2025 has officially begun, and for fans of The Witcher, we'll be spending plenty of time on the Continent this year. From the animated film The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep releasing in February to the upcoming fourth season of The Witcher television show on Netflix, there'll be plenty of adventures with Geralt of Rivia. There's also a new Witcher book by Andrzej Sapkowski out on shelves in Poland, titled Crossroads of the Crows. While we don't have an English-language release date for the novel yet, details are starting to leak out which paint an intriguing picture of the book.
For example, at long last, we now know Geralt of Rivia's age in the book canon. Crossroads of the Crows is set during Geralt's teenage years, when he's a new witcher finding his way in the world. According to reliable Witcher scoop site Redanian Intelligence, Geralt is 18 years old in the book — the youngest we've ever seen him in Sapkowski's works. Due to Geralt's mutations as a witcher, he ages slower than a normal human, so his exact age has always been an open question.
But now Sapkowski has made it explicit. Crossroads of the Crows takes place in the year 1229. And since we know for a fact that Geralt is 18 in the book, that means he was born in 1211. The Witcher Saga novels end in the year 1268, which means Geralt is roughly 57 at the time.
That doesn't exactly make Geralt a spring chicken, but it's still much younger than most fans believed. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt video game takes place around four years after the end of the books, in 1273. In it, Geralt's mentor Vesemir comments that he's "almost a century old."
The Netflix show goes a step farther, establishing Geralt's birth year as 1160, which means he's around 106 by the end of the third season. So the Geralt of the television show is almost twice as old as his book counterpart.
Interestingly, Geralt's lover Yennefer of Vengerberg is actually younger in the TV show than the novels. Her age was established already in earlier written works: she was born in 1174, making her 94 years old by the end of the novels. Netflix changed her birth year to 1192, which makes her around 32 years younger than Geralt in the TV canon. As RI puts it, this means that "by the end in the show they’ll be 108 and 76, while in the books they are 57 and 94."
At the end of the day, these little details don't change too much. It's hard to begrudge either the video games or TV show for making Geralt older than he is in the novels, considering that Sapkowski himself is only now making Geralt's age a finite number nearly 40 years after his first Witcher short story was published in 1986. But they are fun to ponder while we wait for our next trip to the Continent!
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep animated film releases on Netflix on February 11. Season 4 of The Witcher is expected sometime later this year, though no exact date has yet been announced. On the video game front, developer CD Projekt Red recently unveiled the first trailer for their highly-anticipated game The Witcher IV, which will let players step into the role of Geralt's adoptive daughter and protégé Ciri. As for the novel Crossroads of the Crows, we'll have our ear to the ground for any updates about an English language release in the coming months.
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