Sure, there are mutants and mages galore,
but the slow-beating heart of The Witcher
is in its monsters.
While some may be unfamiliar to you,
they've actually been with us,
stalking through human stories
for centuries, even millennia.
Here are the very real mythologies
behind every single monster
in the first half of The Witcher's first season,
in order of appearance.
And if you want them all, let us know
by liking, sharing, and telling us in the comments.
Okay, so you know The Witcher's serious about monsters
when it has a kikimora in the first scene
of the first episode.
If that name's not ringing a bell,
it's probably because it's a beast from Slavic folklore,
which has been underrepresented in popular fiction.
To start, kikimoras are always female.
They rise from stillborn children
or women who died in labor
and often bear the deceased's face.
In some Russian versions of the tale,
kikimora is indeed a creature of the swamp
who leaves wet footprints wherever she goes.
But in most, she's a purely household spirit,
occasionally a nightmarish household spirit,
slipping through keyholes to squat
on the chest of sleepers, suffocating them,
in her more benign incarnations, though,
she's described as more of a nuisance
with a cleanliness fetish.
So, you can think of kikimora
as kind of a monstrous cousin to Marie Kondo?
I love mess.
Human-animal hybrids are a ...
♪ Tale as old as time ♪
Almost every mythological tradition on Earth
has some variation of them.
The first we see in The Witcher are sylvans,
which resemble fawns, the unpredictable woodland man-goats
from Greco-Roman mythology, although maybe they hit
more like the bloodthirsty half-man-half-bovine Minotaur.
In many versions of that latter myth,
the Minotaur was conceived when the insulted god Poseidon
took revenge on the insulting King Minos
by cursing his wife, making her fall
for a real specimen of a bull.
There's a lot of art on the internet about this.
It might be why Geralt goes immediately for the mom insults.
You mother****** goat!
But lest you think that human-animal hybrids
are just ancient, magical things, allow me to introduce you
to the mysterious pig-faced lady of Europe.
Nearly simultaneously in the 1600s,
in multiple places across the continent,
a legend arose of a pregnant rich woman who was cursed
and whose baby was born with a pig's head.
They myth persisted and somehow gained the veneer of fact.
As late as the 1800s, newspapers reported that
the pig-faced lady lived in London's posh Manchester-Square.
Goats, pigs, bulls.
But what about The Witcher's human-hedgehog combo?
Has that ever popped up in myth?
Well, because we go the extra mile here at Netflix,
I looked into this, and ...
Nope.
I found Hans My Hedgehog, a cockerel-riding,
bagpipe-playing, princess-loving Brothers Grimm creation
who was a wee bit more monstrous in the Jim Henson version.
That's enough!
Out!
If you've finished The Witcher,
you know that the striga is probably the scariest monster
on the show; although, technically she's a cursed human.
And that's fitting, because they're pretty terrifying
in the scant myths about them, too.
According to what we have, the striga
is sort of a vampire prototype:
huge, almost bird-like claws, sharp fangs,
and a thirst for human flesh and blood,
although she can live off of animals, too.
But strigas weren't born that way.
The unlikely number was two.
People with two hearts, two souls, two sets of teeth,
conditions common when a pregnant woman was cursed,
could become strigas after they died.
They second self sort of took over the corpse
and went on a feeding frenzy.
Even though they're not so common in fiction,
it's interesting how many cultures
have variations on the theme.
Strigas' demonic cousins proliferated across southern
and eastern Europe to unlikely places, like your garden.
This is the striga, or witchweed plant,
which is kind of pretty, right?
But it's known for viciously penetrating the roots
of a host plant and sucking out all of its nutrients.
Scientists even make dad jokes about its rapaciousness.
So, whether it's the plant or the bewitched
princess variety, stay away from strigas, y'all.
Well, when it comes to episode four's selkiemaw,
the showrunners of The Witcher
didn't give us much info work with.
Thanks, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich!
All we hear is a pretty gripping tavern talk
from a villager that includes the creature's name.
The ice cracked open!
And a selkiemaw shot out!
Oh, you'll never see one!
And all we see are its guts on Geralt.
I had to get it from the inside.
The name selkiemaw, in every spelling we could think of,
doesn't return any results.
But plain old selkies are indeed notable
mythological creatures of the water.
In Irish, Scottish, and Icelandic folklore,
the selkie is kind of an affable, shape-shifting seal.
It mostly spends its time in seal-like endeavors,
lounging on rocks, being cute, et cetera.
But occasionally, it sheds its prized skin,
revealing a beautiful human underneath, and comes ashore.
There's usually a lot of marriage shenanigans after this.
Its use is fitting for an episode written by an Irishman.
Still, a friendly seal with magical outerwear
doesn't quite square with what little we know
of the selkiemaw, like it can swallow a witcher whole,
it has swallowed a whole village whole,
it possesses a cavernous mouth with devil's teeth.
And, actually, there is tell of a similar creature
lurking deep within Russia,
about a six-hour's drive west of Moscow: the Brosno dragon.
It's said to be a huge, reptilian or dinosaur-like creature
that inhabits the small but curiously deep
waters of Lake Brosno.
And just like the selkiemaw, the dragon can eat.
His stories are full of him chomping down on things
like invading Tatar warriors and their horses,
a German airplane during World War II,
and somehow an entire island that some vikings
were going to leave some treasure on.
I don't know if this wise without a witcher in tow,
but people still look for the dragon.
This is an easily chompable dogsled team
searching across the frozen lake.
♪ Toss a coin to your witcher ♪
♪ O valley of plenty ♪
♪ Whoa ♪
Our search for the selkiemaw, however,
has reached its successful conclusion.
We figured it out!
Take that, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich!
Thank you!
In the fourth episode,
there's also this formidable killer insect
that haunts Yennefer, roachhound.
So we started researching it, and the weirdest thing
we realized is, where are all the insect monsters?
Like, I mean, insects, and all arthropods, really,
are basically already monsters in real life.
So, why not make them mythological ones?
But maybe it's because we're not looking
in the right places.
Think about it: the typical Western myths
that many of us learn in school usually involve mammalian
or sometimes lizard-like creatures.
But Asian, Pacific, and indigenous folklore
often seems to use insects and spiders
in their monster-making.
In the tales of Thailand
and several New York state Native American tribes,
there are monster mosquitoes as big as chickens,
who are capable of launching coordinated attacks on forts.
The Wayana of South America have kuluwajak,
forgive the pronunciation,
a two-headed caterpillar who cuts off
and devours human heads.
And then there's Japan.
The Japanese have a giant, samurai-hating spider
that can turn invisible, and omukade,
a mountain-sized centipede with venom for breath.
By the way, this is a real mukade centipede,
and I still find it frightening.
So, now you know why they later created Mothra.
So, yeah, insect monsters; I'm not scared.
Are you scared?
Run far, run fast, Yennefer.
There's something profoundly disturbing
about meeting your exact twin.
Wait.
Stop that.
Which might be why the myth of the doppelganger
keeps finding its way into our popular fiction,
including in The Witcher's doppler.
True, the word doppelganger
was only coined in the 18th century.
But cultures as old as the ancient Egyptians
believed in the Ka, a sort
of spiritual facsimile,
replete with a person's
memories and feelings,
that could sometimes mislead.
But they can also replace you.
Everything you've ever done, ever debated,
ever dreamed is in our head now.
People from the Orkney islands feared the trow,
sickly changeling creatures that would replace
healthy human babies with their identical trow replicas.
If you want to get crazy, we can get crazy.
So it's sort of like the plot of Us.
Sometimes a benign version of the doppelganger will pop up.
The Norse Vardoger, for instance, was an identical you
that went ahead of the real you
and showed up early to all your meetings.
But most of the time, they're an omen of doom.
Following his election in 1860,
Abraham Lincoln allegedly saw
his exact double in the mirror.
The other was pale and ghastly-looking.
His wife believed the vision foretold his reelection
but also his death.
There is a condition, heautoscopy,
which can cause someone to see their double at a distance.
Or, at least you better hope it's heautoscopy
and not a doppelganger.
As hard as it is to believe while watching this,
the djinn of Arabian mythology
are surprisingly a lot like us.
I mean, sure, they are technically, according to the Quran,
creatures made of smokeless fire that live in an unseeable,
unknowable dimension somewhere beyond our own
and who are blessed with supernatural powers
of shape-shifting, invisibility and flight.
But they also possess a fair share of human qualities;
like us, the djinn eat, they drink, they sleep,
the fall in love or lust with each other and with humans,
as made vividly clear in this pre-Islamic-era poem,
which isn't all that flattering for either side.
And, maybe most like us, they're capable of choosing
between good and evil; although, unfortunately,
many seem to end up on the dark side.
Their mischief continues to the present day,
because, while the existence of djinn
predates even the founding of Islam,
belief in them is still very common
in many parts of the Muslim world.
Djinn can be annoying.
In 2009, a Saudi couple somehow sued one for harassment.
It was making weird noises
and throwing rocks at their house.
On the more serious side, the djinn
are believed to be able to possess humans.
And the psychiatric trauma attributed to djinn possession
is so serious that I found seemingly dozens of articles
in legitimate medical journals about it.
By the way, if you are ever possessed,
Arabic lore suggests you go ahead
and put on a necklace of fox or cat teeth
to frighten the djinn away.
But, as with grumpy humans, maybe the best advice
is to just give the djinn their space
and never ever go fishing for them.
Don't judge me.
Okay, monster maniacs,
as promised, those were all the monsters
in the first half of The Witcher.
Let us know if you want us to do the rest in the comments.
You may notice that Geralt spends a lot of time
in bathtubs throughout the show, which raise the question:
are there bathtub monsters?
Again, Japan comes through.
The akaname is a strange, dirty and disgusting little goblin
that licks the filth off of bathtubs.
So, enjoy your bath tonight.