The Witcher Review

Before the Netflix series. Before the games that sold sixty million copies. Before Henry Cavill's bathtub became a meme. Before any of it, there were the books — and the books, it must be said, are magnificent. Andrzej Sapkowski began writing about Geralt of Rivia in 1986, submitting a short story to a Polish fantasy magazine on a dare, and over the following decade produced two short story collections and five novels that constitute one of the most intelligent, morally complex, and bitingly funny fantasy series ever written. That most English-speaking readers discovered the Witcher through a video game is one of the great ironies of modern publishing. The books deserve to be famous on their own terms.

Geralt is a witcher — a professional monster hunter, mutated in childhood through a brutal alchemical process called the Trial of the Grasses that grants him superhuman reflexes, resistance to disease, limited magical abilities, and a distinctive appearance: white hair, cat-like yellow eyes, and a face that frightens small children. He is also, despite his carefully cultivated reputation for emotional detachment, a man of fierce moral conviction, dry wit, and a talent for finding himself in situations where every choice is wrong.

The short story collections — "The Last Wish" (1993) and "Sword of Destiny" (1992, though written first) — are the series' purest expression. Each story takes a familiar fairy tale or myth — Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Rumpelstiltskin — and deconstructs it with surgical precision, revealing the ugliness, moral ambiguity, and human cost that the original tales papered over with happy endings. Sapkowski's Snow White is a bandit queen driven mad by persecution. His Beauty falls in love with the Beast not because of his noble soul but because she's a sociopath who finds his savagery attractive. His Little Mermaid makes her sacrifice and gets nothing but pain in return.

This is not the knowing, winking deconstruction of a writer who thinks he's cleverer than his source material. Sapkowski loves fairy tales — you can feel it in every story. His deconstructions work because they take the original tales seriously enough to ask: what would these stories look like if they happened to real people in a real world, where prejudice is rampant, justice is rare, and happy endings are a luxury few can afford?

The answer, consistently, is: messy. Painful. Morally complicated. And far more interesting than the originals.

The novels — beginning with "Blood of Elves" (1994) and continuing through "Time of Contempt" (1995), "Baptism of Fire" (1996), "The Tower of the Swallow" (1997), and "The Lady of the Lake" (1999) — shift from standalone stories to a continuous narrative centered on Ciri, a young princess with Elder Blood who becomes Geralt's adopted daughter. Ciri is prophecied to either save the world or end it (Sapkowski is deeply skeptical of prophecy, and this ambiguity is deliberate), and every power on the Continent — kings, mages, elves, the mysterious Wild Hunt — wants to possess her.

The relationship between Geralt and Ciri is the emotional heart of the series, and Sapkowski handles it with a tenderness that contrasts beautifully with the surrounding brutality. Geralt, who has spent his life insisting that witchers don't have feelings, discovers through Ciri that he does — that he is capable of love, fear, sacrifice, and the particular terror of a parent who knows the world wants to destroy his child. Their bond is built not on biology but on choice, which makes it more powerful than any blood tie.

Yennefer of Vengerberg, the sorceress who becomes Geralt's great love and Ciri's mother figure, is one of fantasy's most complex female characters. Beautiful, brilliant, ambitious, manipulative, insecure, fiercely loyal to those she loves, and utterly ruthless to everyone else, Yennefer defies easy categorization. Her relationship with Geralt — passionate, combative, interrupted by long separations, bound by a magical wish that neither is sure represents genuine feeling — is the best romantic relationship in fantasy fiction. It works because both characters are difficult people who make each other worse as often as they make each other better.

Sapkowski's world-building is distinctive in its deliberate incompleteness. He does not provide maps, appendices, glossaries, or detailed histories. The Continent is evoked through fragments — overheard conversations, conflicting accounts, unreliable narrators, references to events the reader never witnesses. This approach creates a world that feels lived-in rather than designed, historical rather than encyclopedic. You never fully understand the Continent, which is exactly the point — neither do the characters who inhabit it.

The political landscape draws heavily on late medieval and early modern European history, with particular emphasis on ethnic conflict, pogrom, and the persecution of minorities. The elves of Sapkowski's world are not noble, ethereal beings but a conquered people, driven from their lands by human colonists, reduced to second-class citizenship or guerrilla warfare. The Scoia'tael — elven commandos who fight a brutal insurgency against human rule — are simultaneously sympathetic freedom fighters and terrorists whose methods are indefensible. Sapkowski, writing in post-communist Poland, understood ethnic conflict from the inside, and his treatment of it is more honest, more uncomfortable, and more nuanced than anything in mainstream Anglophone fantasy.

The prose — in the original Polish and in David French's excellent English translations (which replaced earlier, less faithful translations) — is rich, allusive, and often very funny. Sapkowski writes with the erudition of a literature professor and the timing of a stand-up comedian. Geralt's deadpan observations, Dandelion's preening self-importance, the various rulers' pompous pronouncements — all are rendered with a precision that makes the Witcher series one of the genre's great pleasures to read at the sentence level.

The later novels have structural issues. "The Tower of the Swallow" and "The Lady of the Lake" fragment their narratives across multiple timelines and viewpoints, and the Arthurian mythology that Sapkowski weaves into the finale — Ciri as a Grail figure, the Lady of the Lake as a literal character — doesn't integrate as smoothly as the fairy-tale deconstructions of the short stories. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, which some readers find powerful and others find evasive.

"Season of Storms" (2013), a later standalone novel set between the stories of "The Last Wish," is entertaining but inessential — a professional piece of work that demonstrates Sapkowski's undiminished skill without breaking new ground.

The CD Projekt Red video games — "The Witcher" (2007), "The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings" (2011), and "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt" (2015) — are masterpieces of interactive storytelling that introduced Geralt to a global audience. Sapkowski's publicly stated indifference to the games (and his legal disputes with CD Projekt Red over royalties) is well-documented and rather sad. The games are deeply faithful to the spirit of his work — morally complex, bitingly witty, willing to present choices with no good options — and they have done more to popularize his creation than anything else. That Sapkowski cannot appreciate this is his loss.

Netflix's adaptation, debuting in 2019 with Henry Cavill and later Liam Hemsworth as Geralt, captured some of the books' essence — particularly in its first season, which adapted the short stories effectively — but increasingly diverged from the source material in ways that frustrated fans and the author alike. The series demonstrated, as adaptations often do, that the qualities that make the books great — the moral complexity, the literary allusions, the deliberately fragmented narrative — are precisely the qualities that resist translation to a visual medium optimized for clarity and momentum.

The Witcher saga, taken as a whole, is one of European fantasy's crowning achievements. It is darker than Tolkien, funnier than Martin, more philosophically engaged than either. It takes the familiar furniture of fantasy — elves, dwarves, magic, monsters, quests — and interrogates it with the rigor of a prosecutor and the compassion of a confessor. Sapkowski asks: in a world of monsters, who is the real monster? And his answer, delivered across eight books of unforgettable storytelling, is that the question itself is a trap.

There are no real monsters. There are only choices, and the people who must live with them.

Toss a coin to your Witcher, indeed. But read the books first.