00:00The Witcher's world is teeming with monsters, both the human and big pointy teeth kind.
00:06In fact, it's so full of the latter that we couldn't cover all of them in just one pass.
00:11But you guys totally supported our last piece, thank you so much.
00:15So, like we promised, we're back to dig up the real world origins of the monsters in the second half
00:21of The Witcher's first season.
00:23Toss a groin to The Witcher!
00:26It's monster mythology!
00:38Well, there's a tiny little problem with the first monster we see in Episode 6.
00:43No one ever says its name,
00:44Let's get on before the beast gets hungry again.
00:47and we only get a short glimpse of this toothy raptor-like disembodied head.
00:52So first we'll have to solve a monster mystery.
00:55By going back to The Witcher books,
00:57this episode is based on Sword of Destiny's Bounds of Reason.
01:01And Geralt starts that by hunting a basilisk.
01:05And just to be safe, we checked with showrunner Lauren Schmidt-Hissrich,
01:09who said, yes, it is a basilisk, one of many subspecies that might or might not be in development.
01:16Ooh, scoop!
01:17Although proportions vary by the tail,
01:19the basilisk is typically portrayed as some mixture of reptile and chicken,
01:24born of a rooster's egg, yes, rooster,
01:27that was incubated by a toad, which admittedly sounds really silly.
01:32But counterpoint, isn't a T-Rex kind of a mixture of a chicken and a reptile?
01:37And like the T-Rex, the basilisk is considered a king,
01:41the little king of the serpents in Greek.
01:43But you can argue that its formidable arsenal of monstrous weapons makes it way more dangerous than these beasts and
01:50or puny dinosaurs.
01:52Like a dragon, it could breathe fire.
01:55And its hiss could kill.
01:56So could its odor.
01:57In fact, it was so very toxic that its venom was known to travel up a man's spear to kill
02:03him and the horse he rode on.
02:06And scholars thought its native habitat of Libya was actually a verdant paradise until basilisk toxins turned it into the
02:14Sahara.
02:14And we haven't even gotten to its famous death stare yet, which even rivals Geralt's.
02:20The basilisk stare was thought to be instantly fatal.
02:24Humans in antiquity went to great lengths to protect themselves from it.
02:28For instance, in Warsaw in 1587,
02:31the citizenry sent a convicted felon into a suspected basilisk lair wearing a suit of mirrored armor,
02:37like he was on the basilisk bomb squad or something.
02:40By the way, Warsaw now has this cool basilisk statue, which we thought you might like to see.
02:46Aside from Geralt, who kills them pretty easily without the aid of mirrors,
02:50the basilisk did have one powerful enemy that the dinosaurs didn't have.
02:54You may have seen it earlier.
02:57It's the weasel.
02:58Yes, despite all those instant kill weapons,
03:01a smelly weasel could somehow take out a basilisk.
03:04Some even think that this bloody mythical rivalry originated in the real-life enmity between Cobra and Mongoose.
03:11But whatever its origins and weaknesses,
03:14these peasants possess a certain amount of wisdom about the basilisk.
03:18It's been an hour.
03:20Let's get on before the beast gets hungry again.
03:29The Hirika is a rare creature within the world of the Witcher.
03:33And unfortunately, it's even more rare after the...
03:36incident in Episode 6.
03:38But it's also the first monster we've encountered that was created out of thin air by Witcher author Andrzej Subtkowski.
03:45As far as I can tell, it's only mentioned in the Sword of Destiny, and there just two times.
03:51Blame Destiny.
03:52But we do get important information that the Hirika is so endangered that Geralt won't accept a contract on one.
03:59The show expands on that.
04:00The exceedingly rare Hirika lives in a forest.
04:03It changes from something cute to something frightening.
04:06But it's harmless if given food.
04:09It's probably starving.
04:10You need your weapons.
04:11Oh yeah, and absolutely do not eat it.
04:15Oh shit.
04:17That said, I'm not the only one that sees some passing resemblance between the show's Hirikas and the more modern
04:23form of gremlins.
04:24They're both rare creatures with giant eyes and ears that undergo some transformation that humans find terrifying.
04:31And they also have a few important... dietary rules.
04:36Although you'll probably never see Gizmo like this.
04:39RIP, Hirika.
04:44And now we get to the granddaddy of all monsters.
04:47The dragon.
04:48If you've only seen certain fantasy shows,
04:51Dracarys.
04:52An intelligent, likable dragon like Borch Three Jackdaws may not be so familiar to you.
04:57But the thing about the dragon is that it has arisen separately in so many cultures that it's not just
05:03one thing.
05:04In the West, the dragon is typically depicted as an evil beast.
05:08But even that doesn't mean it's been static over the course of its history.
05:13Even the Greek name has multiple meanings.
05:15Serpent on its face.
05:16But trace that back and you get to see clearly.
05:20And in the time of the ancient Greeks, dragons were the worst.
05:24Literal enemies of the gods.
05:27Typhon fought and fell to Zeus.
05:29The worm Nidhogg gnawed on the roots of the world tree in Scandinavia.
05:33And of course, the Book of Revelations prophesied that the Christian Devil would come back as a multi-headed red
05:39dragon.
05:40That didn't help the dragon's image.
05:42But when spinners of tail started writing about dragons as creatures on Earth,
05:48they weren't necessarily what we associate with our familiar Western dragons.
05:53Roll a saving throw against dragons, prep!
05:55Pliny the Elder, a Roman natural historian who would influence generations,
05:59wrote about dragons as almost boa constrictors, killing with their powerful tails.
06:05So strangely, there's almost a millennium of accounts of dragons hunting elephants,
06:09their supposed favorite prey that are straight out of nature documentaries.
06:14Ah, the now wary elephant and her calf move swiftly to the depths of the river,
06:20giving the hungry dragon no other option than to seek new feeding grounds.
06:26And dragons of this era were terrified of the supposedly godly panther.
06:31You don't see that much anymore.
06:33Getting away from that early depiction seemed difficult.
06:37Beowulf's famous dragon flies and breathes fire and hoards treasure like future dragons would.
06:43But it's also said to coil and to possess a venomous bite like a snake.
06:47In fact, it wasn't until the 1200s that the first known modern dragon appears in a manuscript.
06:52A winged, four-legged, fire-breathing red dragon that would become part of many a night's stories.
06:59For kingdom and glory!
07:00But even then, the bestiary is varied by author, spawning amazing, now forgotten dragon facts like this one.
07:08It was thought that dragon urine, which obviously would rain down from the sky, would putrefy human tissue upon contact.
07:15Anyway, that's just the West.
07:17Because the East has had its own distinct dragon culture maybe since the year 3000 BCE, and they're not evil
07:24at all.
07:24In fact, they're considered powerful and lucky, revered as celestial beings that could control the rain among other aspects of
07:32reality.
07:33They were even adopted as symbols of the Chinese emperor.
07:36And while they are still largely flying serpents, the Eastern dragon is typically believed to include parts of nine different
07:43beasts.
07:44Plus, they were known to change size and shapeshift into human form, so perhaps the Witcher's gold dragon was influenced
07:51by them as much as the West.
07:52Of course, we don't know why dragons arose in this many cultures.
07:56Scholars cite misunderstood evidence of dinosaurs or a deep fear of crocodiles.
08:01But I do know I always love to see them.
08:04Which is why Lauren Schmidt Hissrich's idea that there are gold dragon witchers that protect other dragons from humans should
08:11immediately be greenlit by my superiors at Netflix.
08:15Thank you for your consideration.
08:19Some thought that the nasty monster whose bite poisoned Geralt in the final episode was a necker,
08:24originally a dangerous type of water spirit in Northern European folklore.
08:29But Lauren confirmed for us that this was indeed a pack of ghouls we saw burrowing through the corpse-strewn
08:35battlefield.
08:36And maybe the most surprising thing I've learned in the course of researching all these monsters is that the original
08:42ghoul isn't undead.
08:44What are you doing to me, D&D's Monsters Manual?
08:48Belief in the ghoul began pre-Islam in a sort of mythological exchange between the societies of Mesopotamia and Arabian
08:56nomads.
08:56But the ghoul was probably helped along when the hadith, a book of the prophet's sayings, not always but sometimes,
09:03acknowledged the creature's existence.
09:05Rather than being undead though, they were a dangerous class of the already volatile spirits called djinn.
09:12Which we saw in episode 5, remember?
09:14And as if that wasn't bad enough, they had been corrupted by Iblis, the devil of Islam.
09:20So as to exact revenge on humanity, it wasn't such a hard task considering their ability to shapeshift from their
09:27disease-bearing, clawed, animalistic forms to that of seductive women.
09:31Although their hoof-like footprints could give them away.
09:34Nor were they easy to kill.
09:36You had to do it in one perfect stroke or they could come back.
09:41Ghouls prowled for travelers in forgotten places, like wastelands or derelict buildings or graveyards.
09:48But in the original incarnation, they didn't actually eat the dead.
09:52They love living human flesh, true.
09:55And strangely, there are accounts of ghouls going crazy for dates.
10:00But it's worth mentioning that the reason we all believe that ghouls eat the dead is because one of the
10:06early translators of 1001 Arabian Nights embellished and it caught on.
10:13Of course, this is all probably rather academic if you're dying a painful death from a ghoul bite.
10:19Still, even a surly witcher would agree that it's important to know your monster.
10:25And there it is.
10:26All the monsters that made it into the witcher's epic first season.
10:31The only question is, what creatures do you want to see in the second season?
10:35Let us know in the comments.
10:36For me, I think I want a short.
10:39Until then, happy hunting.
10:50For anyone wondering, there was one monster left on the cutting room floor, according to LSH.
10:56Geralt originally took a contract for a Polvik in episode 6, but Yennefer beat him to the punch, obviously leading
11:02to them...
11:03You know.
11:05Anyway, in Slavic mythology, the Polvik is a grassy-haired field spirit that can change size depending on the surrounding
11:12plants.
11:12But it can be hostile, especially to those who fall asleep in the fields.
11:17The only way to get in good with one was to offer it two eggs and a rooster that could
11:22no longer crow while no one was looking.
11:24LSH says the show version was, and I quote, so cute.
11:29Maybe next time.
11:31Maybe next time.
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