Introduction

In Andrzej Sapkowski’s Neverland, mankind has fallen into Fantasy and the fabled and the fantastic have fallen into History. A metaphysical migration at the beginning of Time, and Time began when the author set his pen to the paper.

Mr Sapkowski is a fan of history and a writer of fantasy, making it natural the two would combine in his method of work: euhemerization. He describes it as telling myths in un-fairytale-like language, giving a naturalistic treatment to improbable, fantastic material as he reconstructs ‘the events that might have lain at the foundation’ of a fairy tale’s creation.^[1] The Witcher cycle does this to the very end. But by demonstrating how Geralt and Yennefer ascend into fable, how Ciri returns into mythic circulation, and how legends resist closure, he also exposes the limits of his method. Myth returns – eternally. The books turn on this tension: first tearing the fairy tale down, then restoring it.

Some critics try to classify me amongst postmodernists. They proceed from the assumption that everything has already been, so my prose, like that mushroom on horse manure, grows on the mass of literature that was created before it. If one were to accept this as the criterion of postmodernism, then of course I'm a postmodernist, because if I'd read nothing, I'd have written nothing. If this is how it's to be, then it's difficult to find a more precise definition. I'm a mushroom and I grew on a great heap of horse manure, which is world and domestic literature.
—A. Sapkowski, Historia i Fantastyka

The intertextual weave of The Witcher is so dense that it virtually demands the active participation of the reader in deciphering the allusions and metaliterary elements for reading the work in its semantic fullness; by reaching outside the text also. The author’s short stories, exploration of the Arthurian legend, compendiums of the fantasy genre’s tropes and classics – all help. Indeed, there was a plan to add an appendix at the end of The Witcher cycle, listing everyone the author referenced and pulled ideas from, but the thought was dropped at the urging of the publisher…^[2] Only to resurface indirectly in the aforementioned publications. A good deal more can be found in the epigraphs.

The Witcher is a fantasy, yes, but it is also a meditation on the genre, on the make and value of fairy tales, a study of a living myth, and, most interestingly for myself, a glance into art’s relationship to reality. The Witcher is self-reflective and meaningfully pastiche and palimpsestic, and without understanding this element, the storyworld’s Plot and characters do not fully unlock. (Particularly in Lady of the Lake.)

‘Since in the novel – argues Sieradzki – there was constant talk (admittedly unclearly) about the “conjunction of the spheres,” which centuries ago brought about the coexistence of humans, elves, dwarves, and other races, one could reasonably expect in the finale some kind of “deconjunction,” as a result of which we were left alone on Earth.’ […] There must be some bridges between fantasy and our world. The scaffolding of convention isn't enough. Ultimately, we must somewhat believe that you're telling stories ‘from this earth,’ so we need an explanation of where the elves and dwarves went... Did they vanish like the dinosaurs? Fine, we have no objection. But we want to know what happened. Was there a holocaust, did a glacier come, or did a comet fall? […] We're curious whether you even asked yourself this?
 
Indeed, I even had a plan to write about it, to explain it precisely. I abandoned the intention, preferring to leave the matter ‘implicit.’ Also regarding the fact of whether it's really ‘our Earth’ at all. Because who said, and when, that it's this Earth of ours? Or perhaps it's one of the absolutely classic Never-Never Lands of fantasy? Like Tolkien's Middle-earth?
—A. Sapkowski & S. Bereś, Historia i Fantastyka

As a fan of the more ambiguous aspects of this world, I like to move around in this story’s folds by drawing meaning and building through the metaliterary lens. Consequently, I want to talk about some of the fairy dust without which we might not actually understand what it is that we are talking about when we talk about Ciri’s abilities, ‘time travel’, and the magic of elves and unicorns. Take it as my attempt at answering the questions about bridges between fantasy and our world and the fate of unicorns, elves, and dwarves.

A short primer for topics I’ll engage with across the 4 parts:

• Zero: creativity is an infinite recursive process without origin or terminus. Imagination generates realities as ontologically valid as material existence. Fairy tale is a world view.
• One: the history of The Witcher world is mostly recited in human chronicles; the Elder Races’ perspective helps to understand the tale’s metafictionality.
• Two: characters are configurations of mythic archetypes, trapped in the author’s Plot, i.e. the history of this storyworld. The characters, and their dynamics, are allusive but also exist as inter-narrative entities whose nature as legends is to exist eternally among the dreams of writers and readers.
• Three: the most important element for drawing meaning from The Witcher is Time.

I read The Witcher as meta fantasy. Let me show you how it works.

Bolesław Leśmian – Mirrors Multiplying Toward Eternity

Epigraphs dot Andrzej Sapkowski’s books like clues. The Lady of the Lake, for example, is prefaced with Shakespeare’s The Tempest; the topic of ‘life like a dream’ receiving extensive coverage in the final book (as well as another preface by way of Poe’s Dream within a Dream ahead of Chapter 2). Silently they connote the author’s literary philosophy, multiplying the contexts within the text and pointing toward useful frames for interpretation.

Besides Mircea Eliade, who appears ahead of The World of King Arthur (1995), the most useful clue for unlocking The Lady of the Lake and, in truth, the whole cycle, came to me from the short story Maladie (1992). A beautiful tale and Sapkowski’s personal favourite.

Widzę tunel lustrzany, wyżłobiony, zda się,
W podziemiach moich marzeń, groźny i zaklęty,
Samotny, stopą ludzką nigdy nie dotknięty,
Nie znający pór roku, zamarły w bezczasie.
 
Widzę baśń zwierciadlaną, kędy zamiast słońca,
Nad zwłokami praistnień orszak gromnic czuwa,
Baśń, co się sama z siebie bez końca wysnuwa
Po to, aby się nigdy nie dosnuć do końca…
 
I see a mirror tunnel, carved, it seems
In the underground of my dreams, menacing and enchanted,
Lonely, never touched by a human sole,
Not knowing the seasons, frozen in time.
 
I see a fairy tale in a mirror, where instead of the sun,
A procession of candles watches over the long forgotten dead,
A fairy tale that endlessly unfolds by itself
In order to never reach the end...
—Bolesław Leśmian, Prolog or Dwa zwierciadła (Two Mirrors)
Translation by Krystian Kościelski

Retelling the legend of Tristan and Iseult, originating in Celtic mythos, the short story is preceded by two stanzas from a Polish modernist poem. The poet uses ‘fairy tale’ as an ontological and epistemic category. It is a worldview, and allows inquiry into truths inaccessible to rational thought. The mirror tunnel becomes Leśmian's central metaphor for how reality multiplies itself in imagination and how culture relays experience via infinite reflections. An interminable recursive process – creativity. And death, in Leśmian’s terms, represents but passage into timelessness not annihilation.

This connects to Leśmian's broader philosophy of the ‘nieistniejące’ (non-existent): entities that do not exist in conventional material sense but possess genuine reality in linguistic and other imaginative creation. The mirror tunnel exists ‘w podziemiach moich marzeń’ (in the underground of my dreams), described as ‘samotny, stopą ludzką nigdy nie dotknięty / Nie znający pór roku, zamarły w bezczasie’ (solitary, never touched by human foot / Knowing no seasons, frozen in timelessness).^[3] This space embodies bezczasie – one of Leśmian's neologisms combining ‘bez’ (without) and ‘czas’ (time) – signifying existence outside temporal bounds, beyond causality, in suspended animation. It marks Henri Bergson's influence. Bergson distinguished between ‘durée’ (the felt, lived duration) and spatialized clock time, but Leśmian pushes further. His mirror tunnel exists in what Gnostic-influenced interpretations call the ‘astral plane’ – a purely spiritual realm outside normal time, perceived as woven from bright light of different colours representing particular states of consciousness.^[4]

In the second half of the poem, the poet requests a burial through the infinite mirror tunnel by which he reaches fairy tale that endlessly unfolds itself. His death is to be passage through recursive planes of existence. Very much like what happens with Geralt at the end of his journey when he re-joins the amorphous legendary matter that fuels the canon of fairy tale and fantasy archetypes. In fiction, there is no essential difference between life and death. Art and culture, like mirrors, commemorate lost origins by generating ever new forms for what once was.

Mirrors in Leśmian’s poem function as thresholds between different planes of reality, their positioning creating a series of reflections drawn into eternity where each further one is the congealed echo of the nearer. Existence is but an echo of echoes, reflection of reflections, unfolding eternally.

In The Witcher, upon Ciri’s or other mythic entities’ entry into other realities, the ‘barrier’ between worlds shatters like glass.

The image blurred and shattered, as painted glass shatters, suddenly fell to pieces, disintegrated into a rainbow-coloured twinkling of sparkles, gleaming and gold. And then all of it vanished.
[…]
The night air above the lake ruptured, like a smashed stained-glass window cracks. A black horse emerged from the crack.
— Lady of the Lake

Something creaked, just like canvas being torn. The terns rose with a cry and a fluttering, for a moment covering everything in a white cloud. The air above the cliff suddenly vibrated and became blurred like glass with water spilled over it. And then it shattered like glass. And darkness poured out of the rupture, while riders spilled out of the darkness. Around their shoulders fluttered cloaks whose vermilion-amaranth-crimson colour brought to mind the glow of a fire in a sky lit up by the blaze of the setting sun.
Dearg Ruadhri. The Red Horsemen.
[…]
But the air also ruptured in another place, and from the rupture, cloaks fluttering like wings, rushed out more horsemen.
—Lady of the Lake

In crossing the Threshold of Time, through the Gate of Worlds, Ciri crosses into possibilities that resemble each other, though never perfectly. Times and places are like glass shards reflected in each other; made up, ultimately, of words.

Words can only imitate words.

Might we not take Leśmian's poem as a lens for The Witcher then? Prolog is a poem about poetry. The Witcher aspires to be a fantasy about fantasy. Genre that multiplies through infinite reflection, spinning a fairy tale that never completes and resists being pinned down. But the mirror metaphor raises a question: in what dimension do these reflections move? Not in space, but in Time. To understand how Sapkowski tells his tale – what it means for characters like Ciri to do what she does – we need to distinguish between the different kinds of time at work. We need Mircea Eliade's categories of Mythic and Historical Time.

Mircea Eliade – Mythic and Historical Time

The most important element of The Witcher cycle, after Love, is Time. Time not Place. Place serves the Plot, but Time serves Meaning.

As is generally known, the Universe–like life–describes a wheel.
—The Tower of the Swallow

To explain, we set off from 1995 when Andrzej Sapkowski publishes his credo, The World of King Arthur, and prefaces his thoughts on the makings of the foundational myth of Western fantasy literature with Mircea Eliade (1957): ‘Myth is a true (hi)story that happened at the beginning’; in verbatim, ‘A myth is a true history of what came to pass at the beginning of Time.’ Myth narrates a sacred history, relating to an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the ‘beginnings.’ Myth relates how something began to be.

Discussing what has become of (the purpose of) myths in the modern world, Eliade recognises Historical and Mythic Time as distinct ontological modes of being. The modern man, frequently atheistic or agnostic, is at every moment in peril of succumbing to the tides of history and longs for the meaning found in mythic patterns. Unlike history, myth exists in the continual present; in it, pre-Creation chaos – the real time of unbounded possibilities manifest in archetypal models that give the business of living meaning and value – is actualized. It is the eternally re-emergent centre from which everything flows. The ‘now and always.’

To the individual, it makes itself felt in the dreams, fantasies, and longings that we touch upon in the psyche, in the Unconscious. Tolkien (1947), in On Fairy Stories, would identify this mode of being with the Cauldron of Story that exists before a writer, the sub-creator^[5], expresses his creative impulse by drawing a time and a place out of the cauldron to form a fantasy, calcifying Time in a history of a world. History consumes – ruthlessly, irreversibly and meaninglessly – but myth preserves. Embalms. To arrest this degradation, to re-actualize the space of possibilities, archaic man periodically abolishes profane time through a ritual return to the mythic beginning; creating a cyclical rhythm in imitation of Nature, and in order to curtail his own anxiety of living in Time. Among other things, we do this by reading.

Mythical archetypes survive to some degree in the great modern novels. The difficulties and trials that the novelist’s hero has to pass through are prefigured in the adventures of the mythic Heroes. It has been possible also to show how the mythic themes of the primordial waters, of the isles of Paradise, of the quest of the Holy Grail, of heroic and mystical initiation, etc., still dominate modern European literature.
 
Every popular novel has to present the exemplary struggle between Good and Evil, the hero and the villain (modern incarnation of the Demon), and repeat one of those universal motives of folklore, the persecuted young woman, salvation by love, the unknown protector, etc.
 
Reading… gives one a break in duration, and at the same time an “escape from time.” Whether we are “killing time” with a detective story, or entering into another temporal universe as we do in reading any kind of novel, we are taken out of our own duration to move in other rhythms, to live in a different history. … for the modern man it is the supreme “distraction”, yielding him the illusion of a mastery of Time which, we may well suspect, gratifies a secret desire to withdraw from the implacable becoming that leads towards death.
—Mircea Eliade, p.35, Myths, Dreams & Mysteries

This readerly relationship to myth – our escape into literature – will become crucial for understanding how characters within The Witcher navigate in Time. We will return to this in Part 4.

Fantasy literature constructs a world that functions differently from historical fiction or pure mythology. Historical fiction operates chiefly in linear time, mythology in cyclical, sacred time with no historical progression. Combining the mythical with the realistic, Fantasy flows from the tension between these two modes: some storyworlds feel sacred and enchanted, others feel mundane. The world of The Witcher falls in the latter category (despite retaining a sacred, mythical conception of Time). There is no hallow Tolkinesque creation myth. Instead, the different peoples enter history through repeat mass migrations, echoing in their brutality the settlement of the British Isles, Eastern and Central Europe, or, as a matter of fact, any land at all. Re-using stones from ancient elven roads and cities brings the latest arrivals, humanity, closer to a pre-historic time – quite literally a time of everything fantastic and mythical. With the ensuing socio-political realities though, the story's focus shifts to what’s boiling fiercely in the pot while the search for the root, the mythical template, recedes into deeper waters. For a while.

Sapkowski’s Never-Neverland is a prop serving his writing method, euhemerization, by which he makes characters and the Plot interesting for the modern reader. But he rejects his method as philosophy. There is much to indicate that this profaned world of anti-values is the Waste Land, a Land Deprived of Grace, that awaits disenchantment through compassion and (non)human decency, which must be learned. The individual and their relationships with others attract the author the most. However, this does not mean the cosmogony’s meta-framing does not matter at all; it just tells a different story than in traditional fantasy. A story around the story, and about the story.

Frequently set in pseudo-medieval worlds, invoking ancient prophecies and concerning fading and lost knowledge, Fantasy pulls toward Mythic Time. But the narrative also tends to emphasise individual choice and acceptance of mortality and passing, with the plot striving forever toward some kind of climactic, final resolution. As in Historical Time, where the individual feels like they are 'making' history by making themselves (an illusion), yet also treasures the singularity of each unrecoverable, perishable moment. ‘You might overlook the right moment… That one right, unique moment. Time never repeats itself!’ exclaims Ciri, having learned only half the equation. Because Historical Time, as Sapkowski amply demonstrates, is full of horrors – deportations, genocides, massacres, pogroms, persecution, slavery, torture, petty cruelty and indifference – sustained by man’s behaviour toward Others; occurring randomly or even contingently on good deeds, with finality, and containing no redemptive meaning. Unique moments can be ghastly. Ciri might not ever be able to move past her many moments of profound loss; that one irreversible moment in Rivia, for example, when time came full circle for Geralt and Yennefer. Loss may become more bearable, though, when thought of as imitating an eternal pattern of returns – as herself assuming the roles of witcher and sorceress. The Witcher finishes, after all, in a new beginning.

Fairy tale consoles and saves on a primordial plane where all archetypal possibilities remain open, in the beginning to which we yearn to return in our escape from the clutches of Time – through storytelling; never ending.

Tales began to circulate around Ebbing and Geso. About the Wild Hunt. About the Three Spectral Riders. Stories were made up and spun in the evenings in rooms smelling of melting lard and fried onions, village halls, smoky taverns, roadhouses, crofts, tar kilns, forest homesteads and border watchtowers. Tales were spun and told. About war. About heroism and chivalry. About friendship and hatred. About wickedness and betrayal. About faithful and genuine love, about the love that always triumphs. About the crimes and punishments that always befall criminals. About justice that is always just.
 
About truth, which always rises to the surface like oil.
 
Tales were told; people rejoiced in them. Enjoyed the fairy-tale fictions. Because, indeed, all around, in real life, things happened entirely back to front.
—Lady of the Lake

The sacred Mythic Time of beginnings in The Witcher remains in the pre-Conjunction (pre-Creation) era, inaccessible to the historical mode of thinking, but we see it re-form when certain unique events take place around (Celtic-elven) holidays (e.g. Ciri is born at Belleteyn, wounded at the autumn equinox, and commits a massacre in Dun Dâre at Saovine); leading the reader to sense that there exist times of different quality. Profane vs Sacred. We see it in ritual imitation of, or belief in, an underlying supernatural reality. And we see it in the mythicization of the protagonists and their contemporaries by the people of Neverland. ‘It was the myth that told the truth: the real story was already only a falsification. Besides, was not the myth truer by the fact that it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny?’ (Eliade 1949, The Myth of the Eternal Return).

The fantastic is usually explained away with the superstition and imperfect knowledge of laymen. The storyworld exists in Historic Time and Sapkowski’s working method profanes most mythic powers – except destiny, love, and Nature’s cyclicality. These three are meta: destiny is Plot, Nature reflects the one true Force of which everything is born, and love… Love is the Mystery. Profanation of any of these does not end well for anyone.

In history's sweep, great events do not have half the significance for the common folk that stories born of individual heroism possess; the world remains fundamentally the same as a result of great wars, but a story told about how some emotion or dynamic came to be and why it is meaningful might, in the right moment, change a person's life. It is impossible to stand against the machine of History, but it will make weathering its brutality a little more bearable when individuals manage to mature, find faith in the existence of basic decency and hope, and take heart in the imperishable flame of humanity. ‘Tis the province of storytelling.

If there exists one universal thing for every world – fantastic or ours – it’s the total bastardry that reigns in it. That’s my little, minor, and unobtrusive authorial message contained in the book.
—Andrzej Sapkowski, Historia i Fantastyka

In the 90s, The Witcher rang like a modern myth, shamelessly dissecting the topics of the (recent) day(s) while retaining something timeless. Sapkowski writes Fantasy in which the world's believability is constantly questioned, reverence proves impossible, and disenchantment destroys the genre's pretensions to sacred myth-making. Unlike Tolkien, he is not crafting a consistent Secondary World that conceals its own artifice. The tale does not console nor arouse belief by being incomparably ‘other’ than the profane day-to-day; quite the opposite, it is all too recognisable. The plethora of anachronisms fit like a charm, because the world order is sui generis. And yet… At Loch Eskalott, a renewal occurs; a return to the roots of this genre’s ethos, to its archetypal form from which the realness of its shape flows. At Loch Eskalott, Mythic Time takes over, recovered for a world that has undergone demythologization and profanation far too long; enacting anew the archetypal order in which the tired hero leaves history and sails into the mists.

We should read The Witcher at least twice, in historical and mythical key, and we would receive a different experience as a consequence. We follow Geralt’s temporal self and learn about the world as he spirals ever closer to his end in which Ciri, a legend from birth owing to whom Geralt will survive and obtain immortality, takes the witcher from history into Myth. From the broadly borrowed and adjusted bricolage of a place and time Andrzej Sapkowski concocted, Ciri delivers him to the archetypal Avalon. ‘Only in fables survives what cannot survive in nature. Only myths and fables do not know the limits of possibility.’ The historical person of Geralt – as historical as a fictional persona can be – will be overlaid with myth; the same rich, folkloric essence out of which all characters and tales are drawn. As his historical figure fades, as the witcher returns to his roots in the primordial Chaos, and as archetypal variations replace the figure he cut in the memories of those who remain trapped within the history he lived through, Geralt becomes ‘real’ in the universal sense; as only stories can be – as the stuff of legends.

The double bottom is, of course, that Geralt is already fictional and ahistoric and, hence, already a rendition of an archetypal hero. We are in the author's laboratory where he is demonstrating how a hero comes to be – the archetypal hero's thousand faces, whether Arthur, Geralt, or anyone else.

Ciri though, is a different matter.

In the world of The Witcher, we witness a collision between legendary and historic ontologies, mythical and profane characters and phenomena, in a place and time where the Place is undergoing violent desacralisation – losing its fairy tale elements to the pogroms accompanying the onset of modernity. We have characters who stand in both worlds simultaneously (Geralt and Yennefer), characters who are fantastic but subjected to the tyranny of history (Elder Races, mythical creatures), and Ciri, who is the nexus of the author’s games.

Therefore, we begin with the elves from whom Ciri inherits her fantastic nature – what they could do before the Conjunction, what they lost, and what they would like to do again. From there we can grasp what Ciri can do, and why the most important element for understanding Lady of the Lake, and the whole series, is Time.

(And why Lady of the Lake makes all the sense, actually.)

Footnotes