What a great article, truly loved it. The dragon short story is probably the best of the Witcher short stories - the end is truly delightful. But it’s not just because dragons are a pain in the ass that Geralt won’t hunt them. The Witcher’s code forbids killing any monster with sentience, unless that monster is a…

That’s a key element of the Witcher’s message: morally dubious acts don’t cause curses. There has to be magic and a caster behind. Geralt doesn’t believe in fate, only in straight cause-effect consequences.

And next, Wawel Jesus:

Sapkowsky was not a travelling fur salesman. he was a highly positioned and highly educated governmental official working in the state export system (which effectively worked as a part of the foreign relations system of the Warsaw bloc). it was during the time Poland was still a socialist republic. he mentioned in his…

Someone put a curse on her because of her incestuous conception. Her mother died in child birth and she was effectively born as a striga in the crypt.

This is the kind of content I want more of here. 

Oh my god thank you for an amazing book suggestion!

Depends upon your authority. According to my copy of Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology (yes, there is such a book, and it’s a great read), there are a number of descriptions of the basilisk, but the most complex and recent account of its genesis says that it is hatched from an egg laid by a seven-year-old cock during the Dog…

Isn’t that cockatrices? I thought basilisks were hatched from serpents’ eggs.

Coincidence?

In The Sword of Destiny, a character protests, “you can’t kill a basilisk without a looking glass, everyone knows that”—Sapkowski’s nod to the Warsaw legend. But, Geralt takes no mirror with him to defeat the basilisk, only his sword.

Seen above, the Wawel Dragon. Seen below, the Wawel Lion:

You knew the risks when you put on the uniform.

To build off of myths that humans come later and mess everything up, the medieval myth that Brutus and a group of post-Iliad Trojans eradicated a race of giants in Britain bears mentioning. This was presented in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae, though it predates him by a couple of centuries. Here’s a…

I bought the first Witcher novel. Thanks for pointing out the two collections that really pertain to this first season!!!

Slavic person with a PhD in ethnology here, can somebody please call an ambulance? I think my eyeballs are going to start bleeding from the high blood pressure caused by this article.

““Yes, there are elves in Eastern European folklore too. But, it’s in the Celtic legend where humans and elves face off in an epic battle like that mentioned in The Witcher.”

Hm, I’m glad you mentioned that Sapkowski’s elves are more Celtic-inspired (and generally that much of Sapkowski’s setting has Celtic roots, plus…

Was Edda cursed because of her birth? My PC copy of the first game included a novella that tells the story of Geralt’s tussle with her, and, while Foltest is worried that her strigahood is because she’s a product of incest, Geralt tells him it’s just that someone cursed her. I don’t know if it was an adaptation or…

I want to inject this post into my veins

Jumping off from this if you want to be the kind of person who can say “the book was better” its actually REALLY easy to do that here. The first season is clearly based on the short stories that provide the backstory to Geralt and his companions that are continued in the book series proper (starting with Blood of…