The Witcher

Did You Know?

• Entries in The Witcher series earned Sapkowski the Janusz A. Zajdel Award three times: "The Lesser Evil" (1990), "Sword of Destiny" (1992), and Blood of Elves (1994).
• The Last Wish won the 2003 Premio Ignotus for Best Anthology in Spain.
• Blood of Elves won Best Novel at the first David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy in 2009.

Production

Andrzej Sapkowski, a 38-year-old traveling fur salesman with an economics degree who loved fantasy literature, entered a short story contest in 1985. His son Krzysztof, a regular reader of the Polish magazine Fantastyka, urged him to participate. The contest had a 30-page limit. Sapkowski's submission, "The Witcher" from 1986, reworked a Polish fairy tale where a princess becomes a monster because her parents committed incest. He waited roughly a year for the results and finished third. Sapkowski believed his story was the best, but the judges ranked it lower because fantasy was seen as children's literature in Poland at the time. Readers, however, responded with great enthusiasm, so Sapkowski wrote one or two new stories each year to meet their demand.

He based "A Question of Price" and later "Sword of Destiny" on a familiar fairy tale pattern: a monster or sorcerer saves someone's life and then asks for payment. The first four stories about the witcher Geralt of Rivia were gathered into a 1990 collection called The Witcher, published by Reporter and now out of print. That collection includes "A Road with No Return" from 1988, which takes place before the main stories and features Geralt's future mother. In 1990, after what Sapkowski called a chance meeting, he struck a deal with SuperNowa to continue the series. SuperNowa released the second collection, Sword of Destiny, in 1992. The following year, they published The Last Wish to replace The Witcher as the first book. The Last Wish contains all the stories from The Witcher except "A Road with No Return," the only tale without Geralt. New stories added to The Last Wish happen chronologically before those in Sword of Destiny.

"Something Ends, Something Begins," written in 1992 as a wedding present for Sapkowski's friends, offers an alternate ending showing Geralt and Yennefer's wedding. This story and "A Road with No Return" appear in some Polish editions of either The Last Wish or Sword of Destiny.

Setting

When first creating The Witcher, Sapkowski had not yet conceived of the series' world background. He began with short stories, noting that one does not create universes in short stories. When he switched to full novels, the necessity of coherent background became imminent, and something resembling a universe started to emerge, though it plays a secondary role in the story. Sapkowski admitted to using Slavic mythology often due to its richness but said he does not have preferred mythologies, folklores, or bestiaries for monsters; the story dictates necessity, and he mostly puts aside existing mythologies and invents something himself. He categorized monsters into three types: those that already exist with established names and habits, such as dragons; those he invents with names found in nature, mostly insects; and completely original creations, some unnamed. Sapkowski said he personally abhors politics and considers his books politically neutral. The stories are set on an unnamed continent settled several thousand years earlier by elves from overseas, who encountered gnomes and dwarves. After a war between elves and dwarves, the dwarves retreated into mountains, and elves settled in plains and forests. Human colonists arrived about five hundred years before the events, igniting wars. Humans became dominant; non-human races are now second-class citizens, often living in small ghettos or wilderness regions. Other races include halflings and dryads; werewolves and vampires appeared after a magical event called the Conjunction of the Spheres.

Translations

Andrzej Sapkowski has stated he had no hand in the English translations of his work, noting that a polite translator might occasionally ask him a question or show him a page, but the process is entirely the translator's own. On the quality of these translations, he offered a Polish saying: "Translations are like women: if they are beautiful, they are not true; if they are true, they are not beautiful." Fluent in about fifteen languages, he can judge translations himself, finding some terrible and others pleasing when the spirit of the original survives. The stories and novels have been translated into 37 languages. Sapkowski created the word wiedźmin as the masculine form of the Polish word for witch, wiedźma. In a 2005 interview, he explained that he sees "witcher" as a natural English masculine counterpart to "witch," and that the similarity between these English and German terms inspired him to coin wiedźmin. Polish game designer Adrian Chmielarz has claimed he invented the English translation "witcher" around 1996–1997. Earlier, the term "hexer" was used, appearing in the 2001 film adaptation and the first official English translation in the 2000 anthology Chosen by Fate. CD Projekt adopted "witcher" for its 2007 English video game release, and Danusia Stok used it in her translation of Ostatnie życzenie that same year. Michael Kandel, however, chose "spellmaker" for his 2010 translation of the short story "Wiedźmin" in A Book of Polish Monsters. Russian translations kept the original Slavic term ведьмак (Vedmak) rather than inventing a new word.

Adaptations

From 1993 to 1995, Sapkowski's stories were adapted into a six-issue comic The Witcher by Maciej Parowski and Sapkowski (story) and Bogusław Polch (art). In 2011, Egmont released a two-part comic book titled Reasons of State containing an original story, written by Michał Gałek, illustrated by Arkadiusz Klimek, and colorized by Łukasz Poller. In 2013, Dark Horse Comics announced a comic book series called The Witcher based on the video-game series and made in collaboration with CD Projekt Red, beginning publication in 2014; most stories are based on original plots not written by Sapkowski. In October 2015, a one-shot webcomic titled Matters of Conscience was released by CD Projekt Red to expand on events following their second video game. In 2007, a video game The Witcher developed by CD Projekt Red was released, followed by The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015. Sapkowski had no involvement with the video games, giving the studio license to create a completely new story using his characters. All three games were positively received, with Metacritic scores of 81, 88, and 93 out of 100 respectively, and sold over 75 million copies as of May 2023, over 50 million from The Witcher 3 alone. CD Projekt Red developed a card game named Gwent included in The Witcher 3, and created two stand-alone video games based on it: Gwent: The Witcher Card Game and Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, both released in 2018. A remake of The Witcher was announced in October 2022 under the codename "Canis Majoris," entitled The Witcher Remake, to be developed using Unreal Engine 5 by Fool's Theory with creative supervision from The Witcher series staff and CD Projekt Red. A fourth game, The Witcher IV, has been confirmed and is under development as a new installment different from the previous trilogy.