WiC Reads: Blood of Elves

CHAPTER ONE

What’s surprising about the first chapter of the Witcher saga proper is how little the titular witcher appears. Geralt of Rivia, scarred and battle-hardened, shows up at the beginning and the end, escorting the surprise child Ciri to Kaer Morhen, the Witchers’ Keep, so that he can train her to become one of his order. These brief sections are lyrical and stylized. The first is dominated by Ciri’s unrestful dream, all of it written in the present tense. These sections are here to give us a taste of the strange relationship between these two, and are mostly told from Ciri’s perspective. Not a ton actually happens in them.

The rest of the chapter is another story. The bulk concerns the adventures of Dandelion, a bard and one of Geralt’s best friends. There’s a long section where he’s singing a ballad in a town square, a ballad based on some of his adventures with Geralt from the first two books. It’s an excuse for Sapkowski to dump one giant load of exposition on us. The townsfolk debate the merits of the ballad and whether the events it describes really happened until well after Dandelion has taken his tips and left.

We also get a hefty helping of world-building. Sapkowski’s Continent isn’t like George R.R. Martin’s Westeros; it’s more directly inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with humans at odds with dwarves at odds with elves, although all of them are intermixing more than they usually did in Middle-earth. We also hear of conflicts between the countries of Cintra and  Nilfgaard, so there are some geopolitics involved, too. The Witcher exists at a halfway point between Tolkien’s mythic imaginings and Martin’s grounded politicking.

From there, Sapkowski wastes no time getting into the thick of it, as Dandelion is accosted by a shadowy figure named Rience and rescued from torture by Yennefer, a powerful sorceress and Geralt’s on-again off-again love interest. Rience is looking for Ciri, the granddaughter of Calanthe, the queen of Cintra until she committed suicide rather than submit to the invading Nilfgaardian army. Why is Rience so intent on finding Ciri? I don’t know, but the way Sapkowski writes for and about her, she’s already taken on a sort of mysterious importance. The plot is afoot!

I’ll be honest: I enjoyed The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny well enough but there was something keeping me from getting fully invested. Maybe it was the English translation I’m reading, or maybe it was that Sapkowski has created a high fantasy world best explored in a serialized format rather than through loosely connected short stories. I’m looking forward to seeing the kind of tale he can tell now that he has more space.