Sword of Destiny

Sword of Destiny is the second volume of The Witcher saga, which began with The Last Wish. Here, Andrzej Sapkowski maintains the structure and style of the previous book, presenting episodic tales packed with irony and social criticism while developing the protagonist around the story’s main theme.

This theme, as the title suggests, is the fight against everything that is predetermined: Geralt wants to prove that the responsibility for building his own future lies only on his shoulders and is not set in stone. The narrative frames this conflict around Geralt’s personal and professional life, focusing on his impossible relationship with the sorceress Yennefer and on the Witchers’ tradition of recruiting special children.

Geralt’s relationship with Yennefer is one of the first elements to be problematized in the narrative. In the opening tale, for example, one of the characters tells the sorceress: “It is written all over your faces, I don’t even have to try to read your thoughts. You were made for each other, you and the Witcher. But nothing will come of it. Nothing. I’m sorry.”  Geralt’s main antagonist, therefore, is not the monsters he fights or the society he despises, but destiny itself. The events that transpire around him are fraught with fatalism. Geralt fears the hands of destiny but wants to face it head-on and cease its influence on him. The witcher, however, knows that to defy fate is to confront the conformism and inertia inherent to it, which can be a far more complicated feat than beheading mandrakes and banishing werewolves.

The first story, The Bounds of Reason, is a sarcastic adventure in which Geralt joins an eclectic group of hunters that is set to kill a dragon for a young king. The narrative is developed by the interaction between the members of this group, with various fantasy tropes – like unscrupulous mercenaries, honorable paladins, and sensible druids – being satirically examined while they discuss their worldview and what events their journey might put into motion. Since modifying one’s destiny is, by definition, an impossible action, it becomes interesting to note how Geralt and Yennefer act in the face of increasingly bizarre situations, clinging to their existence in a hopeful manner: if the impossible is indeed possible, maybe they can conquer destiny after all. The narration is also profoundly ironic: when a character tells a guard that he deserves a promotion for not accepting a bribe, the narrator jokes that the guard had a professional future precisely because he would eventually accept a larger one.

The following tale reinforces the implacability of the witcher’s antagonist. A Shard of Ice develops his love for Yennefer, testing it when he encounters a powerful wizard that also loves her. Spakowski effectively sets the stage for the likely duel between the two men: both parties’ personalities are established and their hostility only grows with each passing page. Geralt’s rival, however, is an honest and upstanding man, which increases the tension by making the reader cheer for both figures – or for none, as they’re dueling for a woman as if she had no say in the matter. Nevertheless, the sense of helplessness present at the climax works precisely because it also characterizes the book’s main conflict.

The next two stories are Eternal Flame and A Little Sacrifice. The first is more concerned with developing the protagonist than its main theme, although it ends up being somewhat redundant. In the story, Geralt finds himself chasing a doppelganger that has taken the form of a merchant. The real merchant hires the witcher to capture the creature before the city guard confiscates his possessions and puts him in jail.  Eternal Flame’s big question is about Geralt’s code of honor, which doesn’t allow him to kill sentient monsters. This refusal is indeed well developed by Spakowski, especially at the moment when the doppelganger takes the form of the witcher and the dialogues hint at how this code may come from how Geralt views himself. However, such discussions had already been explored in the first short story, in which Geralt also initially refuses to slay the dragon and discusses his reasons.

A Little Sacrifice, on the other hand, proves to be an essential chapter in understanding Geralt’s journey. This time Geralt is employed by a prince to find out what caused the deaths of several fishermen, and, as he proceeds with his investigation, the love story between the prince and a mermaid is developed in the background, with each party demanding the other a sacrifice for the sake of their relationship: the prince wants her to leave the sea and become human – the story is working with The Little Mermaid –, while the mermaid wishes he would become a triton instead, relinquishing the crown (“If he really desires me, he must have a tail, fins and everything a normal merman has. Otherwise I don’t want to know him!”) Geralt faces the problem in a melancholic way, wondering if he would be able to act differently from them if he was put in the same position by Yennefer. This melancholy fits perfectly with the gloomy, pessimistic tone of the coda, in which his friend Dandelion reflects on the fate of a troubadour who was interested in the witcher.

The fifth short story, which lends its title to the book, intensifies the focus on Geralt’s profession when he finds himself having to protect a little princess, who has been lost in a dangerous and forbidden forest, where dryads slaughter any humans they see regardless of their social position and age. The struggle against fate is openly discussed by the characters, who explore the subject by pointing out the hypocrisy of a man that expresses his revolt against destiny but, at the same time, just laments his inability to act.

Finally, Something More concludes the discussions raised by drawing attention to an important tale of the previous book and forcing Geralt to face the prospect that fate might have also reserved a gift for him.

In the general scope of the book’s narrative, there were some positive changes in Sword of Destiny when compared to The Last Wish. The book is still organized like a collection of short stories, but the chapters that served as an irrelevant connection between each one in The Last Wish disappeared in favor of a chronological narrative, which provides cohesion to the structure in a much less intrusive way. In addition to that, the presence of Dandelion in all stories is also a positive aspect, since he serves as a necessary comic relief that breaks the overall melancholic tone of the book.

The narrative’s main problem lies in its insistence on explaining the meaning of the already obvious titles. In A Shard of Ice, for instance, Geralt and Yennefer reflect that the truth is “a shard of ice” on a tiresome number of occasions. This repetition is excessive and, to some extent, offensive to the reader’s intelligence.

Nevertheless, Sword of Destiny is a book that develops its main theme effectively through its six stories, which together represent a single struggle against fate. In the end, Geralt emerges as a tragic figure, while his journey, if somewhat obvious, is considerably melancholic and pessimistic.

August 08, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on May 17, 2015.