Ready for The Witcher, Season 2? Here's your (un)required reading list to help you prep.
By Sloane Rosenthal, Kinfolklore Contributor
It’s been a long offseason, y’all, but Season 2 of The Witcher is finally nearly upon us! We’ve still got two months to wait between now and eight more glorious hours of a leather-clad Henry Cavill grunting at the camera, though, and you can only listen to Paul’s riffs on “Toss a Coin” on the podcast so many times without actually losing your mind. So, between now and December 17, here’s a list of more ways to spend quality time with Geralt and the Witcher fam, by delving into the world of the books that inspired both the global-phenomenon video game and the show.
So, where do you start? Here’s a full syllabus of Witcher-related reading.
Before you crack a book, I have to recommend you read this hilarious interview with Witcher scribe Andrzej Sapkowski from i09’s Beth Elderkin. One of the big debates when the show first launched was about what to do with its tone, spurred by some of the “this is the next Game of Thrones” pitches: is it campy on purpose? Is it serious? Is it Xena: Warrior Princess for the 2020s? I can’t think of a better way to explain the books’ tonal approach than to tell you that they were written by the guy who answered this question like this:
io9: “What was your reaction to learning your books were getting 500,000 reprints after the release of the Netflix show?”
Sapkowski: “How do you expect I answer this question? That I despaired? Shed tears? Considered suicide? No sir. My feelings were rather obvious and not excessively complex.”
Sapkowski’s dry, darkly funny sarcasm is mirrored in Geralt’s self-deprecating deadpan; he’s mostly in earnest, but mercifully not affected with some desperate sense of self-seriousness. Get in, kids: this is supposed to be a good time.
“Sapkowski’s dry, darkly funny sarcasm is mirrored in Geralt’s self-deprecating deadpan; he’s mostly in earnest, but mercifully not affected with some desperate sense of self-seriousness. Get in, kids: this is supposed to be a good time. ”
A note, before we go further: these books were written by a guy who seems to have looked at George R R Martin and said, “I’ll see you that bit in the cave and raise you a foursome in a bathtub with a dragon and also sex on a stuffed unicorn.” Both the books and this discussion contain adult content and spoilers.
What if I just want to read the stuff I saw in Season 1?
This part is easy. The things that happen to Geralt (and to a lesser extent, to Ciri and Yen) are largely adapted from two collections of short stories: The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny. These were written after the novels, but are set before the events of the main saga (which really starts when Geralt and Ciri meet up for good shortly after the fall of Cintra at the Battle of Sodden Hill). By the time he wrote these anthologies, Sapkowski knew his characters well, and both the writing and translations had matured substantially (and as a result, they’re some of my favorite writing in the whole series). They map out the kind of theoretical and emotional mission statement for the saga in considerably more detail and depth than the first season of the show, introducing us to Geralt, Jaskier (Dandelion), Yen, and eventually Ciri, and Geralt’s central anxieties about the ethics of monster hunting for money, what he can and can’t feel and why, and grappling with both blades of the sword of destiny. Like the first season of the show, The Last Wish is not written in chronological order, though Sword of Destiny is considerably more linear, so you can read the stories pretty much whenever. They map on to the Geralt-centric portions of the episodes of the show approximately as follows:
Episode 1: “The Lesser Evil” from The Last Wish
Episode 2: “The Edge of the World” from The Last Wish
Episode 3: “The Witcher” from The Last Wish
Episode 4: “A Question of Price” from The Last Wish
Episode 5: “The Last Wish” from The Last Wish
Episode 6: “The Bounds of Reason” from Sword of Destiny
Episode 7: “The Sword of Destiny” from Sword of Destiny
Episode 8: “Something More” from Sword of Destiny
Now, I said they map onto the Geralt-centric portions of the episodes (with the exception of Episodes 5 and 6, where Geralt and Yen’s stories merge, and spots of Episodes 4, 7, and 8, where he and Ciri appear together). So...where does the rest of it come from?
The short answer is, it doesn’t. Yen’s backstory as a child and at Aretuza is almost entirely a show-only invention (literally: the one time Geralt asks her about it in Time of Contempt she responds, “don’t ask me, please, don’t ask me.”). And some of it is really cool and thrilling and some of it is, uh, real complicated. Ciri’s story is something of a hybrid of original content and adaptation: we know from comments in Sword of Destiny and Blood of Elves (the first novel in the series) that the Battle of Sodden have occurred and Cintra has fallen, but we don’t get much detail on what actually happened (but I’ll take that trade, cause it gets us more time with Jodhi May’s Calanthe, who is a delight).
It’s worth noting that there are some major book-to-show changes in Season One, most of which concern Yen. Paul did me a solid and talked about two of them in the Kinfolklore podcast episodes on Episodes 5 and 6, but I’ll add here that the description of Yen’s transformation in Episode 3 is entirely a show invention, and that few comments we do have in the books about the relationships between, say, magical ability and fertility, beauty, and power are quite different from the depiction on the show (and, uh, I kind of hate the show’s version). Also, Episode 6, largely based on “The Bounds of Reason,” curiously omits a hot tub foursome between Geralt, the Zerrakanian twins, and Borch (I guess in human form?), which seems like a real missed opportunity.
What about the rest of the short stories?
They’re great, and you may as well read them. Sword of Destiny has three as-yet-unseen short stories, entitled “A Shard of Ice,” “Eternal Flame,” and “A Little Sacrifice,” and they contain, inter alia, a heist comedy featuring a shapeshifter, Jaskier writing a song about his love for Geralt, and a rather infamous discussion about Yen’s preference for sex on the back of a life-sized stuffed unicorn (video game fans are already familiar with this classic detail). Andrea’s evil-adjacent pal Istredd shows up, and we’ll just say that he realllllly doesn’t cover himself in glory. Only one story from The Last Wish is omitted; more on that below.
What should I read because I’ll see it in Season 2?
What we know for sure:
“This story is fun, and I’m really intrigued to see how they fit it into the story’s timeline going forward — or don’t.”
Thrones fans, rejoice! In the show’s worst-kept secret, Kristofer Hivju, late of the forces of His Grace, King Jon Snow/Stark/Targaryen, is joining the Witcher-verse as Nivellen, the main character in the one omitted story from The Last Wish, “A Grain of Truth,” which is a kind of Beauty and the Beast-esque tale. So, we’re going “back” in time, at least once. This story is fun, and I’m really intrigued to see how they fit it into the story’s timeline going forward — or don’t. A Grain of Truth is the first episode title, so read this one before the season comes out.
And then what?
Entering the thickets of wildest guesswork, I think we can say pretty confidently at this point that we’re getting substantial portions of the saga’s first two novels, Blood of Elves and Time of Contempt, based on casting announcements and episode titles alone. Blood of Elves centers on Ciri’s training and the discovery of her true nature, first at Kaer Morhen with Geralt, several other Witchers, and Triss, and later at the Temple School in Ellander, with Nenneke and Yen. Naturally, there’s some not so good folks searching for Ciri (including Bridgerton’s Chris Fulton, who joins the cast as baddie-sorcerer Rience), and periodic hijinks ensue. Time of Contempt is both more interpersonally focused on our Witcher family of Yen, Geralt, Ciri, and Jaskier, but also branches out into more political territory, highlighting some of the mage-driven power struggles we saw in Season One of the show, before shit gets intensely, intensely weird.
Showrunner Lauren Hissrich has said that she plans to expand on the time between the end of the short stories and the beginning of Blood of Elves to delve further into Ciri’s early training with the Witchers, so I expect we’ll see more of that in Episode 2, Kaer Morhen. The title of Episode 6, Dear Friend, seems to be a reference to a truly hilarious letter Yen sends Geralt after he asks her to help train an increasingly unruly Ciri, so that may be where Yen and Ciri’s time together kicks off. Anya Chalotra (Yen) says she and Freya Allan (Ciri) worked together a great deal this season, so I’m hoping this means we’ll see a significant portion of their Blood of Elves arc, much of which is really quite charming.
“The title of Episode 6, Dear Friend, seems to be a reference to a truly hilarious letter Yen sends Geralt after he asks her to help train an increasingly unruly Ciri, so that may be where Yen and Ciri’s time together kicks off.”
A few characters who don’t appear until a significant way into Time of Contempt have also been announced, suggesting we’re headed pretty far into the events of the second novel. These include video-game-fan favorite Sigmund Dijkstra, the lovably slimy head of the Redanian Intelligence Service, who’s played by 18th-century Scotland’s creepiest uncle, Graham McTavish, apparently taking a break from his current day job of drinking whisky in a kilt. Fellow Outlander alum Simon Callow and BBC regular Liz Carr are along as Codringher and Fenn, the Continent’s resident morally dubious lawyers (you can find those everywhere, folks). But the really telling announcement as to how far into the thick of things we’re getting is that relative newcomer Aisha Fabienne Ross will play Lydia van Bredevoort in both the ominously-titled Episode 5 (Turn Your Back) and the untitled season finale. Lydia is a longtime assistant to Vilgefortz, and appears in a pivotal sequence about 2/3 of the way through the novel. I’m not sure it’s the smart money, but I’d bet the loose change in my pockets that we wrap up the season with the events on Thanedd, towards the end of Chapter 4.
But this is a lot of reading, and Go Tell The Bees That I am Gone comes out on November 23rd!
I know, y’all, I know. Yes…but fortunately, these books are short. The short stories are an incredibly quick read (especially if you just read the sections that are depicted on the show). If you want to have covered everything in some depth before the season starts, I think in all available likelihood you’re safe skimming the novels, which are likely to be substantially abbreviated in the show, given how much ground it seems we’re covering.
Sloane Rosenthal
is a freelance writer and knitwear designer, and the co-founder of American yarn company Hudson + West Co. A native of Washington, DC, she lives in Boulder, CO with her family, and tweets occasionally about pop culture (among other things) @rosenthalsloane.