#alzur

[dukeofdogs]

Happy Valentine's Day to all who celebrate

[marnasid]

I found an even more unpopular piece of the witcher fandom than Thronebreaker🤠👍

I entered the game to learn more about the Witcher lore and look at the handsome mage, but in the end I found myself feeling sad (my boy deserves a better life😭😭😭)

[stillness138]

i traced the original to make a brand new bastardization of a classical art piece. the creation of viy, maribor, late 900s, colorized

[wanderingwolfwitcher]

The Witcher Netflix Writers: 

[crazy-fruit]

some recent sketchbook pages

[ehay]

The Spell of Last Resort.

[dravenxivuk]

Alzur's Legacy Lambert in @atroppa-nightshade ’s Pink Smoke.

[hanzajesthanza]

the multilinguality of a lot of the witcher characters is something i love and also probably a feature resulting from sapkowski being a polyglot himself as well as creating a fantasy world that mimics the real one.

it’s a more obvious and crucial element in the hussite trilogy, but i think that it’s also significant in the witcher, too.

languages are not as simple as belonging to one people group. for instance, one can know one dialect of elder speech and be fluent in it, but struggle to communicate in another dialect.

there’s various dialects of elder speech, the first being the classical, the one spoken by elves. another one is nilfgaardian. another one is skellige jargon. another one is brokilonian… and there is an entire variant of elder speech used by mer-people and sea creatures, but it is sung, with one’s musicality, melody, and intonation affecting their accent.

and elder speech is needed for specific activities. if you cast spells? if you’re a human, you need to know classical elder speech, because the human way of casting spells requires incantations and hand gestures.

if that wasn’t enough, the concept of languages dying out and intermingling and evolving is also touched on.

for instance, the dwarvish language exists, but is quickly being forgotten as assimilation into human settlements becomes more and more common, and youngsters are reluctant to speak their own language

another example of time and the mixing of groups affecting the evolution of language is in the north case, a mountainous region in which nilfgaardian and northern tongues have been mixing for the past couple of decades due to imperialism and nilfgaardian expansion northward. and owing to this is an eruption of new slang using words from nilfgaardian has entered the local tongue.

(this part is just a headcanon:) there’s probably a lot of local languages and dialects, from regions the nilfgaardian empire consumed, that are various stages of dying because some places were conquered hundreds of years ago and some were conquered only a few decades ago

there’s even more obscure languages like the vampire language which is only known to us in a nauseatingly menacing, terror-inducing song and… an untranslatable pun.

what’s more is the curious use of latin words and phrases used as one mught use them today; for which, of course, the out-of-universe explanation is that sapkowski is addicted to using latin, but, in-universe is an ancient language with a similar role latin has in modern society being “translated” to our latin, just like the common tongue is being “translated” to polish.

and what i love the most about this is that this isn’t knowledge that lives in the background, not touching the lives of our characters. the characters’ abilities (or inabilities) to speak languages affects them in many ways throughout the story.

geralt speaks elder, but his brokilonian dialect is poor (at least during sword of destiny, in time of contempt he seems to have improved somewhat during his month-long stay)… and dandelion had to learn elder speech for his expedition to brokilon, to sing elaine ettariel and speak with the dryads, and you can see that he’s a beginner in the language.

milva gains multiple nicknames in elder from the elves owing to her service to them, not solely out of respect, but because her given name is hard to pronounce for them. and her present nickname, the one she should be proud of, is not of any of her attributes, but a familial title—sor’ca, sister.

another thing about milva is that she is illiterate, but at the same time, bilingual. one does not preclude the other!

cahir’s mother language is nilfgaardian, but speaks the northern common language because of his northern ancestry on his mother’s side. and in times of stress, his mind blanked on northern, as well as when he swore in nilfgaardian.

cahir can understand angoulême’s north case slang, as well as “translate” for the rest of the company, but they have probably run into confusion or frustration—“how did you get that from that?!”

and regis’ language is so obscure, he makes a joke in it to himself and no one else understands, but he still is clearly amused by it. and vampires seemingly also do not speak with their mouths, only using telepathy, so the acquisition of human language must have been a challenge for him. and i wonder how many human languages he’s learned only to later face their extinction. perhaps when he came back from the grave, the human language he had learned was now defunct, or rarely used?

[dukeofdogs]

[dukeofdogs]

Gwent: The Witcher Card Game | The cards that could’ve been 45/?

Grandmaster Ortolan (Maxin Kozlov), Sorel Dagerlund (Ewa Trawińska)

Biruta Icarti (Iruna Yurova), Alzur (Marina Karakatsani aka Snook-8)

[piranhaincaps]

fun fact! Alzur's Legacy Lambert does have his (game) facial scars, but he hides them beneath the sweep of his hair and they're easy to miss

[stillness138]

a song of ice and fire lore theories: character x is actually y, prophecy interpretations, maesters are behind everything,...

the elder scrolls lore theories: character x is a manifestation of y, metaphor and conflicting accounts of events, smth smth towers wheel time and cycles,...

the witcher lore theories: literally anything that isn't in the text is possible and we will never be proven right or wrong. also the creator of witchers fucked a giant centipede.

[arianaofimladris]

It's nice to see Polish fan production being remembered and valued by foreign viewers.

[tcustodis]

how about a blorbo minipack:

gascon, zoltan, abigail for that w1&bugfucker combo, and crowmama from our card game?

doesn't have to be all of em tho 😅

Ofc i did all of em

[tigerlylascollection]

Primeval Sorcerer Azur

"Once a grand master at the Academy of Raya Lucaria, now exiled and residing near the Hermit Village."

-Elden Ring, Fextralife

Screenshot of my PS4 gameplay and enhanced in photoshop.

[wingsofhcpe]

It occurred to me that I failed to mention Tissaia has lost her magic in this.

Based on an idea I had for Tissaia in The Witcher 3: the Wild Hunt timeline for an rp server.