"Her Lute and Her Sky Blue Pearl": Pandemic Beneficence in the Medievalist World of "The Witcher"

 [Presented at the Medieval Association of the Midwest Conference, October 20, 2021]

Polish fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski is best known for his medievalist universe of The Witcher series of short stories and novels, a wildly popular set of computer games and a live-action Netflix series. Witchers such as Geralt are taken from their families as children and mutated through a secret and arduous process. Those who survive the painful trials are trained in martial arts, magic, and monster physiology and taxonomy in order to become monster hunters, rewarded with superhuman strength, agility, and senses, an extremely long lifespan, and resistance to disease. Witchers are social outcasts, equally looked down upon by humans, elves, dwarfs, and other humanoids who reluctantly rely upon the mutants to do their dirty work for them. The saga focuses on a variety of different forms of racism, portrayed as speciesism.

This includes genocide and attempted genocide using medieval versions of biological warfare. In the 14th century Genghis Khan and his Golden Horde traveled west from the steppes of Mongolia, unintentionally bringing with them fleas that carried the bacterium Yersinia pestisi, responsible for the Black Death. In 1346 the Tartar army assaulted the city of Kaffa on the Black Sea, but after suffering significant losses from the plague, the Tartars took the bodies of their fallen comrades and catapulted them over the city walls. The resulting epidemic ultimately led to the fall of the city. On Sapkowski’s fictional Continent elves and their Nilfgaardian allies are accused of likewise intentionally spreading plagues and contaminating wells and other sources of drinking water, in this case with poisonous herbs.

Bigoted villagers intentionally leave girls who are sick with diphtheria, scarlet fever, and smallpox at the edge of Brokilon forest for the dryads to find and adopt, hoping to cause a deadly epidemic that will rid the world of dryads. Fortunately, they are immune. This attempt at genocide mirrors the tactic suggested by British army commander Sir Jeffrey Amherst to use smallpox against susceptible Native American tribes during the French and Indian War.

Several different epidemics are referenced in Sapkowski’s saga, not always consistently, possibly the result of translating the works from Polish to English. Sapkowski does not mince words when describing the horrors of pandemics; indeed,  the Witcher saga is known for its use of brutal medievalisms, and is often compared to his friend George R.R. Martin’s world of Westeros and its HBO adaptation Game of Thrones. Yet underneath the plotlines of prejudice and genocide there also lies a thread of compassion, mercy, and altruism, although not without sacrifice. A number of such episodes relate to pandemics and other medical crises. These episodes are examples of Sapkowski’s use of compassion, mercy, and altruism to carefully poke holes in both the common medievalist stereotype of a brutish Middle Ages, as well as the trope of the monochromatic Middle Ages in celebrating a colorful diversity of cultures and humanoid beings.

In Baptism of Fire Geralt and his company of marginalized humans and dwarves come upon three cottages in a forest clearing. They are waved away by a guard dog and a “short, stout girl with long plaits” shouting emphatically. The company is horrified to discover that she was warning of “The plague… Smallpox.” While the young woman appeared healthy, her family had died of the disease, and had been dragged into a pit behind the cottages.The company begins to leave, but are interrupted by a band of thirteen marauders on horseback who ignore the girl’s warning and assault her. The dwarf Yazon wonders how the human marauders are unafraid of the disease, but the troubadour Dandelion notes that fear “is a human quality. There’s nothing human in them any longer.”  Vastly outnumbered and out armed, Geralt has to come up with a plan to divide and conquer. Dwarf Zoltan initially criticizes Geralt, noting that if the Witcher gets too close to the girl “you’ll come back infected… You’re putting us all at risk…” But the Witcher’s plan largely works, and the marauders are dispatched without much further debate. While Geralt cannot save the girl from initial harm, they do save her life, and realizing that she is immune but without resources, they leave her with the majority of the marauders’ horses to use as food so she does not have to slaughter her single cow.

Later in the same novel, a group of scheming sorceresses discuss the complicated family tree involved in the passing down of the so-called Lara Gene. The transition from the first generation to the second had been violent, as the genetically enhanced elfen sorceress Lara Dorren had died while protecting the newborn daughter she had conceived with her forbidden human lover, Cregennan. Her daughter, Riannon, had benefited from the compassion of Queen Cerro, the second wife of King Vridank of Redania, who adopted the infant as her own. Unfortunately, her husband’s disowned firstborn daughter, Falka, born of his banished first wife, tried to seize her birthright of the kingdom in a bloody rebellion. Before being captured and burned at the stake, Falka had imprisoned a pregnant Riannon, now the wife of Goidemar, King of Temeria. Riannon’s twins and Falka’s child were raised as triplets, and in her captivity-caused insanity Riannon knew not which of the children was biologically hers. Indeed, the sorceresses hired by King Goidemar to ferret out Falka’s demon seed (in order to have the toddler murdered in public view) feigned an inability to identify Falka’s child, and in time the King accepted all three children as his own.  However, the sorceresses knew all along that Adela had been Falka’s, leading to the irony of Adela’s untimely death at the tender age of seventeen. As one of the sorceresses explains in a lengthy section of exposition, “She died of the plague. The demonic bastard, the accursed blood, the daughter of the diabolical Falka helped the priests in the infirmary beyond the castle walls during an epidemic. She caught the plague from the sick children she was treating and died.” The compassion learned from her adoptive family had ultimately been her downfall, not any madness assumed to be inherited from her birthmother.

In the short story “A Little Sacrifice” (Sapkowski’s take on “The Little Mermaid”), the troubadour Dandelion, vainly tries to find a pearl to give to his friend and protegee, Essi Daven, for her birthday. Essi picks up a discarded shell and Dandelion jokes that it is a birthday present from Geralt, but the joke is on him, because it contains a beautiful bluish pearl the size as a “swollen pea.” Essi is deeply in love with Geralt, who, despite being a bit of a womanizer, refreshingly long resists sleeping with her as it would take advantage of her feelings. He has the pearl “set in silver, in a little silver flower with intricate petals,” which she afterwards wears as a talisman against all evil. However, as often happens in Sapkowski’s tale, there is no happily ever after, and the talisman fails to protect her from the smallpox epidemic raging through Vizima four years later. Dandelion tenderly “carried her out in his arms between corpses being cremated on funeral pyres and had buried her far from the city, in the forest, alone and peaceful, and, as she had asked, buried two things with her: her lute and her sky blue pearl. The pearl from which she was never parted.” Respecting Essi’s last wishes represents a small act of kindness in the face of a raging pandemic, uncelebrated, unheralded, and utterly unable to change the outcome. It is important nonetheless, as it helps to define for the audience what a loyal and conscientious friend the often irresponsible Dandelion truly is.

Similarly during a pandemic of violence, the bloody Nilfgaard War against the Northern Kingdoms, the halfling field surgeon Milo “Rusty” Vanderbeck, takes a moment to enjoy the calm and cleanliness of his virginal, yet technologically crude, field hospital tent set up to serve the soldiers of the Northern Kingdoms. His staff consists of three women, Marti Sodergren, a “sorceress and healer” whose magic included anesthesia, blood-staunching, and disinfecting spells, Iola, a novice priestess from the Temple of Melitele, and Shani, a young medical student from the Oxenfurt Academy. Rusty initially has little confidence on this inexperienced team, but each ultimately rises to the occasion. Sapkowski interjects vignettes of Rusty’s struggles to save his patients juxtaposed against bloody battle scenes, highlighting the brutality and savagery of warfare based on medievalist weaponry. At one point Iola is utterly overwhelmed with the horror of it all, the bodily fluids, the “endless screams,” the “pointlessness of what we’re doing,” as limbs are roughly sawed off and patients die of blood loss before they can be seen. It should be noted that Rusty’s field hospital is one of the few truly egalitarian spaces in the Witcher universe. As the halfling explains to a soldier demanding expedited care for a noble, “It doesn’t matter… if this one here, from whose guts I’m removing bits of iron, is a peasant, a member of the minor gentry, old nobility or aristocracy. He’s lying on my table. And to me, as I hum to myself, a duke’s worth a jester. Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.’” Elves aligned with Nilfgaard burst into the field hospital and kill the wounded, until discovering that one patient, whom Iola is trying to shield with her body, is a Nilfgaard colonel. Rusty is true to his word.

In The Lady of the Lake, the introduction of the Catriona plague is an accident, caused by the magically gifted Ciri’s undisciplined magical teleportation, jumping from world to world, time to time, within the multiverse, without any thought of potential contamination. On one world, interpreted by some fans to be our 14^th century earth, a plague-carrying flea hitches a ride in her clothes. Once back in her own world, the flea infects a rat, and then a cat, and then the cat’s abusive owner. The resulting “viral haemorrhagic fever” called the Red Death (or Catriona’s plague, after the ship that initially spread it) subsequently travels around the Continent, eerily similar to the early days of COVID-19. Again, happy endings are in short supply in the fractured fairy-tales of Sapkowski’s universe. While Rusty and his assistants survive the battle with Nilfgaard, the sorceress Marti Sodergren dies two weeks after the battle, killed by a jealous lover. Rusty and the novice priestess Iola die the following year during the largest Red Death outbreak. Sapkowski describes how “All the physicians and most of the priests fled…. Rusty and Iola remained, naturally. They treated the sick, because they were doctors. The fact that there was no cure for the Red Death was unimportant to them. They both became infected. He died in her arms, in the powerful, confidence-inspiring embrace of her large, ugly, peasant hands. She died four days later. Alone.”

As for Shani, she “died seventy-two years after the battle, as the celebrated and universally respected retired dean of the Department of Medicine at the University of Oxenfurt. Generations of future surgeons used to repeat her famous joke: ‘Sew red to red, yellow to yellow, white to white. It’s sure to be fine.’ Almost no one noticed how after delivering that witty anecdote the dean always wiped away a furtive tear,” in memory of her mentor Rusty. In the medievalist universe of the Witcher saga we see first responders and other volunteers die in plagues caring for others. How many medical heroes likewise gave their lives caring for the infected during our own ongoing pandemic?

At the start of the battle with Nilfgaard, Rusty gives his neophyte assistants a revealing pep talk:

 

 In a moment people will start slaughtering each other. And a moment after that moment the first casualties will appear. Almost a hundred thousand soldiers will begin to wound each other. In very elaborate ways. There are, including the other two hospitals, twelve of us doctors. Not for all the world will we manage to help all those that are in need. Not even a scanty percentage of those in need. No one expects that. But we’re going to treat them. Because it is, excuse the banality, our raison d’être. To help those in need. So we shall banally help as many as we manage to help… We won’t manage to do much more than we’re capable of. But we shall all do our best to make sure it won’t be much less.

 

In these brief vignettes, Sapkowski celebrates selfless acts of kindness and compassion, even when knowingly powerless to change the ultimate outcome. His medievalist world may be bleak and brutal overall, but it is not without humanity, even if the trait is frequently found in the actions of those whom humans marginalize and condemn as subhuman.