#death tree

Non, I apologise in advance for the incoming reflection. You unleashed a beast. Before I decided to enter the... uh, rewarding career of teaching, I had written a master's thesis on the construction of the hero and how it changed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a follow up to my dissertation (I never got to do it, because I'm working class af and couldn't reasonably afford it). But, anyway, why is this relevant, you might ask? Well, it's to do with who this tree memorialises and some of the interesting parallels I've been mulling over recently.

For me, the Witchers are an allegory for many things, but thinking about Sapkowski's background, it struck me that he could be drawing influences from soldiers lost during the conflicts of the twentieth century. Young men snatched from all walks of life, turned into weapons, equipped with the shittiest guns and defences (I'll never forget learning that French soldiers in WW1 initially wore red hats with blue jackets...) and then thrown out to die. And the people that took the heaviest hit? The poor. It's always the poor.

Who are the Witchers before they're mutated? They're orphans, urchins, the unwanted. Geralt and Ciri? They're one in a million. Most Witchers would be like Eskel or Lambert; impoverished kids taken from their villages. You don't see lords and kings sending their children to become witchers. It's too dangerous. But the poor? Well, they don't matter. Send them in droves. Send them to suffer and die.

The poor only become worth something through sacrifice. Time, their health, their finances, their lives. They become heroes--worthy of memorialisation and praise--when they have made that sacrifice.

But surely the Witchers--poor themselves--would remember the children? No. They might recall their faces, perhaps, but after a while they blur into one. So many die, it's easier on the soul to let them slip away. If you get hung up on that then nothing will ever get done. Perhaps that's why they tell themselves they don't feel. It's the only way they can put the trauma behind them (or think they have), and they don't want the reminder.

On top of that, you have the indoctrination of the mages--members of the ruling classes through birth, luck and/or education--telling them that the strong survive, that only the weak perish (like how the government turn their citizens against those that require benefits, aid, support, anyone?) They have made themselves worthy by sacrificing their humanity. Transformed from something less than dirt to a Witcher. (Not quite a hero in their own context, but the parallels with a heroic soldier and how they are used and thrown away? It's there).

But what happens when they go out into the world? They're reviled and shunned. They're only useful when they're fighting--dying--and beyond that, no one's interested. No one will remember them after they're gone. Not even their names.

Throw that all together and you get the Witchers memorialising their fallen themselves. Like fellow soldiers memorialise each other with their dog tags. They don't have a family to speak of, just the brotherhood, so that's where their dogs tags go. The rest of the world forgets about them. But the Witchers don't.

This is very much 'death of the author' here. My private reflections when trying to rationalise an odd design choice. Did LH consider anything like this? Probably not. She didn't even consider the logic of a brotherhood of practical, diehard survivalists leaving a damn hole in their roof. Subzero temperatures in a mountainous biome? Constantly having to restock fuel in blizzards because we're burning through it to stay warm? Nah.