Nowa baśń. Strzyga Romana Zmorskiego i Wiedźmin Andrzeja Sapkowskiego

Abstract

Andrzej Sapkowski’s story, which introduced wizard Geralt into Polish literature, is a transformed folk motif of a “princess — lamia” as recorded by Roman Zmorski in his literaiy version of the tale Strzyga. The transformation refers to the following aspects: the change of the central motif from the fairy tale monster into the wizard; the reconstruction of characters from stereotypical into multidimensional ones; implementation of psychological motivation instead of fantastic one: introduction of economic and political factors in place of religious ones, alterations in the axiological area of the tale to create ethical dissonance; plot distortions leading to the reversal of conventional fairy tale sequence of events; focus on the language of narration. The narrator, who is revealed in the language layer of the work through the use of contrasted lexical and phraseological forms (such as archaisms, neologisms, borrowings, vulgarisms, prosaisms, colloquial expressions and jargon of the trade expressions) creates a distance towards the presented world, and he functions as stylizer and plagiarist, introducing ironic undertones in the story. Sapkowski’s tale Wiedźmin disturbs the fairy tale convention replacing the fairy tale with anti-tale.