that lives most vividly within him is of friendship and community rather than what he has believed to be true love. This illustrates the way he has grown and matured over his journey.

“Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it.”

Physical and Spiritual Transformation, and the connection between the two, is a common thread throughout the story. Having spent several decades with Madame Semele, Una has likely witnessed a variety of transformations, including the one Tristran was subject to. Her observation of physical transformation as a manifestation of the inner self makes the novel’s transformations, including the looming threat of Yvaine’s metamorphosis over the wall, more emotionally powerful.

“And then they were at Tristran’s old home, where his sister waited for him, and there was a steaming breakfast on the stove and on the table, prepared for him, lovingly, by the woman he had always believed to be his mother.”

The return home is an essential story beat in the classic quest archetype (for example, Frodo’s return to the Shire in The Lord of the Rings). Tristran’s return to the ordinary world he knew is necessary to complete his journey; however, this point in the quest archetype always sees the hero emerge changed by their experiences. The final line of this moment emphasizes Tristran’s expanded knowledge and worldview, highlighting the fact that he can never truly return home to the same life he once had.

“Mark my words, soon enough this market will be just a memory. There’s other markets and other marketplaces, I am thinking. This market’s time is almost over. Another forty, fifty, sixty years at the most, and it will be gone for good.”

Sixty years after this moment takes the novel to roughly the 1920s, or the time from which the retrospective narrative is being told. It’s also notable that during this time the world would see a rise in industry and science, effectively pushing old beliefs and otherworldly trading systems into myth and legend. This poignant moment highlights the slow decline of magic as the world moves into the modern age.

“Oil lamps and gas lamps and candles glowed in the windows of the houses of the village. To Tristran, then, they seemed as distant and unknowable as the world of the Arabian Nights.”

By this point in the story, Tristran has undergone a complete transformation and embraced his true potential and self. Where the story began with him yearning for the other side of the Wall, and Faerie representing the great unknown, here his own home has become that unknown in its turn. This moment shows that a great divide has risen between Tristran and his home village forever.