The first tease for The Witcher 4, back in 2022, was nothing but an image of a snow-covered Witcher medallion—but not a wolf. That led to an immediate question: Which school did it represent? There are several in the world of The Witcher, after all: Geralt’s School of the Wolf is the one we know best, but there are also schools dedicated to the Viper, the Bear, the Manticore, and others, each with different attitudes and approaches to their profession.
That’s true of the games, anyway, but apparently it’s not the case in the books they’re based on. In a new AMA on Reddit, Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski said the whole idea of individual Witcher schools is based on a mistake, and it hasn’t gone away because “videogame people” won’t let it go.
“A single sentence about some ‘school of the Wolf’ mysteriously made its way into The Last Wish,” Sapkowski explained. “I later deemed it unworthy of development and narratively incorrect, even detrimental to the plot. Therefore, later I never included or referenced any Witcher Gryffindors or Slytherins again. Never.
“However, that one sentence was enough. Adaptors, particularly videogame people, have clung to the idea with remarkable tenacity and have wonderfully multiplied these ‘witcher schools.’ Completely unnecessary.”
But with witcher schools now firmly embedded in the psyches of fans around the world, Sapkowski is faced with the question of what to do about it. “The path of least resistance,” he said, would be to erase the errant sentence from future editions of The Last Wish, presumably in hopes that it all blows over eventually; but he could also “expand and clarify” the topic, possibly by diving deeper into the significance of individual Witcher medallions. “The sky is the limit,” he said, although he dropped no hint about which way he might be leaning.
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Letho was an infamous witcher from the School of the Viper in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
He did, however, have some other, more general thoughts about the videogame and television adaptations of his work, which he thinks are perfectly fine but also inherently inferior. “There’s the original and then there are adaptations,” he said. “Regardless of the quality of these adaptations, there are no dependencies or points of convergence between the literary original and its adaptation. The original stands alone, and every adaptation stands alone; you can’t translate words into images without losing something, and there can’t be any connections here.
“Moreover, adaptations are mostly visualisations, which means transforming written words into images, and there is no need to prove the superiority of the written word over images, it is obvious. The written word always and decidedly triumphs over images, and no picture—animated or otherwise—can match the power of the written word.”
Sapkowski has a way of coming off as perpetually grumpy, as though he always has better things to be doing than answering questions or accepting awards, but CD Projekt co-CEO Adam Badowski says that’s more “a persona” than anything else, and that he’s really a lovely guy at heart.
If it is a bit, it’s one Sapkowski is committed to: The whole AMA is blunt, and more than once he urged people questioning him about the deep lore of The Witcher world to knock it off. In response to a question about how gnomes and dwarves live together in Mahakam, for instance, he dropped this absolute banger:
No idea. None of the plots I’ve created required such information, so there hasn’t been any, and there probably never will be. To clarify for the future, which would also apply to other questioners: please ask me about what is in the books, not about what is not.
He’s equally to the point with a person who asked if he might establish an online presence similar to that of A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin. “I value my privacy too much to expose it to the vanity fair that is the internet and social media,” Sapkowski replied. “Which sometimes, excuse me, very much resembles also a carnival of stupidity.”
Later, Sapkowski dispenses some advice to a writer who asks him about sources of inspiration, saying it’s a “misconception” that such things flow from external sources. “Inspiration resides solely in the author’s imagination; if that imagination isn’t sufficiently rich, neither Venice, the Ackerman Steppe, nor a Norwegian fjord will help,” he wrote. “However, if you are indeed from northern Poland, allow me to recommend the Wda River Valley. Sit on the high bank and look down at the river. After a while, inspiration might come. Or it might not. No complaints will be accepted.”
And yes, Sapkowski does get into some actual talk about The Witcher here and there. Regarding Ciri’s seemingly variable age, for instance, he notes that such estimates come from other characters in his books, who may be mistaken or purposely lying. There’s something here for everyone, in other words: Insights into The Witcher for serious fans, and a masterclass in telling people to stop bothering him with nonsense for everyone else. Read the whole thing on Reddit.
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