by Stefan Ekman
There are several differences between the domains. The starkest distinction between Faerie and mundanity is that in Faerie, magic works. Other differences include disparity in time and season, space and geography. When Tristran enters Faerie, “[h]e felt as if he were walking into summer” (70 [95]), leaving the late October of mundanity behind. The harvest moon that shines down on him suggests a late September that, as he travels deeper into Faerie, becomes more springlike (73 [101]).
Crossing the border thus becomes a movement back through the seasons, but the relation between Faerie time and mundane time is not simply a question of being out of sync. The relationship itself is indeterminable. Some time periods are approximately of the same length in both realms: in Wall, nine months pass from Tristran’s conception until the basket with the newborn boy is left at the gate, and the eighteen years that pass as he grows up in Wall correspond to Madame Semele’s “nearly twenty years” in Faerie (113 [158]). On the other hand, there is a distinct impression that Tristran’s adventure in Faerie takes much less time than the twenty-five or so weeks that pass in mundanity. With this temporal slipperiness, Stardust joins a rich tradition of folktales and fantasy texts.25 Under “Time in Faerie” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Langford observes that “[v]isitors to Faerie find that time there is subjective, disengaged from real-world clocks and calendars.”26 He further suggests that there are two types of relations between Faerie time and mundane time. Either a given time interval in Faerie is longer (often much longer) than the corresponding interval in mundanity or it is (much) shorter. Years in Faerie hence equal hours in mundanity or vice versa. The first type, which according to Langford suggests a time polder, is discussed further with regard to polders. The second type is ultimately a way of bringing characters into a more or less distant future. Stardust’s Faerie does not fall neatly into either of Langford’s categories but has a time flow that denies a simple relation to the time flow of mundanity.
This temporal slipperiness is mirrored in an equally slippery geography and fanciful inhabitants. “Maps of Faerie are unreliable, and may not be depended upon” (61 [84]), the reader is told, and the narrator explains why:
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, containing every manner of landscape and terrain). Here, truly, there be Dragons. (61 [84])
This unmappable land is, in other words, a land where imagination is real, a land not of proof and evidence but of imagination and belief. The very notion of maps is anathema to its geography. “Here be Dragons” doubly supports the idea that Faerie is a land of the imagined. First, this phrase alludes to the monsters and descriptions of monsters found on some medieval maps, descriptions that “served to fill up embarrassing empty spaces in unknown regions, a custom which went back to Roman times and forward to the sixteenth century.”27 These monsters, which were never found by explorers, are given a refuge in Faerie together with the lands in which they were supposedly residing. But use of the “Here be Dragons” phrase also suggests that not everything is known and that fancy rules Faerie. It is, in fact, a common misconception that the expression can be found on medieval maps. Its only occurrence is on the early sixteenth-century Lenox globe, where the phrase is given in Latin (Hic sunt dracones).28 “Here, truly, there be Dragons” thus brings the monsters of medieval maps into Faerie, but it also becomes a comment on how, even today, people believe in what amounts to fables.
Despite its everyday, solid appearance, the wall from which the town has taken its name does not follow the rules of any common or garden wall. It is “a high grey rock wall” that “is old, built of rough, square lumps of hewn granite, and it comes from the woods and goes back to the woods once more” (7 [3]). This brief description conveys an impression of solidity and antiquity: this is a border that cannot be breached or crossed, and that is how it has always been. The wall is also conspicuously delimited: it appears from the depths of the woods and returns again, surfacing, as it were, briefly at Wall. Rather than being a long border along which the two realms lie side by side, the wall is only a point of contact where they happen to touch. Although it is never mentioned, the impression is that the wall cannot be followed; the circumference of Faerie cannot be traced. This restricted contact is underlined by the bird’s-eye view in the illustration on page 209, where the wall is seen coming out of the trees, snaking along the margin of a meadow with Wall on its far side, and disappearing in the forest again. Beyond that, the woods of Faerie and mundanity cannot be told apart, although a flying ship and Stormhold keep on the horizon imply that the viewer is actually looking out from the Faerie side and that everything except the small portion of Wall is part of Faerie.
As in the case of Brust’s Deathgate Falls, the border in Stardust is not a distinct line between two realms. Some of the land on the far side of the wall also belongs to the border, with a crosshatch stretching from the wall to where Faerie truly begins. Beyond the wall is a meadow; beyond the meadow a small stream; and on the other side of the stream a forest. While the rules of Faerie work all the way up to the wall (the star, Yvaine, can come with Tristran that far without turning into a meteorite), Faerie proper begins in the forest. It is among its trees that inhabitants of Faerie can be glimpsed (7 [3]), and that is where the Market is held. There, October starts changing into summer (70 [95]), and when Tristran sets off in search of the star, it is not until he has crossed the meadow and the stream that he finds himself in Faerie:
[O]nce in the woods at the top of the hill he was surprised to realize the moon was shining brightly down on him through a gap in the trees: surprised because the moon had set an hour before; and doubly surprised, because the moon that had set had been a slim, sharp silver crescent, and the moon that shone down on him now was a huge, golden Harvest moon, full, and glowing, and deeply colored. (51 [71–72])
Not until he has passed the meadow and the stream is it mentioned—but then twice—how Tristran walks into Faerie (51 [72–73]). Rather than a single border consisting of the wall, with mundanity on one side and Faerie on the other, there are two borders and a transitional zone between them. The meadow, in other words, is where Faerie and mundanity overlap.
The sentry on duty by the wall draws attention to why the wall is guarded. Leading through the wall to the meadow crosshatch and on to Faerie is a single opening. The gateway is “an opening about six feet in width” guarded on the town side by two townsmen with wooden cudgels (7 [3–4]). That it is the single possible crossing is made plain not only by the many travelers who come to Wall for the Market but also by the comment that “the Market at Wall […] is too close to the world on the other side of the wall” (158 [235]). The diligence with which the border crossing is guarded by the men of Wall raises questions. First of all, against whom do they keep guard—that is, who is prevented from crossing? Is this a self-serving act of protection from some real or imagined danger, or altruistic protection of something or someone? Second, on whose orders (and authority) do they keep guard? These two questions provide a basis for understanding the most central issue about the border in Stardust: why do guards monitor the way between mundanity and Faerie so assiduously? The answers to these questions, in no way obvious, reveal interesting facts about the relationship between the two domains.
From the guards’ instructions, it can be inferred that passage from mundanity to Faerie must be prevented. The main function of the guard, it is said, “is to prevent the town’s children from going through the opening, into the meadow and beyond.” Solitary ramblers and visitors to Wall are also discouraged (7 [4]). Travelers who have come for the Market are similarly kept from crossing until the Market opens. There is only one instruction: “It is the task of the guards to prevent anything or anyone from coming through from the village, by any
means possible; and if it was not possible, then they must raise the village” (49 [68]; my emphasis). These instructions can hardly be aimed only at keeping some children from getting into trouble. “[A]nything or anyone” is certainly unequivocal, and would include not only people and animals but also whatever fairy creatures might be returning after a sojourn in mundanity or who might flee from the encroaching power of science and technology. Most frightening in its implication is the order that the guards prevent the crossing “by any means possible.” Two grown men armed with long cudgels can easily do serious damage. Whoever issued that instruction is willing to go to any lengths to stop any crossing—from the village side. The seemingly all-inclusive command29 is modified to include only whatever comes “from the village.” It is entry into Faerie that is prohibited. When Tristran returns after his adventure, he is forced to debate this point with the guards on duty. He insists that the letter of the instruction is only to stop passage into Faerie, whereas the guard, Mr. Brown, claims that the spirit is to stop any crossing of the border. The reason this detail is not part of the guard instruction, Mr. Brown argues, is that no one apart from Tristran has ever tried to cross the border from the Faerie side. Indeed, so certain are the guards of this fact that they stand with their backs to Faerie, and although they are said to stand on either side of the opening (7 [3–4]), they are repeatedly portrayed in the opening. Faerie denizens are simply not expected to cross into mundanity and are trusted not to threaten the guards who, apparently, do keep “anything and anyone” out of the Faerie domain.
It is hinted that the watch is organized by Wall’s innkeeper, who possibly hails from, and acts as an agent for, Faerie. On the whole, the instructions to the guards suggest that they were issued mainly with Faerie’s best interest at heart. It is never made explicit who the master gatekeeper in Wall is; but Mr. Bromios, the innkeeper, appears to carry ultimate responsibility (see 50 [70]; 191 [294–95]), and he is also referred to as an authority on earlier Markets (9 [8]). There are several clues as to the innkeeper’s identity, the foremost of which is that his name, Bromios, is one of the names of Dionysus.30 This tallies with his olive skin, the good wine he serves, his implied longevity, and “items of antique statuary, and clay pots” in his room (192 [297]). The innkeeper’s divine identity is further corroborated by the stick entwined with bronze ivy that hangs on his wall (192 [297]; also see ill. pp. 193, 199). This stick closely resembles a thyrsus, a fennel staff topped with ivy, which is one of Dionysus’ attributes.31 The innkeeper in Wall, who apparently controls the entrance to Faerie, is in other words closely associated with the Greco-Roman deity of wine and revelry.
Related to Bromios is the Fellowship of the Castle, a group that acts to protect Faerie and could, conceivably, be behind the watch at the gate. The connection between the Fellowship and the innkeeper is the hairy little man who calls himself “Charmed.” Once in Faerie, Tristran is immediately found by the little man and, at the time, their meeting seems like a coincidence to the boy. The reader, however, can identify Charmed as the man who shared the byre with Tristran’s father, Dunstan, almost eighteen years previously, especially by his comment that Dunstan once did him a good turn (94 [131]).
There is more to Charmed than this, though. Even more than Bromios, he seems quietly to watch over Dunstan and Tristran. Even when he is not mentioned in the text, he frequently appears in the illustrations, often at crucial moments.32 His timely appearance therefore suggests that he was actually waiting for the boy. This explanation is not only possible but probable: in the bloodthirsty serewood, Charmed tells Tristran that he could “castle” but that “there’s no one I could castle with’d be any better off here than we are” (76 [107–8]). At the time, the expression “to castle” appears only to mean some mysterious changing of places (as king and castle can change places in chess). Not until Captain Alberic explains to Tristran that the hairy little man is a member of the Fellowship of the Castle does the expression acquire a wider meaning as an early indication of this secret society. Little else is said about the Fellowship, except that Tristran might have joined later and helped break the power of the Unseelie Court (212 [332]). Although the Unseelie Court is never described in Stardust, it is traditionally the court of wicked Faerie creatures; fighting it makes the Fellowship come across as being on the side of good (something the reader is likely to have assumed, as only “good” characters are revealed to be members). This also suggests that they work to protect Faerie. The captain tells Tristran that the hairy little man is “not the only member of the fellowship with an interest in your return to Wall” (165 [244–45]). Who else would want Tristran returned to Wall—that is, out of Faerie? Given his probable connection to Faerie, Bromios is the most likely candidate, and indeed, the innkeeper can be seen drinking amicably with Charmed at the Market (199). The Fellowship of the Castle thus comes across as a likely principal behind Bromios and the diligent watch kept at Wall.
Mundanity threatens Faerie, which explains the rigorous guard duty. People from mundanity are kept out of Faerie on Faerie authority. Although dealings with Faerie beings are traditionally perilous for mundane people, and although magic can leak from Faerie to mundanity, it is Faerie that is at risk when mundanity’s scientific hegemony threatens to spread across the border. The Market as an arena for regular meetings between Faerie and mundanity emphasizes trade as the driving force behind their interactions. According to folktales and fantasy stories, however, Faerie beings generally have the upper hand when dealing with mundane people, or at least usually attempt to trick them. This sinister side of the Market is further alluded to by the presence of goblin sellers from Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market of 1862 (pp. 20–21), where neither purveyors nor goods are beneficial to the consumer. (The goblins’ appearance recalls Laurence Housman’s illustrations of the 1893 edition of Rossetti’s poem. See my note 36, in this chapter.) In this way, the Market reminds the reader of how perilous Faerie can actually be. The opposition between the domains is also evident in the opposition between science and magic, which is brought out from the very beginning of the story. The two scientists, Morse and Draper, and the secular rulers, the queen and the prime minister, would all smile disdainfully at anyone who had mentioned magic or Faerie (8 [5]). Yet, at the border, mundane science meets the magical Faerie. Magic and technology cannot coexist: the former appears to overcome the latter. When the wind blows from Faerie, it carries the smells of Faerie along with the propensity for magic, “and at those times there were strange colors seen in the flames in the fireplaces of the village, and when that wind blew the simplest of devices, from lucifer matches to lantern-slides, would no longer function” (40 [54]). Magic gives the impression of being the stronger force, but this is just an illusion. The scientific knowledge of mundanity is simply too inimical to much of Faerie. When explorers prove the nonexistence of mythical lands, these lands take refuge in Faerie; were the fallen star ever to enter mundanity, she would cease to be a person and become what science has “proven” her to be: a lump of ferrous rock.
In mundanity, magic and wonder are crowded out by science and technology. This dynamic at a time of massive technological breakthrough in the heyday of British industrialization brings into focus the disappearance of magic from mundanity. Such a process of disappearance, or diminishing, Clute refers to as thinning.33 “In low fantasy, crosshatch fantasy, etc., rarely does the world provide venues unthreatened by one or more of a huge range of diminishings or dismissals of the old order,” he remarks before listing examples including “the desiccations of the secular and of technology,” the draining of magic, and the expulsion of the inhabitants of Faerie.34 Whereas Stardust’s Faerie is reasonably safe behind the wall, mundanity has been suffering from thinning for an unspecified while. As is typical of quest or portal fantasies, according to Farah Mendlesohn, the story “begins with a sense of stability that is revealed to be the stability of a thinned land”;35 but rather than dealing with the thinning, Stardust pushes
it into the background. Even so, the thinning of mundanity is engaged occasionally: imaginary countries, once they are proved not to exist, are subtracted from mundanity’s geography and added to Faerie’s. The illustrations of the Market (in particular on pp. 20–21) suggest that legendary and imaginary characters also relocate to Faerie.36 The Market, which now takes place every nine years, once occurred annually (9 [8]), and Madame Semele claims that fewer visitors come to each Market. Her pessimistic prophesy that it will last “[a]nother forty, fifty, sixty years at the most” (197 [306]) is proved wrong, though. The present-day narrator explains already in the beginning of the story how, even today, the guard at the wall is relaxed every nine years for the Market (7 [4–5]).
Where magic is apparently a property of the air (or at least something that travels with the wind), the thinning of mundanity is a frame of mind. Just as disbelief can destroy the power of a story, it is a force that can threaten the very existence of a magical realm. Thus, only people who would not bring scientific rationality, and thinning, into Faerie are allowed to enter. Unlike the thinning in The Lord of the Rings, which is tied to the leaving of the elves, or Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides (1988), in which iron drives the magic away, scientific thought (such as the advancements of Draper and Morse) destroys magic in Stardust. This is why not only the scientists but also the secular leaders would treat suggestions of magic with disdain—they all subscribe to the rationality brought by science, a rationality inimical to Faerie. In “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien points out how destructive disbelief can be: “The moment disbelief arises, the spell [of the Secondary World] is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”37 The spell is broken; magic fails, Faerie (or whatever secondary world the story concerns) collapses. This theme has been treated repeatedly in fantasy fiction. Religious belief is in focus in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods (1992), wherein the true belief of the worshippers is required to keep their gods in existence, just as little children’s belief in fairies is needed to keep Tinker Bell alive in J. M. Barrie’s drama Peter Pan (1904). Disbelief brings Hell to an end, cancels death, and threatens the existence of reality in John Wyndham’s “Confidence Trick” (1954). The most prominent example in the genre, however, is Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (1979; trans. The Neverending Story 1983), in which the entire world of Phantásien (Fantastica) faces destruction unless the diegetic reader shows belief in it.
