How was the first witcher made in The Witcher books?

While viewers won’t be getting any new adventures with Geralt of Rivia in 2022, soon we’ll be back on the Continent for Netflix’s live-action spinoff The Witcher: Blood Origin. Set 1,200 years before the events of The Witcher, this four-episode limited series will explore the lore of The Witcher universe. We’ll learn about the Conjunction of the Spheres, a celestial event that merged the worlds of monsters, humans, and elves to create the Continent as we know it. The show will also delve into the creation of the first prototype witcher.

With multiple books, games, and season of television, the mythology of The Witcher universe is somewhat complicated and often contradicts itself across mediums. So while Netflix’s new series is set to depict the origins of the first witcher onscreen, it will almost certainly be different than the way witchers are created in Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels or in the video games from CD Projekt Red. We know this because of the timeframe. Blood Origin is set during the lead-up to the Conjunction of the Spheres, while in the books and games the witchers are created as a direct reaction to the hardships caused by that event.

So before The Witcher: Blood Origin comes out, let’s brush up on how the first witchers were created in the books.

How were the first witchers created in the novels?

One common thread between Sapkowski’s Witcher books and the video games by CD Projekt Red is their often opaque references to in-world mythology. Sapkowski includes passing nods to historical figures that are never fully explained. Meanwhile, the games often had tomes and journals you could pick up to learn more about the world of The Witcher.

The creation of the first witchers is one of those rather opaque details, so opaque that it wasn’t until the 2018 novel Season of Storms that Sapkowski finally gave readers more details. In that book, Geralt discovers that certain sorcerers had been creating experimental monsters for centuries, which subsequently escaped and went on to ravage the countryside. When he confronts a group of sorcerers at the castle of Rissberg about this, he learns that it was these very types of experiments which led to the creation of the first witchers. Here’s a quote:

"For it was Cosimo Malaspina, and after him his student Alzur, yes, Alzur, who created the witchers. They invented the mutation owing to which men like you were bred. Owing to which you exist, owing to which you walk upon this earth, ungrateful one. You ought to esteem Alzur, his successors and their works, and not destroy them!"

Alzur was briefly mentioned in The Lady of the Lake, as well as in a short story named “The Road of No Return” which was never translated into English, but this moment in Season of Storms made clear how important he was.

How was the first witcher made in the games?

The video games by CD Projekt Red, including the Gwent card game, expanded on this and filled in details about Alzur’s life. While the games aren’t technically canon to the story of the novels, they do sync up surprisingly well. The games depict Alzur as a sorcerer who sees the damage monsters are inflicting on the people of the Continent, and resolves to create a new kind of monster hunter to fight them.

However, Alzur is also responsible for creating quite a few monsters as well, both in the books and games. His methods for creating the witchers amount to performing experiments on unwanted or potentially kidnapped children. The games play up the idea that the rulers of the Northern human kingdoms enlisted Alzur’s help because monsters were running rampant across the countryside, but that in his own way he’s just as dangerous as the monsters he’s trying to fight.

The common denominator in both the books and games is that the witchers were created to help keep down the monster population after the Conjunction of the Spheres, because so many people were ending up as monster lunch meat. Whatever way The Witcher: Blood Origin tackles this topic, it will certainly be different since the show takes place before the conjunction.

The Witcher: Blood Origin drops on Netflix on December 25.

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h/t Reddit, witcher.fandom.com