Character List

Tristran Thorn: The book's main character (renamed "Tristan" in the movie adaptation), a half-Faerie creature raised by his father and stepmother. Tristran foolishly promises to retrieve a fallen star for his sweetheart, Victoria (see below), and so unexpectedly finds the beautiful Yvaine.

Yvaine: A fallen star, which Tristran 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 Stormhold, who want her for their own reasons. When Tristran realizes his love for her and abandons his courtship of Victoria Forester, Yvaine marries him despite their inability to interbreed.

Dunstan Thorn: Tristran's father. Main character in the beginning of the book. He visited the Wall Market to find a gift for his sweetheart Daisy, and ended up fathering Tristran 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.

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 very beautiful, she is somewhat proud and dimwitted. She ultimately marries a man called Monday and thereby unwittingly frees Tristran'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 in order 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.

Lady 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. Lady 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, the 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.