Summary
- Sapkowski’s work has never said a woman becoming a witcher was impossible.
- CDPR’s canon is different to book canon.
- Rayla experienced a witcher-esque transformation and survived.
I’ll preface this piece by saying that CD Projekt Red’s canon for The Witcher is not the same as Andrzej Sapkowski’s canon, so the debate is ultimately meaningless as CDPR have the agency to do whatever it wants with the lore. That being said, the studio has repeatedly expressed the respect it has for Sapkowski’s work and has tended to stay faithful to his lore, unlike a certain Netflix series.
The debate that’s been swirling around The Witcher fan base since the revelation that Ciri has become a fully-fledged witcher, is if women can even become witchers in the source material. There have been woman witchers in licensed stories like the tabletop roleplaying game The Witcher: A Game of Imagination and the oft-maligned Polish adaptation series, The Hexer. However, Sapkowski’s books have only referenced male witchers thus far.
She-Witchers
That being said, the author has also never explicitly ruled out that there could be she-witchers. The concept of witcher schools is established in the books but is only really expanded upon in other works, like CDPR’s games. There’s a suggestion that girls find it more difficult to survive the Trials, causing witchers to stop recruiting girls. This would explain why the vast majority of witchers are men, but it doesn’t necessarily rule out that women can become witchers altogether.
Anonymousbeaver00 posted an interesting excerpt from Blood of Elves where Triss Merigold ponders how witchers and magic users have lost touch with one another— meaning the experiments necessary for creating new witchers lack magical supervision and are more likely to fail as a result. It’s notable that Triss doesn’t immediately discard the idea that Ciri could become a witcher, potentially implying that the idea isn’t impossible. If any woman were to survive the Trial of the Grasses, it would be Ciri. She’s the child of prophecy and likely the most extraordinary woman in The Witcher’s setting.
In reality, it’s just not something that Sapkowski has thoroughly explored in his work. He’s telling a story about Geralt and Ciri, so establishing deeper lore about witchers isn’t necessarily a priority for him. He’s not explicitly ruled it out, and likely never will.
As for the games, the character Rayla unwillingly underwent a similar mutation to witchers and managed to survive. However, she was driven insane by the process.
The Witcher IV is a single-player, open-world RPG from CD PROJEKT RED. At the start of a new saga, players take on the role of Ciri, a professional monster slayer, and embark on a journey through a brutal dark-fantasy world. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it aims to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date.