In part 1 I defined the Medieval/Alchemical and Modern lab tropes. Here we apply them to various televisual incarnations of The Witcher.
In the
2002 Polish tv adaptation, Geralt visits the sorcerer Isredd in his lab. We can
easily see skulls (human and otherwise, a tumble of books, rather
modern-looking glassware, and an animal skeleton. Geralt is less than impressed
with the array of equipment, scoffing “Every time I see this stuff I wonder if
one couldn’t dabble in magic without all these eyesores.” Istredd retorts that “true,
deep magic requires knowledge and research,” as he reveals that he also has a woman’s
corpse on ice, part of his research on infertility.
While the
available video quality of the episode is not great, we can still identify many
alchemical and modern lab tropes here, which I have highlighted in yellow. As
you can see, we do appear to have an amalgam of the modern (clearly minus the
electrical devices) and the medieval. It is also interesting to note that there
is some natural overlap between the two lists.
In
Netflix’s 2021 animated prequel The Nightmare of the Wolf, the Witcher
Vesemir enters a secret basement lab as a child, a bestiary where monsters are
studied and, he later learns, are created in vats. The sorcerer (here called a
mage) Reidrich explains that in the past some monsters were crossbred through
“inelegant” alchemy but now the mages “guard the secrets to such mutagenic
alchemy, preventing further abuse,” a bald-faced lie (DeMayo).
As an adult Vesemir rescues his friend, the elf Filavandrel,
from the mutated elf Kitsu, who had been trying to recreate her own illicit genetic
engineering at the hands of Reidrich on kidnapped elf girls using “strange
alchemy” – think Frankenstein’s creation trying to make his own mate (DeMayo).
Kitsu’s lab reflects modern tropes, sensibilities, including specialized
glassware that did not exist before the 1800s (TV Tropes).
Vesemir is horrified to find a secret room in the bestiary where the mages create new monsters for the Witchers to hunt through mutagenic alchemy, assuring that they will continue to have jobs. The mages’ creation of life through artificial means brings to mind the alchemical homunculus described by works attributed to Paracelsus from the early 16th century (Murase 47) and included in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part Two (1832).
Summarizing the depictions of laboratories in The Nightmare of the Wolf, we again see a synthesis of both the alchemical and modern lab tropes (highlighted in yellow here).
Season 1 of the live-action Netflix series features a single detailed laboratory, that belonging to sorceress Triss Merigold. While the scene is brief (and I have spared you the mangled bodies preserved in salt), we can still easily identify several of the classic tropes, and an interesting continuity error: a literal off-the-shelf modern Florence flask (with the manufacturing label clearly visible).
In Season 2 much of the action takes place in the ruins of Kaer Morhen, the Witchers’ ancestral home, which was significantly damaged at the end of The Nightmare of the Wolf. The basement bestiary still exists, for the sole purpose of conducting examinations on monsters. The secrets of mutagenic alchemy have been lost, and with them the ability to make new Witchers, leaving Geralt and his brethren an endangered species. Production designer Andrew Laws explains in a behind the scenes video that “It’s not just a matter of having a few pretty things on a table. We want to make it look like there’s a purpose to… these are autopsy tools, this is what happens in here, you know? How do they cut things? How brutal is it? This is our version of a medieval world. You will see layers of destruction. It’s tired, it’s falling apart, but it is the witcher’s home.” The level of detail in this set clearly reflects Laws’ vision of what this medieval alchemy lab should contain, and we recognize a number of familiar tropes, including simple metal tools, animal skulls, scrolls and books, and an examining table and wall-mounted manacles.
The space is introduced in episode 2, “Kaer Morhen,” where we see Geralt conducting a brutal autopsy on a piece of a mutated monster, both the tools and the technique reflecting the brutality of the monster-hunting lifestyle. In the next episode, “What is Lost,” Vesemir, now the elder statesman of the Witchers, is obsessively trying to figure out what killed one of his own, carefully peeling away and prying out bits of foreign monstrous tissue from the man he had raised from a child. He voices frustration that even with a “lab full of alchemical compounds that can change day to [expletive] night” he is unable to solve this mystery of how a leshy could become so heavily mutated (Higgins and Schmidt). In this birds eye view of the lab we again spy a number of expected items, from an operating table and a variety of crude metal tools and labware (notably mostly more correctly medieval ceramics and metals rather than more modern glassware) to books and, it is presumed, arcane knowledge.
Geralt seeks the scientific opinion of Triss as to whether the leshy and another strange beast that had killed the leshy were mutated by mutagenic alchemy. Triss mixes some of the tissue with a liquid, utters a magical spell, and sets the solution to spin in a centrifuge overnight, noting that any sign of magic will cause the sample to glow. This is clearly a case of steampunk technology, as the first experiments with rotating wheels (on the orientation of seedlings) were conducted by Thomas Knight in 1806, and the first continuous centrifuge was designed in 1878 for the purpose of separating cream from milk (Taulbee et al. 17).
While Triss fails to find any sign of mutagenic alchemy, she and Vesemir do find evidence that Ciri, Geralt’s foster daughter, has powerful magic within her blood, magic that can possibly be used to make more Witchers. Vesemir appeals to Ciri’s love for Geralt and the other Witchers to submit to experimentation, this particular scene in the lab notable for the juxtaposition of the simple pots and mortar and pestle with a more modern rack of test tubes. Test tubes are an early 19th century invention, perhaps by famed chemist and physicist Michael Faraday (The Test Tube 30).
Ciri consents to being a guinea pig, and Triss draws her blood using a long thin metal pipe (similar to a metal straw) connected to modern-appearing rubber tubing. The first blood transfusions were done in the 1666 by Richard Lower in Oxford. As reported by Robert Boyle to the Royal Society, quills were inserted into the necks of dogs and connected with silver or brass pipes. In some cases the pipes were directly inserted into the animals (Boyle 354; 356-7). The next year the Royal Society received a report of a transfusion from a sheep to a human, using a combination of quills and very thin pipes (thinner than had originally been used on animals) (Coga 557-8). We therefore see that in this case the prop designers of The Witcher have provided a historically reasonable facsimile of 17th century medical instrumentation.
Triss engages in alchemy of her own, carefully crafting a Witcher-creating potion from Ciri’s magical blood. Her equipment is a curious mixture of more medieval (mortar and pestle) with modern lab equipment that is crafted from wood rather than metal to give it an older feel. For example, a primitive-looking glass flask with a strap of leather wound around it is held in place on wooden lab stand using wooden rather than metal clamps. Such a simplification is not possible in the case of the hypodermic needle used to inject the potion, the first such device probably created by Francis Rynd in 1844 (Craig). Instead, the prop designers went all-out steampunk, creating an ominous multi-needled and artistically decorated piston-style needle that the audience would probably identify as Victorian in design (if not engineering).
Geralt interrupts the attempt to convert Ciri into a Witcher, and the protective father figure spiriting his ward as far away from his mad scientist colleagues as possible. As Triss and Vesemir reflect on the horrors of their experiments, a smoking (modern) flask is featured as a visible metaphor of their having slipped into mad science (just in case the audience hasn’t figured this out on their own by now).
So how did Andrew Law and his crew do? As seen here, the laboratory in the Kaer Morhen-based episodes hits nearly all of the alchemical and modern tropes.
We will end with a quick study of perhaps the most authentically alchemical lab in The Witcher, that of renegade sorceress Lydia, a specialist in blood tracing. Using chemicals and magic, she ascertain the source of blood through smelling it, although as she notes, she usually conducts her forensic alchemy on the dead. Instead here she is tasked with verifying that the potion created by Triss was made from Ciri’s blood (the flask having been predictably stolen by decidedly bad guys right after Triss and Vesemir realized the errors of having created it in the first place). Notice that her lab contains metal alembics and wooden, metal, and ceramic mixing and storage devices, mirroring those seen in alchemical woodcuts and engraving. The glassware is primitive, with the exception of the test tubes, perhaps because the set designers believed the audience would not respect Lydia’s prowess as a scientist without them.
In the trifold taxonomy of medievalism crafted by David Matthews (15) Sapkowski’s tales offer a “Middle Ages ‘as it never was,’” having “a medieval appearance… but take place where there cannot be a Middle Ages” (Matthews 37-8). Sapkowski himself not only reflects “Fantasy uses a medieval veneer, but whoever said it actually is medieval?” but argues that his invented world has “no points of overlap” with “medieval reality” (Sapkowski and Bereś 92, 162; translated by Jakub Majewski). Similar to George Martin’s saga, Sapkowski’s world largely offers a vision of “a gothic or grotesque Middle Ages, entailing the assumption that anything medieval will involve threat, violence and warped sexuality” (Matthews 15). And, it appears, mad alchemy as a proxy for mad science, but always with a nod to modern visual cues and tropes that an audience expects in such cautionary tales.
References
Boyle, Robert (1666) “The Method Observed in Transfusing Bloud [sic] out of One Animal into Another.” Philosophical Transactions 1: 353-8.
Coga, Arthur (1667) “An Account of the Experiment of Transfusion, Practised Upon a Man in London.” Philosophical Transactions 2: 557-9.
Craig, Robert (20 Dec. 2018) “A History of Syringes and Needles.” University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine blog, https://medicine.uq.edu.au/blog/2018/12/history-syringes-and-needles
DeMayo, Beau (2021) The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. Netflix.
Ditomasso, Lorenzo (1996) “Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Tales and the Question of Race in Fantastic Literature.” Extrapolation 37(2): 150-70.
Ferrario, Gabriele (15 Oct 2007) “Al-Kimiya: Notes on Arabic Alchemy.” Distillations Blog, Science History Institute, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/al-kimiya-notes-on-arabic-alchemy
Higgins, Clare, and Lauren Schmidt (2021) “What is Lost.” The Witcher, Season 2. Netflix.
IGN (2 May 2022) “The Witcher: Season 2: Official Behind the Scenes Clip.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUz0me5Zr8Y.
Lederberg, Joshua (1966) “Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution.” The American Naturalist 100: 519-31.
Matthews, David (2015) Medievalism: A Critical History. Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer.
Midgley, Mary (2000) “Review: Alchemy Revived.” The Hastings Center Report 30(2): 41-3.
Morris, Peter J.T. (2021) “The History of Chemical Laboratories: A Thematic Approach.” ChemTexts 7: article 21 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40828-021-00146-x
Morris, Peter J.T. (2015) The Matter Factory: A History of the Chemical Laboratory. London: Reakton Books
Murase, Amadeo (2020) “The Homunculus and the Paracelsian Liber de imaginibus.” Ambix 67(1): 47-61, DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2020.1720359
Pugh, Tison, and Angela Jane Weisl (2013) Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge.
Pyne, Lydia (19 May 2016) “Inside the Alchemist’s Workshop,” JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/alchemists-workshop/
Rifkin, Jeremy (1984) Algeny. Penguin Books
Sapkowski, Andrzej, and Bereś, Stanisław. (2005) Historia i Fantastyka [History and Fantasy]. SuperNOWA.
Schmidgen, Henning (2021) “The Laboratory.” Encyclopedia of the History of Science. DOI: 10.34758/sz06-t975.
Szczerbic, Michal (2002) “Okruch Iodu [A Shard of Ice],” Wiedźmin [The Hexer]. Telewizja Polska. https://archive.org/details/TheWitcherTV/.
Taulbee, D.N., M. Mercedes Maroto-Valer (2000) “Centrifugation.” In Encyclopedia of Separation Science, eds. Ian D. Wilson, E. R. Adlard, Michael Cooke, C. F. Poole, 17-40. San Diego: Academic Press.
“The Test Tube: A Symbolic Story” (2018) The Biomedical Scientist 28-32, https://thebiomedicalscientist.net/sites/default/files/media/document/2018/28-32_bs_testtubes.pdf
TV Tropes (N.D.) “Mad Scientist Laboratory” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientistLaboratory
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