Withcer world question

[PrometheusTS]

Hi , Usually in fantasy games , fictions , novels etc Authors do inspire to real world places for their fantasy worlds, is the same for Witcher too?

 

For example I couln't not notice how Rivia , Lyria all have Italian styled names in their cities of those region , are those inspired by Italy cities ?

[simtam]

Not only that, but some of the city names in the witcherland are city names in real world, for example Maribor.

[BlickJustice]

An interesting question, a pity there haven't been more answers for years.

Mr Sapkowski spoke that when he started to imagine the Witcher, he created names and locations more as "backgrounds" to the stories he was telling the readers, but after the two short stories collections he caught himself in a trap- if he was going to write the next adventures in from of novels, he had to organise everything and actually imagine a "map" of some sorts. 

Some names are from his elven language, such as Kaer Morhen, some are from Slavic languages like Maribor, Novigrad, Wyzima (Vizima in EN), but even though as the books progressed the world was more organised, I still feel all the names are more "backgrounds" to the story, just like at the beginning. I think it's up to the readers to imagine the details- there's nothing in the way of imagining distant lands we read about to be resembling something we think about. CDPR did that when showing locations in their games, it's their vision, not exactly the author's or a reader/player's.  Let's take Rivia you mentioned- when we see the city of Rivia, it never felt like an Italian city to me- it feels like a city just after a great war that leaves people frustrated, wounded and the atmopshere thick as fog- it could be anywhere, to be honest, it's like some kind of background. Rivia is only a name there, but it has a symbolism too, when we consider it's the city the titular character supposedly comes from.

Not to mention, Sapkowski was inspired by a mix of medieval folklores and tales, not only the Slavic ones, and it shows basically in the names and the atmosphere of the locations. And it can really move one's imagination, Sapkowski knows how to pick the reader's curiosity, because he doesn't tell us everything, among all the little details we discover during reading, there are gaps one can fill by themselves.

"The tale continues, the story never ends..."