The Ballad of Geralt the Carelord (Patreon)

Enbies, ladies, gentlemen, witchers and dh’oine!

Let’s talk Geralt and Yennefer. In Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher Saga, a recurring element is that we see how fairy tales are versions of real world stories that have been sanitised and changed to appeal to audiences. We see this a bunch with Yennefer and Geralt who from practically book one are on-again-off-again bitter exes, but dandelion’s ballads sing of their burning, passionate, undying love.

An element in specifically the final book is that right before important characters die there is a flashback to something that contextualises their death. In Rivia, at the end of the series, Geralt intervenes in a pogrom to save the ethnic minorities from the angry mob, and gets mortally wounded by a villager with a pitchfork, and then the reader is treated to a flashback to Kaer Morhen when Ciri prophesied that he would be killed by three teeth (like, on a pitchfork). Yennefer is identified as a witch by the racist villagers and met with a barrage of hurled rocks, and we get a flashback to when she was a student in the rectory talking to Tissaia DeVries. 

Ciri, narrating this whole story to Sir Galahad of arthurian legend - yes, let’s just move on - starts to cry as she explains this part of the story but then tells him she showed up to save them with the help of a magical unicorn and took them to an island where they lived happily ever after, and along the way met lots of characters who died throughout the series.

What some readers seem to have gotten from this is that Geralt of Rivia is alive and he’s… on a farm… and you can never visit because it’s really far away, but he really likes it there, and all the other witchers are there too, and he’s having a great time.
Apropos of nothing, a lot of readers also seem to think that Geralt’s arc in the series teaches us that we should be detached, apolitical, cynical, edgelords.
So let’s talk about the books.

The Ballad of Geralt the Carelord

My hope in doing this series WITCHERMANIA has been to get more people who’ve watched the Netflix show to play the games, and more people in general to go on and read the books because I think they’re all great in different ways. The show is a sweet and simple version of the general themes of the series. Polished, simple, well-meaning - himbofied. The games take a lot more time to explore everything, while falling prey to the classic Gamer Error - oops, all horny. The books are really lovely, and I hope more people will go on to read them after watching this series, because the series really surprised me as not only a rich world, and thematically complex story, but also a great character piece, seeing Geralt’s journey over two collections of short stories and five novels from an edgy little centrist boy into a woke, involved king. Yes Geralt! Hell yeah! Get involved! Geralt embraces his best self and becomes a true role model for us all - This is the ballad of Geralt the Carelord.

Carelord, noun (/kɛːlɔːd/): The opposite of an edgelord, someone who just can’t help but get involved, has a horse in every race, cares a lot.

Sorry Gamers, it turns out kindness was the dankest meme of all.

Alright let’s get on this hot popping train straight to recap city. Choo choo!

The first two books are short stories with some overarching elements and narratives. They’re all great and we’ll focus in closely on some later but for now there are important details to know from specific stories. Geralt is a witcher, he defeated a striga, which has gained him some notoriety, but he also has a nickname “the butcher of blaviken” - this comes from an experience where Geralt went to a town called Blaviken where a mage called Stregobor and a bandit called Renfri each asked him to kill the other. Geralt tried to remain indifferent and impartial and ended up killing Renfri’s men and then Renfri before being run out of town by angry villagers and nicknamed the Butcher of Blaviken. 

Once again, this story is about how indifference helps the people with power and lets the greater evil win, we are not accepting suggestions from the audience at this time.

In another short story Geralt calls Law of Surprise for saving Duny, husband of princess Pavetta of Cintra, which then gives him rights to Pavetta’s unborn baby. He does this on purpose, he wants to steal a baby, it’s a thing.

Along the way he meets a bard called Jaskier which means buttercup in Polish, or called Dandelion in English - go figure. Dandelion writes ballads about Geralt’s life, love and work with some revisions - for example in the short story A Little Sacrifice Geralt is negotiating between a mermaid and her human lover, and she’s pissed because he won’t commit to her by coming and living underwater, which she refuses to grasp is a place where he can’t breathe. After the negotiations sour and the relationship is called off, Dandelion says how he’ll write about the story and we realise he’s writing The Little Mermaid.
Geralt meets the child he claimed by law of surprise - Cirilla of Cintra - while she’s in Brokilon forest with the dryads after running away from her arranged marriage, but he just takes her back to Cintra. Later, after Nilfgaard breezes through and wrecks Cintra, Geralt finds Ciri again living with a peasant family.

The first two books of short stories are written in a more comic-book-y pulpy way, with more action, more sex, and more of Geralt showing off his cool powers. It’s an odd trade-off where they’re lighter and more fun in general but more tropey and tedious in places. In short stories it's pretty normal to make every word and sentence serve a purpose and keep things as economical as possible, while also trying to appeal to the audiences of the magazines short stories are often published in - in Witcher's case for example, Fantastyka. The novels, by contrast have long running elements and plots and it makes more sense to look at what happens across the series rather than particular little stories or small elements. 

For the record though, here’s the super loose gist: Geralt and the sorceresses want to get Ciri an education, Emhyr (AKA Duny) wants to marry her and have an incestuous baby so he can control its magic power to rule the world. There’s a wizard civil war on the Isle of Thanedd and Vilgefortz is exposed as a traitor. Cahir aep Ceallach, a Nilfgaardian knight, tries to capture Ciri but she teleports into the desert and meets a unicorn. Then she joins a group of bandits and gets a girlfriend called Mistle. Ciri and the bandits travel together for a while but then they encounter an agent working for Emhyr and later Vilgefortz called Bonhart. Bonhart is a formidable swordsman and kills all of Ciri’s friends and then captures Ciri, showing her off as a prized captive by making her fight in an arena, then there’s a lot of time and space travel and back and forth and Ciri eventually ends up with the Aen Elle - elves from another dimension who want to take over the world with her magic baby.

Meanwhile Geralt travels around through the Northern Kingdoms for a while with Dandelion. They meet Milva the archer in Brokilon with the dryads, who starts to travel with them as well, and then Cahir the Nilfgaardian who no longer works for Nilfgaard. Geralt is obviously suspicious of Cahir and first he’s like bro and Cahir is like bro and Geralt is like bruhhhhh but then eventually it’s all cool. Lastly they meet the best character in the series, Regis the vampire. He’s incredibly cheeky and - damn, what a lil scamp. The first time they meet Regis they also meet these villagers who are convinced they’re being haunted by a vampire, and Regis happily just hears them list all the patently untrue superstitions about vampires while he’s right in front of them. He also frees Geralt and Dandelion using his vampire powers to take out some soldiers when they’re captured. Regis rules.
Geralt’s travelling party try a few different things in his quest and happen upon some whacky adventures, before coming to Vilgefortz’ castle to free Yennefer, who he has imprisoned there. Ciri had escaped the Aen Elle by this time, did all sorts of whacky time travel shit again, but now she’d been captured by Vilgefortz too, who also wanted to control her magic baby to rule the world. Really original, Vilgefortz.

Geralt and his pals conduct a full-on assault on Vilgefortz’ castle and all get absolutely fucked up, in probably the most devastating sequence in all of the books. Regis gets blasted by a pillar of fire in a magic fight with Vilgefortz and just turned to pulp, but in the games he’s resurrected by another vampire and I simply choose to believe this is canon, because he is the best character in the franchise. 

I will say to Vilgefortz’ credit he has the most incredibly Dragon Ball Z line I’ve ever heard in anything during the final fight, where he says to Geralt “you have a perplexing perseverance. You love to row upstream and piss into the wind, Witcher. But this time you’ve pissed into a hurricane!”

Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri escape after killing Vilgefortz and Bonhart but everyone else dies - oh except Dandelion, he’s just chilling in Toussaint because it turns out he was a duke the whole time. Dickhead.

Geralt agrees to meet Ciri and Yennefer in Rivia in a little while as they go to visit the lodge of sorceresses who fucking surprise, want Ciri to have a magic baby. Nobody in this book has an original plan I swear to god.

Geralt hangs out with Dandelion and some dwarves in Rivia and that’s where he intervenes in a pogrom and gets pitchfork’d. And that’s pretty much The Witcher Saga.

So let’s get into some of those crunchy, delicious themes, yum yum yum.

Geralt’s destiny bond to Ciri, the way he keeps winding up back with her, his feelings and dreams about her when they aren’t together - which they aren’t for most of the saga - seem to parallel how you might feel about an estranged child in real life. If you had a child out there somewhere wouldn’t your obligation to them feel like destiny? 

Geralt originally called law of surprise hoping to claim a boy to train to be a witcher, and then after he finds Ciri again, in lieu of a better plan they just start training her, until Triss Merigold shows up and, partly out of concern for Ciri, partly recognising her magical potential, diverts her education to more books and less blindfold-balance-beam-sword-gymnastics.

Ciri ultimately becomes a kind of witcher, and the way she fits into that world is an interesting thing of its own, but the way Geralt relates to her is a crucial part of his arc from cynical mercenary to carelord. It’s clear his expectation of an adoptive son is taken completely for granted - all the witchers are boys - and her arrival throws that out of whack, makes him reconsider everything. It brings him into a new world, emotionally, personally.

Sapkowski has a couple of expressions that a lot of characters use throughout the series, adding flavour to the world, and one of them is “sometimes a dog is its barking” - basically the function something performs defines it as the thing that performs that function. What makes Geralt a Witcher if he doesn’t do Witcher’s work?
Well, throughout the series Geralt loses his swords, loses his medallion, promises not to do Witcher’s work any more, just straight up says that he is not a witcher like, honestly a bunch of times and even in Rivia at the end, right before the race riot breaks out is talking about retiring, and how Witcher’s work isn’t for him any more. So how is he a witcher at all? He isn’t.

On the other hand, right from the start Geralt describes his work by how he defends people, gets involved, intervenes, even when he doesn’t understand that himself or view himself that way. 

Dandelion even starts treating it as a given that Geralt will intervene all the time and nags him to stay out of things. It’s on the road to Rivia with Dandelion that Geralt finally doesn’t stop and intervene, because he’s on his way to see Ciri again, and he doesn’t want to compromise his safety and jeopardise that. 

Ciri’s relationship with Geralt is the through line of him opening up and getting involved, right from the start of the series all the way to the end.

Three times on the road they encounter people facing serious injustice, and Dandelion, recognising the situation they’ve been in a hundred times says “Geraaaaaalt. Please let’s just move on” but these times, Geralt agrees to just ignore it. 

His love for Ciri and concern for her safety and wellbeing forces him to open up and simply admit he cares. He spends so long looking for her, and living in that mission, it seems only natural that along the way he gets more and more involved and invested in other people’s problems. Here though, he’s trying to make a conscious effort to just look out for him and his.

But when the pogrom erupts in Rivia, Dandelion says again “Geraaaaaaaaaalt” - he beseeches Geralt to just hide with him and wait it out, but Geralt knows he can’t just let this happen and do nothing. Maybe it’s partly that he doesn’t want to leave the world this way for Ciri after he’s gone, but I think it’s simpler than that - sometimes a dog is its barking, and sometimes a carelord is defined by his inability to just ignore injustice. 

Geralt is a massive SJW - literally, he’s a warrior for social justice, he carries a sword and kills racists. It’s not really surprising either, since like I said last time, Sapkowski is an abortion king who absolutely can’t stop talking about abortion.

[Previously on WITCHERMANIA]

Sapkowski is a pro-choice king and he just can’t stop using his platform to talk about abortion. Right from book 2, Sword of Destiny, Geralt and Calanthe start likening Geralt’s responsibility to the right to choose, and Geralt says it’s a sacred right, and Calanthe says they won’t discuss it because it’s beyond debate. King shit right there.

Sex in the books is one of those things affected by the short stories versus novels divide. It certainly gets treated in a more pulpy, porny way in the short stories, and to some degree at the start of the novels too - I mean the first scene of the first book is a kind of odd, unnecessary feeling sex scene even - but throughout the saga and towards the end especially, the style around this element matures and develops into something generally quite refreshing. It even outdoes a lot of other media in how it treats sex and relationships.

The way women are foregrounded in the series is especially interesting. One thing that I’ve seen people comment on about the Netflix series is how much it feels like it’s more targeted at women than other fantasy media, and how much the female characters take over the main role compared to Geralt. In that way it’s really recognising something very true about the books. The novels spend more time overall with Ciri than Geralt, and most of the other perspective characters are sorceresses like Yennefer. I think the show captures Triss and Yennefer’s friendship really well for example, even though they’re only together for like, a scene. In the last novel when Yennefer and Geralt are finally reunited, after Triss and Geralt have been together, Yennefer asks Geralt about being with other people in general, but she doesn’t really seem to care, but when she talks to Triss about it, it feels like she is much more bothered by her friend going behind her back than Geralt, and I think that’s appropriate - Sapkowski’s right to think these two sorceresses who’ve known each other for hundreds of years have in some ways a more meaningful relationship than either of them have to Geralt.

Another cool thing about Sapkowski’s foregrounding of the female characters is the development of Ciri’s sexuality through her teen years. Ciri is bi. She has a girlfriend during the series and rides off into the sunset with Galahad in the end. Actually you could comment more on Ciri’s queerness - Ciri asks Triss to make her into a boy in the first novel, which was… interesting.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with how Ciri’s relationship with her girlfriend Mistle begins, because Mistle is very confident and leading, and one could argue coercive. Mistle also stops another member of the group who was trying to force himself on Ciri right beforehand - I think you can argue either way about Mistle’s behaviour. Beyond that, more materially, Ciri just started travelling with their bandit troupe and mayyyybe putting the moves on a vulnerable person who joined your group for protection isn’t the best. But y’know, I’m not here to just say something contains a problematic element so it should go in the bin - I think it’s actually interesting that the relationship starts like that and then Ciri and Mistle nonetheless fall in love - that’s true to some people’s real relationships, because real life relationships are more complicated.

Also, I think their relationship is written very maturely by Sapkowski - he shows Ciri experiencing internalised homophobia and struggling with conflict about her relationship after people are homophobic towards them, which is a really sensitive and nuanced depiction, especially for how teenage girls are often written.

Now is as good a time as any to say - I really like the accents used in the audiobooks for the Witcher saga. This isn’t something about the books themselves, but of the interpretations of the geography of the world of the witcher I think the english audiobooks is probably the best.

For example, Ciri and the Cintrans have this kind of posh scottish accent, like a mild Edinburgh sort of sound, while the Skelligans have thicker, like, highlands accents, and I think that works pretty well, since the Skelligans are vikings and the anglicisation of vikings is always to make them scottish, and the Cintrans are their closest allies. The audiobook kind of spoiled me in this regard because I really like the choices they’ve made there and by contrast Ciri just talking with generic RP posh english in the games and the show feels really kinda bland. I like that the dwarves were welsh, it works with the elder speech being welsh in the books, and the dwarves being the older inhabitants of the world, and yes, getting really stereotypey here - because the dwarves work in mines. I liked that Geralt had a northern accent - the audiobook reader made him sound like Sean Bean. In the UK there’s a cultural assumption that aligns northern accents with working class and poorer folk, so I quite like this creative choice because it works with how Geralt is looked down on in a classist way because of his job, and it distinguishes him as an outsider to the peasants as well, who all have that generic-fantasy-peasant accent that isn’t quite west-country but isn’t east anglian either. 

I don’t know. I like the audiobooks. They’re neat. Look how much potential Audible is wasting by not sponsoring me right now.

Alright back to those tasty themes.
At the climax of Ciri’s arc, in the final book, several different parties are trying to control her, specifically with an eye to making her have a baby, because there’s a prophecy that her baby will rule the world, and besides the prophecy she is the descendant of an elven hero called Lara Doren who possessed special magic blood called The Elder Blood.

They’re all trying to override her bodily autonomy and also trying to rule the world, and also trying to rule the world by controlling her body. Ciri has all these different factions trying to force her to have a baby. Her father Emyr, The Elves from another Dimension, Vilgefortz, The Lodge of Sorceresses, everybody wants her to have a baby and you as the reader simply have to accept the only thing that matters is that she doesn’t want to, and that’s all there is to say.

I have to say, at first I really did not get what this whole plot thread was going for. It seems so bizarre honestly, even knowing how much Sapkowski wants you to know abortion is good and cool. Seriously, it’s so janky and odd, and honestly I don’t really blame anyone who would find this arc opaque or just a bit bad. I think it starts to open up with a bit of examination though, and personally I think that redeems it a bit.

Emhyr is the first party who wants to capture Ciri for her magic baby, and his plan uhhhhhhhh fucking sucks. He wants to have an incestuous child with his own daughter. This ain’t it chief. Rethink this.

The Aen Elle want to force her to have a baby with their king so they can reclaim the power of the elder blood. She’s their prisoner, this plan sucks, it just doesn’t have the added suck of also being incest.

Vilgefortz wants to medically inseminate her and he’s only after literally the blood for powerful magic he can do with it. I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it’s certainly a different angle.

The Sorceresses of the Lodge want to make Ciri have a baby too, but at the same time ask her to agree to their plan, and also make it clear that they don’t intend to give her any choice. This is why she’s in another realm where she meets Galahad at the end of the story - she’s on the run from well, basically everyone.
Looking at these different alternatives you can see that there’s no change to this forced birth plan that can make it okay - Emhyr’s plan sucks, the elves’ plan sucks, Vilgefortz’ plan sucks and the Sorceresses’ plan sucks too, you can’t force someone to consent, that’s not consent. Bad take, queens. Rethink this.

It’s more than just that though - they are all trying to override Ciri’s bodily autonomy but they’re also doing it so they can rule the world. Sapkowski shows an anti-authoritarian streak throughout the series and I think it’s pretty appropriate that this comes together with his other favourite theme in the whole world, being an abortion king. 

There’s also been some confusion about the elves, which I explained in more detail earlier in the series, but basically some readers think that the Aen Elle are proof that elves are generally bad and that the elves in Geralt’s world should be mistrusted by default. It seems like a really weird conclusion to draw when you see this group from another dimension who have had nothing to do with the Aen Seidhe for thousands of years, and the ones you’re exposed to are sinister and evil. Like, do you not think if there’s a king in that world, there must be peasants? There literally can’t be a king without peasants, that’s how this shit works. If there aren’t people being oppressed a king is just a guy with an obnoxious hat. Do you think the peasant Aen Elle are in on the plan to use Ciri’s Elder Blood? Do you think they’ll benefit from it especially?
It’s so silly honestly. 

Sapkowski has made this group as a sort of War of the Worlds narrative - In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, an alien species comes to conquer earth with superior technology and yeah, they do a pretty good job of it, and it generally sucks for humans. Here’s an observation I borrowed from elsewhere: War of the Worlds was written at the height of British colonialism and is exploring the experience of what it would be like to be invaded and colonised. 

The same is true with the Aen Elle. We see the whole way through the series how much the humans’ genocide and racial supremacy is hurting nonhumans, and then near the end we get to explore the idea of another group taking over the world in the same way, just in case you didn’t get it, just in case you didn’t grasp that what the humans are doing is bad, here’s this group that want to do it to the humans, but then, just to be clear about it, this group has nothing to do with the elves on that world, and have had nothing to do with them for thousands of years. Still, instead, some readers think this only exists to prove that the elves are morally reprehensible, and seem to draw no parallel to how the humans are behaving.
Either way, this plot thread is the part where Sapkowski draws together the themes of people’s rights to bodily autonomy and their rights to political autonomy. It’s a reflexive metaphor. All these folks want to rule the world but they also want to control Ciri’s body, but they also want to rule the world by controlling Ciri’s body, and that’s bad. Don’t do it.

If I had to zoom in to focus on one specific part of the Witcher saga I really love though, really make my pitch for why people should read the books, I’d say it’s how they process bigotry, prejudice, and difference. All the way through this is an important issue, and the use of Geralt as a character and his profession as a sort of rorschach test for different people is really interesting. Some people treat him as a racialised other, some people treat him as a traveller and nomad, an outsider, some people treat him as a worker doing a job that they find repulsive, and in doing that they create this equation between the witcher and the creatures the witcher is hired to deal with. You can see this replicated really well at the start of Witcher 3 with the quest to deal with the griffin. The way the soldiers have tried to deal with the Griffin has only caused more problems, where Geralt and Vesemir actually understand the animal and know how to deal with it. It’s apparent that as the world changes, and these animals are going extinct, Witchers will have to either adapt or go extinct too.
I think the way Geralt’s profession is perceived and treated differently by different people is a great depiction of the way that historically and in the world today class and race and marginalisation in society can intersect.

But it’s not Geralt I want to talk about actually, it’s a Doppler called Dudu.
The Eternal Flame, from the second book, is my favourite of all the short stories.

Here’s the gist: Geralt and Dandelion arrive in town and have drinks with their buddy Dainty Biberveldt the halfling merchant, but half way through, the real Dainty Biberveldt busts in because the first Dainty was an impostor! It turns out a doppler has been imitating Dainty, and Tellico, the doppler, gets away. The gang chase Tellico all over town and start to realise that they’re doing great business deals and actually making Biberveldt a bunch of money. There’s a complication, in the form of Chapelle the captain of the royal guard who wants Dainty to pay taxes on all the great deals he’s done - but then it turns out Tellico paid the taxes too. It’s all chill. Phew!
Geralt finds Tellico and they threaten to fight him but the pair talk things out and Tellico transforms into Dandelion and walks out peacefully into the marketplace where one of Dandelion’s scorned lovers smacks them in the head with a frying pan, knocking them out and causing them to start de-forming, freaking out all the passersby, just as the city guard arrives. Quickly, Dainty Biberveldt gets Tellico to take his form again and claim to be his cousin, Dudu Biberveldt, and Chapelle, the royal guard who saw the whole thing turns out to also be a doppler in disguise anyway, so it’s all fine.

I mentioned previously but I really cannot overstate how much I hate the treatment of the doppler in the show. The dopplers are a very clear queer allegory - someone who’s just like you but secretly different, who the oppressive religious order is hunting down. The dopplers are even burned at the stake, like gay people were in medieval europe by christians. Because of all this, the coding of the doppler in the show as a creepy queer child predator really makes me just livid. 

You can say they threw in a line about how dopplers are usually good-natured, but that’s like saying there’s a line about how Buffalo Bill isn’t a real trans person in Silence of the Lambs. That isn’t what sticks with you. What sticks with you is “would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.”

By contrast, I love this short story, and I feel like it’s such a perfect demonstration of how the books show prejudice and difference.

When Tellico is in Geralt’s form, they tell Geralt they read his mind, and they know that there’s no way he’ll hurt them, because he hates to hurt creatures he know are sentient and well-meaning, and Geralt tells Tellico he knows they won’t do any harm because he can tell it just isn’t their nature. That’s how they talk things out. Geralt says “you don’t imitate the worst in us because you just don’t understand it”

I don’t think I really got what that meant when I first read it. It’s a little strange, right? Dopplers don’t understand the bad things about humans? But then right after, when Tellico is in need, Dainty Biberveldt, the halfling, the person who really has the most reason to feel personally slighted by Tellico, chooses to help them instead. 

That’s what really makes it all click into place. The story gives us this almost horror-movie-ish setup How would you feel if there was someone just like you but slightly different? And then after some comic hijinks and a little adventure, and a confrontation between Geralt and Tellico, we get to that question: Well, why should you care? They’re just like you.