Stardust Study Guide

Stardust

Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Stardust is the story of a boy, Tristran, who stumbles into the land of Faerie and meets a star fallen from the heavens. The star, Yvaine, falls in love with him over the course of their adventures together as they are pursued by a cold-hearted prince and a witch eager to eat the star and claim her youth and power for herself. Tristran and Yvaine marry and Tristran is revealed as the rightful ruler of the realm, but he passes away of old age while Yvaine lingers forever.

Stardust Characters

Table of Contents
  • Tristran Thorn: The book's main character (renamed "Tristan" in the movie adaptation), a half-Faerie creature raised by his father Dunstan Thorn and stepmother Daisy, whom he believes to be his mother. Tristran foolishly promises to retrieve a fallen star for the girl he wants to be his sweetheart, Victoria (see below), and so unexpectedly finds the beautiful Yvaine.
  • Yvaine: A fallen star, which Tristan vows to find and bring to Victoria Forester. In Faerie, stars are living creatures. Yvaine appears to be immortal, but not invulnerable. She is pursued by the Lilim and the surviving sons of the Lord of Stormhold, who want her for their own reasons. When Tristan realises his love for her, he abandons his courtship of Victoria Forester, and Yvaine marries him despite their inability to have children.
  • Dunstan Thorn: Tristan's father. Main character in the beginning of the book. He visited the Wall Market to find a gift for his sweetheart Daisy Hempstock, and ended up fathering Tristan by Madame Semele's abused slave girl, Lady Una. Prior to this, he had bought a crystal snowdrop from this girl, and later gives the flower to Tristran. He is married to Daisy, who is the mother of Tristan's half-sister Louisa.
  • Victoria Forester: A resident of Wall described as "the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around". She is the daughter of Bridget Comfrey and Tommy Forester. Although Tristan is infatuated with her, she does not return his feelings and does not take his promise to bring her the fallen star seriously at first. She ultimately marries a man called Monday and thereby unwittingly frees Tristan's mother, Lady Una, from slavery.
  • The Lord of Stormhold: The eighty-first Lord of Stormhold is an old man who rules Stormhold until his death. At the beginning of Stardust , he has four dead sons (Secundus, Quartus, Quintus, and Sextus) and three living ones (Primus, Tertius, and Septimus), in addition to his long-lost daughter Una. The dead sons appear as ghostly observers, while the living sons constantly plot to kill each other to succeed their father as Lord of Stormhold.
  • Lord Septimus: The youngest and most ruthless of the Lords of Stormhold. He is, by nature, a skilled assassin and has succeeded in murdering the majority of his family.
  • Lord Primus: The oldest of the Lords of Stormhold. In comparison to his brothers, he is benevolent, compassionate and reasonable.
  • Una: A cat-eared faerie girl of great beauty who works as a slave for Madame Semele until released by an improbable occurrence that fulfills the conditions of her debt. Una suffers constant abuse at the hands of Madame Semele, being beaten and called a "slattern". When not toiling for the witch-woman, she is kept in the form of a multicoloured bird chained by a silver thread to a Gypsy wagon. She is later revealed to be the Lady Una, only daughter of the Lord of Stormhold, and Tristran's birth mother.
  • Madame Semele/Ditchwater Sal: A witch, and a member of the Sisterhood to which the Lilim belong. The witch-queen knew Semele as Ditchwater Sal when she was "a young chit of a thing". On their first encounter, Semele drugs the witch-queen's food with a magical substance that causes her to speak only the truth, thus forcing her to blurt out the truth of the fallen star. Semele plots to find the star first and restore her own youth, but the witch-queen curses her so that she will never perceive the star in any way.
  • The Lilim: Three old women of great power. The eldest of the three is called "The Witch-Queen", though they are also called by this title collectively. They are never named, as they lost their names long ago, but the eldest adopts the alias "Morwanneg" at one point. The Lilim were once the beautiful queens of a magical kingdom of witches; when it was lost beneath the sea, centuries of age caught up with them. They seek the fallen star because by consuming her heart, they will be granted centuries of youth and beauty. Using magic counteracts the effect; therefore with each spell cast by the witch-queen, she grows older and uglier. In the movie adaptation, they are named Lamia, Mormo, and Empusa, but none of their backstory is included.

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