The Witcher seems to be everywhere right now. Billboards for the Netflix show, starring Henry Cavill as a monster-hunting mercenary, dot the highways, and a second season and animated film are on the way.
The show’s surging popularity has generated great demand for more Witcher content, leading many viewers back to Netflix’s source material. The Last Wish, the first book in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Wiedzmin (Witcher) series, returned to the New York Times bestseller list in January, nearly three decades after its publication in Polish and more than a decade after it was first published (in its entirety) in English. The book is sold out and back-ordered, not only in English but in French, with over a half-million new copies printed to meet the demand. While many Sapkowski enthusiasts have taken issue with Netflix’s interpretation of his series, the surge of interest in this criminally overlooked writer is welcome. His stories showcase a very different type of world than what English-language fantasy readers are familiar with. Steeped in fairy tales, packed with Polish sensibility, and presented with Sapkowski’s sardonic humor, the Witcher stories take their characters seriously but are never pompous about it.
Sapkowski is often described as the “Polish Tolkien.” While the two writers share a love for (and academic interest in) Arthurian myth and the somewhat-lost genre of “fairy tale,” the experience of reading each is drastically different. Sapkowski’s world is one seen largely in glimpses, especially at first. Readers of the Witcher stories come into that world at almost street-level, following the tales of a “witcher,” a wandering monster-hunter seeking work wherever he can find it. Indeed, The Witcher was a one-off, an entry in a story contest held by the magazine Fantastyka in 1986. But the short story’s roots ran deep and would spawn an entire saga.
The germ of the idea of the witcher — a sort of fantastical exterminator — was Sapkowski’s dissatisfaction with the Polish folk tale Szewczyk Dratewka, in which a cobbler slays a dragon through deception. Cobblers, after all, are not famed for their knowledge of magical creatures. He explained in a 2001 interview (translated by Reddit user Todokugo), “It seemed interesting to me to tell a story where instead of [the cobbler] Szewczyk or some other hero — an idealist who kills dragons and saves princesses — a professional would appear.” Perhaps Sapkowski, an economist, felt such a trade would be far too specialized for an amateur to pick up simply through plot demands and heroism. (In the second Witcher book, Sword of Destiny, Sapkowski includes The Bounds of Reason, his own version of the famous dragon story.)
In the same interview, he joked, “I thought that nobody would write fantasy, because back then — as I thought — everybody wrote about space and introducing socialism there. Meanwhile, it turned out that out of 300 works submitted, 298 were fantasy stories. Luckily it was ‘they killed him and then he bailed’ kind of fantasy, so my Witcher looked pretty good in comparison.”
The story turned out to be a massive success. Though a short, self-contained story, The Witcher not only established its protagonist, Geralt, but presented a lived-in world, with realistic conflicts and factions. As for the monster that Geralt is contracted to slay — it is a strzyga, a vampiric creature of Slavic legend. At a time in Poland when fantasy fiction was in its infancy, Sapkowski was drawing on the country’s own mythology and integrating it into the genre.
In subsequent stories, he would riff on more famous fairy tales, such as Beauty and the Beast (A Grain of Truth) and Snow White (The Lesser Evil), weaving his own stories around their themes. The popular versions of fairy tales often gloss over the drastic, sometimes quite dark consequences faced by their human characters. Sapkowski’s versions emphasize these consequences, and his protagonist is not one to ignore the moral dilemmas they raise.
In The Lesser Evil, for instance, Geralt refuses the offer of a job in which he would have to target someone based on the probability, rather than the certainty, of the person’s guilt. He explains, “Evil is evil … Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit. I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.” Killing monsters is one thing, but conflicts between people are too gray for his liking.
Sapkowski has a knack for establishing believable characters who are interesting in their own ways. And they tend to subvert expectations. The saga’s female leads have their own motivations and drive, and they know to prioritize what’s important to them. They neither fall into the old trope of the helpless damsel in distress nor the newer trope of the strong female character, which reduces women’s personalities to a generic toughness. Instead, Sapkowski’s characters always come across as real people, who can be thoughtful, frustrating, charming, and infuriating alike.
It’s not surprising that Sapkowski’s writing found such a strong audience so quickly. His world is both human and fantastic, and its Polish flavor and acquaintance with Slavic legend add to its appeal. And it has inspired an incredible range of material, including one of the most talented bands I have ever heard, the Polish folk/metal band Percival Schuttenbach (named for a character from the Witcher novels), which uses medieval instruments and adaptations of traditional Slavic music from Bosnia to Russia to its own native Poland. In fact, when CD Projekt Red was adapting Sapkowski’s characters for its video game Wild Hunt, the company used Percival’s first two albums for much of the soundtrack. The music seemed practically ready-made for that purpose.
It is exciting to think of Sapkowski finally getting the attention he deserves in the English-speaking world. Even with what is lost in translation, the Witcher novels stand out compared to much of the genre and should interest readers who don’t usually care for fantasy. Andrzej Sapkowski refuses to coast on “destiny” or to make things run at the speed of plot; instead, he recognizes, as Geralt does, that good fantasy requires something more.
Jibran Khan is a freelance writer and researcher. From 2017 to 2019, he was the Thomas L. Rhodes fellow at the National Review Institute.
