It’s a weird experience to have something you and almost everyone you know personally suddenly get yeeted into the general, international pool of popular culture. Especially when, in truth, few people outside of Poland have any clear idea what The Witcher even is. No, I don’t mean the superficial facts about the setting or the character. Nor what can be gleaned from the games. I mean the broader context of the work and its place in (Polish) nerd culture.
So hey, I guess if you are interested, stay and listen. You might just be among the ones who have a non-trivial understanding of the matter, or you might learn something new.
1) What even is The Witcher?
The Witcher is a fantasy series. When talking about the literary body of work associated with it, you’ll most often have people reference the two short story collections (Sword of Destiny and The Last Wish), which serve as a prequel to the main Witcher Saga, composed of five books (Blood of Elves to Lady of the Lake). However, that is not the entirety of the franchise. There is also a rather odd story called Something Ends, Something Begins, which offers an alternate ending to the Saga, a happy one. And there is a book called Season of Storms that expands on the Witcher world, though it was written and published more than a decade after the end of the Saga. Broadly, these two last titles don’t matter much when discussing the importance and impact of the series.
And then, of course, you have the rest of the assorted Witcher properties, which include comic books, a tabletop RPG, some board games, three different TV shows, a series of video games, and so on and so forth. But, again, these don’t really matter much for discussing the cultural impact of the Saga, though many are interesting topics in their own right.
So we should focus on these seven books. What really are they? Well, there are a few aspects that are shared by the lot of them. They are satirical deconstructions and commentaries upon a number of culturally significant works, both across history and contemporary to them. And this is what I think most people “in the west” don’t understand about the series. That it’s a deconstruction of other things they might be familiar with, but also that the series is very steeped in modernity and the discourse surrounding modern fantasy.
The Witcher is not a piece of high literature concerning itself with Polish mythology (there’s no such thing b.t.w. if someone tells you there is, they are lying straight to your face, most likely to impress you), it is a piece of very well written pulp that is painfully aware of what it is. And what Sapkowski did with The Witcher was to essentially use it as a spotlight to discuss narrative and the fantastical element of well-known works, anything starting from classic Germanic fairy tales, through Tolkien, to the burgeoning field of periodical fantasy publications. And in that way, the crucial impact the series had on its Polish readers at the time was to teach us to think critically about what we were reading.
Now, for what it’s worth, that was back then. The time of Sapkowski has long since passed; he is no longer regarded with the same reverence garnered with his older works, and it is very much his own fault. Even outside of Poland, it’s well-known he is a bit of a shitmuffin. But most of those stories focus on his interactions with the video games and not on the broader decline of his writing and the popularity over the years since the Saga concluded.
Let’s examine one of the short stories as an example. A Grain of Truth is a story from The Last Wish that might easily be my favourite bit of Witcher-related fiction. Now, if you’re one of those people who get really uptight about spoilers, you might want to skip down to the next sections.
So, this story is a spoof of Beauty and the Beast, an old fairy tale from 1756, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (hon-hon)… or is it? Maybe what it’s really meant to deconstruct is the 1991 animated adaptation of the fairy tale? After all, it came out in 1993 itself, when the animated version was very strongly present in the popular culture of its time. In either case, it’s a darkly humorous and quite raunchy (the series is well known for its rather casual air of sexual liberation) deconstruction of said fairy tale, no matter which version you want to focus on, you know what it’s spoofing either way, and it wants you to know. Because much of it is dedicated to asking questions about the Beast’s predicament and life and to the old wive’s tales of true love holding power of magic and curses. Ultimately, the story provides no clear answers; it doesn’t intend to do that. Instead, it poses questions that you might find interesting to answer.
2) The games are not the books
Another aspect of the franchise I find people somewhat confused about is the relationship between the books and the games. Obviously, the games are a lot more popular compared to the books, and especially everything else that orbits around the Witcher trademark, but that leads to some odd expectations.
The games are an extensive rewrite of the books. But, of course, they had to do that, to begin with, to even have Geralt around, as he is rather decidedly dead by the end of the Saga. But it’s not just this one element; they are full of retcons, inconsistencies, odd little changes and omissions. It’s not even the important part – the more considerable difference lies in the tonal disparity between the two versions of the setting, particularly the characters populating it. The book Jaskier is not the Jaskier you meet in the game. No matter how you play him, Geralt is never quite the Geralt from the Saga. They’re not worse; they’re just different.
But to pile onto that, the English translation of the books and the games is… not very good. I’m obviously a native Polish speaker, and my primary exposure to The Witcher was indeed in the Polish language. But I’ve also read some of the translated short stories and experienced a fair bit of the English version of the video games, particularly the first and third ones. I can’t say that I’m particularly impressed, but, in a way, the English version of the books and the games are much more similar than the Polish versions.
This goes into a rather complex topic of localisation, but I think we can simplify the issue to this – there are two very different properties, both called The Witcher. The first is the original continuity of the books, and the second is the much more modern continuity of the games. Something that is based on the books might not necessarily concern itself with what the games have to say, and anything that is based on the books will, by necessity, pile a lot of retcons over the Saga.
Interestingly, most people in the know don’t particularly mind that the games changed things about the books. This can be attributed mainly to the quality of the games’ writing. This isn’t a case where viable elements of a narrative are downgraded by the incompetence of the team adapting it, but rather the creation of two parallel quality products.
In any case, particularly when looking at something like the Netflix TV shows, it’s important to remember they are meant to be based on the Saga, not on the games. So the content of the games has no bearing on why those shows are garbage; they are just bad adaptations of a different version of the property people might not be as familiar with.
3) The Witcher is not high literature
This final point might be confusing because I think the natural assumption is to believe that if something is not high literature, it must be inferior. Realistically speaking, however, there are just different types of media to be consumed at different times for different reasons.
So you have actual high literature, like Tolkien, and then you have The Witcher, which people who have no experience with the actual cultural context of the work seem to think is some kind of Polish equivalent to Tolkien. But it isn’t. It’s far from that.
I’ve already mentioned before that the Witcher is pulp. I want to focus on this and explain why it’s crucial to understand the cultural place of the Saga within Polish fantasy.
The critical point here is the approachability of pulp fiction. High literature can be challenging to read, the Silmarilion being an excellent example for anyone who has attempted or even succeeded at getting through it. The Witcher is the exact opposite of it. It’s written in simple language, with many descriptions laconic and utilitarian. Nevertheless, it tells you how people and things look and what’s happening. It can even be relatively stylish at times. But it’s also straightforward. Or at least what comes off as such in the crazy realm of Polish grammar.
Of course, as I also mentioned before, much of this is lost in translation. You have no frame of reference concerning the language used in the original writing. You can’t really judge if it’s high, poetic Polish or just everyday language you’d hear on the street.
That is also part of my issue with the games, where the English version changes all the dialogue to be stilted, unnatural and played out in various assorted random accents. Why? I do not know, nor do I care.
Anyway, let’s return to the issue at hand. It was easy to just pick The Witcher up and read it. The worldbuilding largely came from supplementary material. As a Saga reader, you didn’t need to know most of it. You had a few critical characters (Geralt, Yennefer, Buttercup – don’t ask me why he got renamed to Dandelion – and Ciri) and a few terms that might crop up repeatedly. It didn’t exist to create a sprawling, lasting world; it existed to present to you approachable and understandable characters.
Everything else was just set dressing for this process. Obviously, quite a few people became fond of the aesthetic, but that wasn’t Sapkowski’s intent. Instead, it was something for anyone to pick up and enjoy (and thus give the author money) because it spoke to the common experience of the human condition. Even when that human condition was expressed by wizards and superhumans.
And this understanding of the character-focused nature of the writing is yet another of those things I find missing from the discourse surrounding the series. At the very least, as I hear it coming from the west.
Instead, there’s a strange amount of gatekeeping coming from people with very sparse and limited exposure to the franchise. Undeniably, this misplaced gatekeeping is not at all dissimilar to the stance of self-proclaimed Tolkien fans, who seem to limit their intake of Tolkien-related media to the Peter Jackson movies. Incidentally, an interesting case of vastly misunderstood media, where a series of severely watered-down films became the pop-culture imprint of the franchise.
Ultimately, there are many people out there who should maybe partake in some of the media they so staunchly gatekeep and make sweeping statements about, lest they find said statements to come from a place of ignorance and their position to actually be that of an outsider.
Esoteric Musings... 