Fans of the series will likely be thinking of the main character, Geralt of Rivia, also known as The White Wolf, as the prime example of a Witcher.įists, Fire and Water by thommas68 ( Pixabay License / Pixabay)

If a child succeeds, he gains incredible reflexes, agility, the tell-tale cat eyes that all Witchers have, and other fortitudes, such as the ability to consume toxic potions that allow them to fight “with blind abandon, sensing absolutely no pain, ignoring even serious injuries” (The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings CD Projekt Red, 2011). To fully become Witchers they must undergo the Trials of the Grasses, a challenge with an average fatality rate of seven out of ten. Over the course of their growing years they are subject to training regiments that would kill the most hardened Spartans, and are administered magic herbs, infusions, and spells designed to give them the speed and strength of the monsters they hunt. Witchers start off as normal human boys taken as payment or “adopted” from orphanages and transported to a Witcher Guild. Magic, and most of the monsters that Witchers hunt, came too. Humans traveled to the world that we know, which had only non-human races prior. In their lore there is a phenomenon called the “conjunction of the spheres” the concept that long ago several parallel universes smashed into each other, allowing peoples and creatures to travel to different realities. They aren’t products of nature, but neither are the vast majority of so-called monsters in the world of the Witcher. They’re not bred, but selected as children and groomed to be monster slayers. Sapkowski’s books are worth the read and are good, though most current fans know about Witchers because of the video games produced by CD Projekt Red. It is a world of protocapitalism with banks, a papal power structure influencing the affairs of secular sovereign states, and death on a mass and unexplainable scale. Examples tying the Witcher’s world to our own include the Vivaldi Bank, which can be likened to the banking families of Italy during the Renaissance the Church of the Eternal Fire, which is inspired by the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism and the Catholic Church and the Catriona plague, which is a version of the Bubonic plague. It is wrapped in a metaphysical layer of myth and fantasy but is otherwise not entirely different from our reality.

The world that author Andrzej Sapkowski created in his fantasy series is a new take on the old Slavic mythology of the White Witch, though his work is distinctly Polish and set in a pseudo high- to late- medieval world. Before I get into what Witchers are, what they do, and how they came to be, I will give some background for the world that Witchers find themselves in.

How many witchers are there