The Witcher Creator doesn’t believe the series is Polish, Slavic OR medieval
I was going through old interviews of Andrzej Sapkowski and I found a really interesting quote:
You’ve stressed many times that the Witcher is neither a medieval, nor a Slavic story. Are you surprised by the constant attempts to ascribe Polish origin to your characters?
“I’m very surprised,” Sapkowski said. “The Witcher Geralt has a pretty ‘Slavic’ name, there are some ‘Slavic’ vibes in the names of people and places. There’s the leshen and the kikimora - but you also have Andersen’s little mermaid and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s Beast. I think there’s a need to repeat this: the Witcher is a classical and canonical fantasy, there’s as much Slavic spirit in it as there’s poison on the tip of a matchstick, to quote Wokulski’s words to Starski.”
And I feel like I’ve always heard the narrative that “the books are super polish” or “we need slavic representation and need to make the show more slavic”
I always assumed Sapko had intended The Continent to resemble medieval Poland but apparently that is not the case at all. I may need to do some re-thinking about the framing of the world.
There’s a full transcript of the 2020 interview here
Man I don’t really have the time but I’m going to anyway because I just can’t help it.
I only recently arrived in this fandom so I’m very new to the books but having just read them to me it really did feel like Sapkowski did not intend for it to mimic Polish history or culture. Or Slavic for that matter. It just has those vibes because he is Polish and therefore Polish and Slavic history and culture are his main frame of reference.
Like mine is Scandinavic/Northern Europe, if I ever wrote a fantasy series there’s a good chance it would end up with some vibes of Norse mythology and Old Danish folklore because that’s my primary frame of reference.
Generally when a writer intends something it is not just more overt but a lot more thought through. But the Witcher feels like Sapkowski just writing from the world he knows best, which is Polish/Slavic vibes with a lot of other European stuff in there.
Which leads me to these tags from @swords-and-spindels
You’re so right. I keep being baffled when people call it pseudo-Medival because it’s not. Quite apart from the fact that it fuses things from five different time periods its main setting is Renaissance. In technology alone, it has moved well away from the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance proper.
Things like glasses and the printing press, things that this world have are Renaissance tech. Portraits of people as well were not normal until this time period, nor was “realistic” painting.
Other things like a very well-functioning banking system complete with the ability to withdraw money in different branches and a working postal service of some kind, didn’t roll around until late 18th or later.
Then there’s the social upheaval and the shift in society towards something far more misogynistic than existed prior (which might not have been that grand but was still a whole lot better) which is also a Renaissance thing. No really, if you had the choice between being a woman in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, I would recommend choosing the former. Your life, legal rights, and social standing would almost undoubtedly have been better during the Middle Ages, if you think they weren’t you’re believing a lie the Romantics/Victorian scholars invented.
I will freely admit that one of the things I’ve studied the least in all of history is medieval Europe, outside of how it relates to Judaism. 
I’m familiar with basically stuff like Charlemagne and the Magna Carta — broadband people and events, but I don’t know as much about the day-to-day life and a lot of general time period facts. So getting to read this kind of analysis is really interesting to me and makes me want to look into it more. 
I also really like the point about how since he is a Polish author obviously that cultural narrative influences his writing, even if he didn’t want The Continent to be fantasy Poland. I think this is a unique strength of the TV show because there are so many people from so many different countries involved. Sapko is one person with one cultural mindset so obviously it’s going to reflect his own life more strongly. A team is made of a lot of people with a lot of different lives all contributing different perspectives. (Duh)
But I also think this makes the people crying about the show erasing Slavic or Polish culture by existing look significantly worse. Because now you’re wondering why they’re pushing for it and why their idea of Slavic is white. 
Mostly, the first clue that it isn’t a middle ages story, at least not our middle ages, is that they know about mutations, genes, taxonomy, etc. It’s fantasy and very much fantasy that pulls from a lot of different cultures and fantasy tropes. There’s some stuff that’s undeniably Slavic (the Lodge as a coven at Bald Mountain, etc) and a lot of cultural context I’ve been told is missing in the English translation– mostly silly jokes. But the idea that the books are about the Polish middle ages and therefore, the show should be white is simply very wrong.
There’s also the possibility of it actually depicting a post-technological society - humans came over from another world during the Conjunction, and we aren’t told, afaik, at what moment “our time” the Conjunction happened. It could be a case similar to what happens in the Darkover books by MZ Bradley. Some things might be kept - glasses, for instance - while others were impossible to reproduce, for whatever reason. It would explain anachronisms I’ve seen people complain about - things like “A type tech is dependent on B type tech, they can’t have one without the other” rather than unrelated technologies from different times being present at the same time - be it a pre or post technology society, things could simply have evolved at different rates due to different conditions.
But yeah. Both from a Watsonian and a Doylist (Word of God) PoV the Witcher is not, and was not intended to be, a representation of Polish/European middle ages, nor Poland, nor anywhere specific. It was intended more as the Fairy Tale section of your local bookshop, if you want to be precious about it.
I believe what it comes down to is people are conflating the fact that the series is very Polish with the world within the series being Polish.
Because the series is very strongly Polish. It has a lot of cultural influences from the writer, it has a lot of inside jokes that you can’t fully understand without reading some of it in the original polish, etc.
But The Continent itself is not Poland. Just like Middle Earth is not Britain.
I’ve also seen a lot of people in the tags bring up how the games they built the world in a very Polish way and that’s absolutely true.
I just read this amazing article about the world building of TW3 and it’s cultural influences and Polish Nationalism. Super interesting read!! Here.
But that’s not the books.
Anyways I love the “past our time” theory and I know I’ve seen that in other media but I do like it a lot!!! It’s a good trope!!!