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Andrzej Sapkowski is most well-known for his series The Witcher, which has spawned its own multimedia empire. The author has earned a reputation as one of the best fantasy writers today for his fantasy world steeped in Slavic folklore, riffing on classical fairy tales and mythologies to create mirror image morals, and short story approach to writing novels. His late debut and fascinating approach to storytelling makes his unusual in the writing world, and today we’ll examine how it happened.
History
Andrzej Sapkowski was born in Lodz, Poland June 21,1948. His father was a member of the Polish People’s Army and participated in the Battle of Berlin and chose to settle in Lodz after the war. His parents were academics, and Sapkowski grew up surrounded by books, and was always encouraged to read. Despite this, his father wanted him to become an engineer because it paid well, but Sapkowski didn’t feel it was a right fit for him. He instead chose to study economics at the University of Lodz, and then got a job as a sales representative in a foreign trade company in 1972. The job let him travel and he worked there for decades before he wrote his first story.
Though not writing, he began his literary career as a translator affiliated with Fantastyka magazine. It was actually Sapkowski’s son, Krzysztof, who pushed him into becoming a writer. Krzysztof was an avid reader of Fantastyka, and saw it running a short story competition in 1985. He persuaded his father to write a story for it, and Sapowski’s submission became the very first Witcher story. Although it didn’t win the competition, it did win 3rd place and established Sapkowski as a talented author. This was in 1986, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and Heroic Fantasy was a derided genre so, despite his success, and further short stories about Geralt of Rivia, Sapkowski stayed at his sales job, until he couldn’t.
There was a political coup, and the monopoly on foreign trade was abolished, forcing Sapkowski to look for new work. When faced with finding someone who wanted to do business abroad, and turning to writing for a living, Sapkowski chose writing, much to his wife’s dismay. Out of his many short stories about Geralt’s adventures in fairytale retellings with a darker bent to them, Sapkowski slowly formed the framework for a larger series of stories. A background emerged for Geralt, along with a supporting cast and larger stories and themes surrounding them. This culminated in 1994 with the Blood of Elves, the first novel of the Witcher pentalogy, for which he received a Junusz A. Zajdel Prize, Poland’s most prestigious Science fiction and Fantasy award. Sapkowski published a Witcher novel nearly every year from 1994 to 1999, finishing it with The Lady of the Lake.
Satisfied with the well rounded story he’d crafted for the Witcher, Sapkowski decided to try something completely different. He settled on historical fiction, and published The Tower of Fools in 2002, the first of his Hussite Trilogy. Set in the Land of the Bohemian Crown during the Hussite Wars of 1419-1434, the time period is an important event closely related to polish history of the period, so Sapkowski felt knowledgable enough to write about it. The trilogy was rounded out with Warriors of God in 2004 and Light Perpetual in 2006. Though not as successful as The Witcher, many consider the Hussite Trillogy to be his masterpiece, and Sapkowski too hiatus form writing after he finished it.
In 2007, CD Project Red, a polish gaming company, published a game based on The Witcher. The game was a success and they followed it up with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011, and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt in 2015. The games were praised for their stories, writing, immersive player choice, dedication to the source material, and explorable world. As of March 2023, the video game series has sold over 75 million copies. Despite its success, and the key role it played in popularizing his work, Sapkowski has never played the games, as they lie outside his interest, and he does not consider himself a co-author of them.
Breaking his hiatus, Sapkowski returned to the world of The Witcher on November 6, 2013, with his prequel novel Season of Storms. Set between short stories in The Last Wish, the prequel depicts a string of failures that force Geralt to make difficult decisions. In 2019, Netflix released their adaptation of The Witcher, skyrocketing the series popularity across the mainstream in the United States and prompting the American publisher to print an additional 500,000 copies to meet demand. Again, despite the success of this adaptation Salkowski maintained a detached perspective and claims his role in its production was purely advisory.
Andrzej Sapkowski’s Writing Style
On of the most notable aspects of Andrzej Sapkowski’s writing style is his complete lack of care for linearity and long, drawn our stories. This was likely born from his time writing short stories. Rather than crafting a world and characters from scratch and knowing everything in intricate detail, the world of the Witcher was created to facilitate his short stories.
Even after he began writing longer Witcher novels with Blood of Elves, the stories are fragmentary. The larger plot is developed in the background of the winding individual stories that lay the groundwork for much bigger events. Crucial information about the world and characters is often dropped casually and with little regard for their ramifications on the wider story. Rather than focusing on the massive events that might define the history of the world, Sapkowski focuses on the small events that act as the turning points that lead to these wider events. The messenger is shot down before he can deliver his message. Geralt chooses to be paid in the law of surprise rather than gold. These small moments build up to have wild consequences that ripple out into the world. Armies march to war. A child is owed to Geralt that he does not want, nor does the child’s caretaker wish to give her away. But the series’ larger themes of destiny and fate conspire to make it so. The overarching narrative is crafted almost as an afterthought as a result of these small moments. A series of incidental events that result from these actions designed to connect the details of Sapkowski’s short stories and carry out the destiny they try so hard to avoid.
One of Sapkowski’s writing tricks is to use an ironic echo to both drill home an idea and show the many different sides of it. He’ll have a character or the narrator repeat something from earlier, often word to word, but the events of the story present us with a completely different context, so the meaning of the words changes as well. In the short story, "A Shard of Ice", for example, a thief realizes who Geralt is midway through robbing him and tells him not to involve others if he wishes to commit suicide, implying it was Geralts fault for looking like an easy target. Here, the idea is funny because Geralt clearly has no intension of suicide, and it was the mugger who attacked him. But the story spins this idea around when Geralt is attacked the next morning by Istredd, who Geralt is not allowed to kill because of his importance to the town. Geralt repeats the thief’s words and leaves, implying that because he isn’t allowed to fight him, Istredd could only be attacking him for assisted suicide, and his death wouldn’t be Geralt's fault. By changing the context and application of the words, Sapkowski transforms them from a joke into a threat. The ironic echoing of earlier words supports the morally gray world of The Witcher by showing how your unique perspective, beliefs, and context color how you see the world.
This ironic echo is especially potent in the Witcher’s twisted retellings of fairy tales, of which there are many. Sapkowski even considers the Witcher to occupy the subgenre of retelling, “which consists of taking classic fairy tales, fables, legends, or myths and telling them anew, whether changed, modified, or sometimes even distorted or twisted in perverse ways.” Here, the ironic echo isn’t self-contained to a single story, but plays on our expectations for fairy tales. Often, the initial use is the pop culture understanding of a fairytale, like Disney’s Cinderella, and Sapkowski's story is the ironic echo of that pop culture fairytale. It offers a darker, alternative interpretation of the themes and morals present in the original story.
The short story "A Grain of Truth" in The Last Wish is a play on Beauty and the Beast. Geralt learns that young women are being killed in a town and goes to investigate a nearby mansion occupied by a beast named Nivellen, and a young woman called Vereena. While the story carries the same idea as the Disney adaptation, that Nivellen’s beastly appearance does not make him a monster, his actions do, it offers its own ironic echo to the more lighthearted adaptation. Where Disney’s Beast longs to be human again, and slowly learns to regain his humanity, Nivellen does not really mind his appearance, and lets it corrupt him. Nivellen is a monster because of his willingness to use the village women to try and break his curse, and the blind eye he gives Vereena when she goes out to murder the women he slept with. And while Nivellen’s curse is broken by Vereena’s love for him, like Belle does for the Beast, it does nothing to change his monstrous actions. Though they present the same ideas, the context of Sapkowski’s adaptation offers the idea that true love is only as helpful as the people in love. Where the Beast’s love for Belle makes him a better person, Nivellen’s love for Vereena actually makes him a worse person. In order to love Vereen, he must turn a blind eye to, or even accept that she must murder others in order to live. His love has compromised his morals, so even when his curse is broken, he is still a monster. But despite the sad ending, the story still reaffirms the moral that true love conquers all. It's just that in this case, love conquered Nivellen's morals.
Sapowski's fragmentary storytelling, twisted approach to moralizing, and the brutal choices he presents to his characters put him at odds with many other fantasy authors. Some authors like Brandon Sanderson begin with their world and characters, breathe life into the cardboard cutouts they move around the story, and see the world take shape around them as they meticulously write out every detail of the universe. In clear contrast, Sapkowski maintains a devastatingly utilitarian view of the world and characters he created. He does not consider them people, or the world to be alive, and in some ways he even seems to hold contempt for them. “Geralt is a fictional character, created to serve the story, which revolves around him. If the fictional character serves the story well, an author likes his character.”
One might get the impression with Sapkowski’s emotional distance from his characters and blasé reaction to his adaptations, that he doesn’t care about his stories. But that isn’t true. Instead, it tells us he doesn’t consider the world and characters to be the most important elements of his stories, but the twisted morals and alternate perspectives he presents us with. And his fragmentary plotting is a result of telling a much larger story without actually changing his format. Although they are called novels, the Witcher pentalogy is still structured like a short story collection. The only difference is that these stories are deliberately trying to connect together and tell a larger story. Sapkowski’s unique style and approach to storytelling remind us that literature and publishing are not an American institute and exist all over the world. Approches we consider standard in America may be completely neglected in other cultures, and insulating ourselves from them is only to our detrement. International authors have made enormous contributions to the world of literature. Andrzej Sapkowski's approch to writing offers a tantilizing example of why we should take the time to read them.
Andrzej Sapkowski Today
After finishing the Hussite Trilogy and taking another hiatus from writing, Sapkowski announced he would be writing another novel for The Witcher. It will be another standalone novel outside the pentalogy, and is expected to release late 2024 or early 2025. We've seen that Sapkowski doesn't write his stories for the sake of the world or characters and had previously chosen to leave The Witcher alone, so it will be interesting to see what stories prompted him to return to the series.
Discussion Questions:
1. All of Andrzej Sapkowski’s work is heavily steeped in Polish history and Slavic mythology. What influences has your culture had on your creative works?
2. Today, many writers struggle to enter the publishing industry while they’re young and feel like they’ve failed if they don’t break out within a few years, but Andrzej Sapkowski entered it well into his adult life. How do you think that changed his perspective on the publishing industry, and his approach to writing?
3. Despite the multimedia success of The Witcher, Sapkowski has shown no interest in any of the adaptations of his work. Why do you think that is?
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