Stone of Farewell

Stone of Farewell Review

Stone of Farewell is the second volume of Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy, and it benefits from the structural freedom that middle volumes have when the world has been established: Williams can move his multiple narrative threads forward without the burden of exposition, and the result is a volume with more momentum and more complexity than its predecessor.

The storylines have fragmented: Simon is traveling with a small group through the wilderness, slowly becoming something more than the kitchen boy he was; Josua, the legitimate prince, is gathering the remnants of the resistance at the ruins of Sesuad’ra; Miriamele is navigating court politics in the south; and the Sithi — the ancient, semi-divine beings who preceded humans in Osten Ard — are making their slow, ambivalent decisions about involvement in human affairs.

The Sithi sections are the series’ most original contribution and the element that has aged best. Williams was thinking about what a genuinely ancient, genuinely non-human civilization would be like — how it would perceive time differently, what human actions would and would not seem significant to beings who have lived for millennia, what their architecture and culture would be like if they had not changed significantly in thousands of years. The answers he arrives at are genuinely alien rather than merely exotic, and they do the work that the best fantasy world-building should do: they make the world feel larger than the story.

Simon’s growth continues at the pace Williams established in the first book — gradual, uneven, authentic. The boy who could barely boil water in The Dragonbone Chair is becoming something, but not easily or quickly. Stone of Farewell is a bridge book in the best sense: it arrives somewhere worth reaching while making clear that the destination is still ahead.

Simon Snowlock

The former scullion has earned a new name. Having helped wound the great dragon Igjarjuk with the black sword Thorn on the slopes of the Urmsheim, Simon emerges from the mountains marked — a white streak in his hair and the sobriquet “Snowlock” — but the change is more than cosmetic. Williams refuses the cheap shortcut of the instant chosen-one; Simon remains impulsive, frightened, and frequently wrong, and his maturation is measured in small, hard-won increments. Much of this volume’s warmth comes from his time among the Qanuc trolls in their mountaintop city, in the company of the diminutive, wolf-riding troll Binabik and the Sithi prince Jiriki, relationships that ground the sprawling plot in real affection. Simon’s arc is the spine that holds the fragmented narrative together.

The Civil War of the Immortals

The novel’s richest material lies with the Sithi. Williams takes us at last into their hidden heartland, the secret summer-city of Jao é-Tinukai’i, where the near-immortal race has withdrawn from human affairs into a timeless, melancholy seclusion. The central question they face is wrenching: the great enemy, the undead Storm King Ineluki, is their own kin — a Sithi prince consumed by grief and vengeance after humanity’s wars drove his people to ruin. To oppose him is to wage civil war against their own blood. Williams’s portrait of a deathless people debating whether to re-enter a history they had renounced is the series’ most original achievement, and it gives the looming conflict a tragic depth that purely human stakes could not.

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

The trilogy’s title names its central engine: three swords of legend that prophecy suggests are the only weapons capable of opposing the Storm King. Thorn, the star-forged blade Simon helped win, is now in the hands of the resistance. Sorrow, Ineluki’s own terrible sword, was forged in the act that destroyed him. And the third, the iron blade of the long-dead King John — Bright-Nail — remains to be recovered. Stone of Farewell deepens the mystery of how these weapons fit the prophecy without yet revealing the whole design, and Williams plants the seeds of the famous structural twist that the final volume, To Green Angel Tower, will spring. It is patient, deliberate plotting that rewards readers willing to trust the long game.

The Scattered Fellowship

Part of what makes the volume feel so large is how widely Williams disperses his cast. Prince Josua, the one-handed claimant to the Hayholt, leads the broken remnants of a resistance toward the titular Stone of Farewell — Sesuad’ra, an ancient Sithi site that becomes the gathering-place for everyone who still opposes the mad High King Elias and the power behind him. Princess Miriamele travels south in disguise, learning how little her royal upbringing prepared her for the world’s hard edges. In the far west, in the Hernystiri mountains, the grieving Maegwin descends toward visions and madness. These separate threads do not meet in this book, which is the standard frustration of a middle volume, but each is laying track toward the convergence the finale will deliver. Williams is playing a deliberately long game, and readers who give him their patience are repaid in the third volume’s payoff.

Where It Stands

Stone of Farewell is a strong middle volume that does exactly what the best second acts should: it deepens character, widens the world, and tightens the noose of the central conflict while withholding resolution. Its weaknesses are the standard costs of the form — the multiple plotlines do not converge here, which can make the book feel diffuse, and a few secondary threads draw more attention than their payoff justifies. But the Sithi material alone makes it essential, and Simon’s steady, believable growth keeps the human heart beating beneath the epic machinery. Williams’s trilogy is one of the foundational works of modern epic fantasy — a direct influence on George R.R. Martin, who has cited it — and this volume is where its ambitions come fully into view.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A panoramic, deepening middle volume whose alien, melancholy Sithi remain the series’ most original creation and whose patient plotting rewards the long game.

Reading Guides

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