It took just the right amount of time for me, 5 minutes or so, to think of the 3 buried mercenaries (sellswords) as the starting point. It then took me about 3 trips back and forth to that 4th grave before finally finding the additional message that was "barely legible". I was really feeling proud of myself, and had a tremendous sense of accomplishment in what was clearly turning out to be a challenging riddle.
Unfortunately, this hard-to-find clue was too hard to follow given the map and the non-descript terrain.
I, too, thought that an "island where many bones did rest" was Skull Island where I previously killed a mob of skeletons, and spent a good hour poring over that spot of land. The part that disappointed me was the part about "Lurking behind wood long dead, throned upon a black, black stone". The problem is, there were dead trees on top of black rocks ALL over the place in that marsh. I even found one in the starting village, right across the water from Skull Island, where you could clearly see a cluster of rocks (I was looking for "stony ornaments"). That's where I focused all my searching.
After an hour I finally gave up, searched the web, found the German wiki, and realized the point of reference was a completely different dead tree in what seemed like a random location. This pointed you towards the ruined temple and all the grave-markers (which I now figured must be made of stone). I really wish they had included some kind of unique landmark and referred to that, instead of simply a dead tree that could be found in various locations throughout the map. Or alternatively, they could have left off that label "Skull Island" from the map, as it created a needless red herring in this challenging riddle.
I'd like to think that I could have figured out the significance of putting together each half of the round gravemarkers to get to the right place, but I'll never know because I saw too many pictures online when I finally gave up and looked. Even though I got the reward, I felt like this was a failed quest that could have been great with just a tiny little different implementation.