Vilgefortz, the main villain of The Witcher

“‘Yes, Artaud,’ Vilgefortz looked at him and his eyes flashed. ‘You will dance to the tune they play. Or you will take leave of the dance-floor. Because the orchestra’s podium is too high for you to climb up there and tell the musicians to play some other tune. Realise that at last. If you think another solution is possible, you are making a mistake. You mistake the stars reflected in the surface of the lake at night for the heavens.’” (Vilgefortz, Blood Of Elves)

"'Nature doesn’t know the concept of philosophy, Geralt of Rivia. The pathetic–ridiculous–attempts which people undertake to try to understand nature are typically termed philosophy. The results of such attempts are also considered philosophy. It’s as though a cabbage tried to investigate the causes and effects of its existence, called the result of these reflections 'an eternal and mysterious conflict between head and root', and considered rain an unfathomable causative power. We, sorcerers, don’t waste time puzzling out what nature is. We know what it is; for we are nature ourselves. Do you understand?’" (Vilgefortz, Time of Contempt)

Hello my dears. I am the Raven who speaks to you.

This time I will talk about Vilgefortz Of Roggeveen, the main antagonist of The Witcher universe. That said, it is difficult to credit anyone with the title of main antagonist in a world that is itself a factory of villainy. It is the case of the world created by Andrzej Sapkowski. Villainy is the rule rather than the exception. His books presents us with a barbaric scenario where, in practically every historical moment of the narrative, many individuals, men and women, can assume the label of villains. The fact is that the world of The Witcher is full of schemes, corruption, sabotage, exploitation and manipulation in the most diverse social classes, something that can be seen in all those who live in it and play the daily game, whether for the sake of survival or to accumulate power. We can't divide the characters between angels and demons: altruism and villainy are traits and possibilities that can be found in the same character, according to the circumstances and demands the dark and cruel world of The Witcher places on them.

Villainy is everywhere. It is present in the Chapter of Sorcerers, in the monarchy or proletariat, among bandits, robbers and rapists. Among law enforcement officers, who are supposedly paid to keep order. And, in addition, the villainous character of their identities is exacerbated by the historical moment where the books are narrated, which is during the war of Nilfgaard and the Northern Kingdoms. War tends to push what is already barbaric to unimaginable extreme levels and we definitely see that play out in The Witcher.

But why, then, do I credit Vilgefortz with the title of the most notorious villain in Sapkowski's works, if he is part of a context full of villains, who can be plucked in bulk? Why not choose Rience, who was marked by the clashes and problems he caused mainly to Geralt? Why not Ehmyr Var Emreis, a tyrannical monarch capable of the hardest and most callous acts to maintain and extend his influence? Why not Leo Bonhart, the cruel mercenary responsible for Cirilla's most desperate and terror-filled moments, abused, beaten, tortured by him with explicit sadism?

Well... I choose Vilgefortz because, unlike the others, who are clearly part of the problem, continuous actors in keeping the gears of this barbaric world working, Vilgefortz in my analysis is the one who architects his own machine and manipulates all the others villains. At the same time, he maintains a fake public image, sustained for decades, of someone who actually fight what he himself secretly cultivates. Vilgefortz is not the one who just has the concept of villainy stuck in his skin, exercising it: he goes further; he is the one who develops and maximizes it, using all human and material resources at his disposal, something he deeply appreciates. And he wields power and control, machiavellianly, so that his allies and even rivals dance to the symphony he has carefully and coldly engineered.

In The Witcher, there are villains who express villainy by lot of power accumulated through the exploitation of people. There are villains who become villains because they exist in a context that conditions them to act badly, otherwise their lives would not last long. There are villains who become professionals at villainy because it is profitable. There are villains who are sadistic because that is who they really are - and find in explicit violence a way to exercise their aggressive impulses, redirecting their resentment, hatred and prejudice towards a target or several. In Vilgefortz we can pinpoint each of these elements, but what really draws attention is that, in him, we do not find the mark of passionality. Although he loves to incinerate humans and opponents, Vilgefortz is not a flame: he is an ice cube. He is the author of a scenario where the pieces, the characters he controls, are carefully placed to break up with each other, where the suffering caused to them and that they cause to others serves as fuel for him to reach his main goal. He wishes to seize and dominate the Her Ichaer, the Elder Blood. Vilgefortz is like an invisible, silent parasite.

And he is in no hurry, which makes him even more dangerous. His plan and vision is perfectly meticulous and patient. He was able to wait calmly for decades until some previously planned actions started to be put into practice. Vilgefortz is the one who has always skillfully managed to maintain an appearance and dissimulate, with more talent, coldness and mastery than his peers. In the Chapter Of Sorcerers, he is the master of this skills. He was the character who, through dissimulation and alienation, did not deceive a sorcerer of great level, but the entire Chapter Of Sorcerers. The person who caused the collapse of the millenary institution of magic and all its organization, something previously unimaginable. All this done with a spine-chilling calm and tranquility. The evil motivations were hidden in the face of a tall, handsome, calm, middle-aged sorcerer, with a remarkable and meek voice. A man of extreme politeness, education and vast knowledge in many areas. The perfect gentleman, one of the most talented in arcane dealings, but who hides a true demon under his mask, capable of the most absurd cruelties. Vilgefortz is not just a perpetuator of doom and misfortune in the lives of the main characters: he is an artist and a conceptual mastermind of chaos. He is, first and foremost, a psychopath. But not the type that common sense judges as crazy, out of control, misfit. Vilgefortz is the psychopath who hides behind a successful surgeon; of the young lawyer who never lost a case, of the innovative scientist. He is the one who uses an ideal image, who in everyone's eyes is an exemplary figure, but who plots, acts and the fruits of his actions, when finally put into practice, are catastrophic, unpredictable and allow little or almost no defense.

Vilgefortz feels immense pleasure in this. He toasts the laurel of his nefarious actions with a terrible calm, a glass of wine in his hand and an angelic smile on his lips. At least it was like that until he received his deformation, which is something that developed a deep hatred and resentment in him due to the size of his ego and pride, something also typical and observable in psychopaths. But in the end, this deformed image of a burned face and artificial eye is truer to the abomination that he is... a calculating, lethal monster. Vilgefortz has something in his nature that is capable of arousing the fear of ordinary people. Capable of leading to the questioning of their concepts and values. Question the exaggerated adjectives given to popular representatives, public figures. After all, he is one, if not the main, hero of the ever-remembered Battle of Sodden Hill. A hero of the realms. And that makes us wonder: to what extent are heroes and leaders, in fact, due to their real nature? Is what is revealed on his surface enough to blindly estimate a leader of his choice? What's underneath your fame and public image? Vilgefortz was considered an ideal model of his time and we saw where that led, what this collective blindness caused. When the theater curtain finally fell and the entire play and orchestration was revealed, it was too late. The damage was already too great to be repaired and the promise of an even more disturbing future loomed. Alienation is the food willingly accepted by the masses, distributed by corrupt people and psychopaths so that they can put into practice, dressed as lambs and innocents, their real wolfish and predatory pretensions.

Vilgefortz has such well-polished characteristics. He is a master at causing great harm, capable of altering the political and common sense of an era. It is not a villain that causes particular damage, but capable of causing collective damage, which will unbalance a world that, in The Witcher, is already very unbalanced even without him. The consequences of Vilgefortz's machinations are of a scope that, due to his narcissism and self-centered desire, is capable of putting at risk not the lives of some, but the future of other generations. Condemning to death those who have not yet been born, subordinating them to a type of life in which they will never have any voice or active participation in building the trends that govern the functioning of their world. This is Vilgefortz: a genocidal psychopath, sadistic torturer and calculating conspirator who, in the name of his thirst for power, is capable of mortifying not only those around him, but those who don't even exist yet. And for all this I credit him, not Bonhart, Ehmyr or Eredin with the title of greatest antagonist in The Witcher books. His development and personality construction received differential treatment and better organization than any other villain seen. Andrzej Sapkowski had a lot of patience with Vilgefortz, polishing the character and his motivations very calmly.

Kovir's young orphan who was apparently abandoned by parents with some connection to magic exhibited a huge talent for arcane arts. However, the boy also demonstrated a growth and maturation in the ability to be devilish. His upbringing in the druid circle of Kovir, highly accentuated innate talent, the years of young and immature experience in murders, rapes, thefts: these were the first experiences of a villain who would be something much worse. But not in a rude or trivial way. It is an evil of diabolical refinement, where few threats and forces would really be able to challenge it. Leaving the druid circle early to become a mercenary is part of Vilgefortz's constitutive process to learn what it really takes to satiate the sadistic instincts he craves. Indulging in a mercenary life, before joining and being part of the Chapter Of Sorcerers, Vilgefortz learned the ins and outs of a life of crime. He pondered the flaws and shortcomings of this way of life and, thanks to his above-average intellect and talent for magic, shaped his own philosophy and modus operandi.

Vilgefortz, like all psychopaths, does not act without purpose. He doesn't give a point without a knot. His fixation with the challenge is something that characterizes him. He is always in constant work or carrying out some hidden plan (or several). The quiet and inactive man is just the appearance he wants others to believe: that he is inactive or acting bureaucratically, as the norms require, when in fact he is extremely active in various places and plots, disguised and silent as a chameleon.

And as if all that wasn't enough, all that mental capacity that Vilgefortz has, the bastard is also talented in warfare. Of the Sapkowskian villains, it was he and no one else who was able to practically cripple Geralt of Rivia, considered perhaps one of the most skilled swordsmen in the history of the Continent. And that without the use of magic. Vilgefortz humiliated Geralt in combat, using only a staff and with extreme skill. For the reader, Vilgefortz represents a shock, a moment where an idealized vision of Geralt of Rivia is shattered. The humiliation that Vilgefortz puts Geralt through is an attack not only to him, but also the readers. It is an attack on the feeling and projection that The Witcher readers put on Geralt, an identification and attachment to the character. And this act reveals what a real great villain really is: someone capable of representing a real danger of loss, of losing everything that we really cherish and value. The one who brings us closer to the memory of our finitude, that death is something that is always close, something that we tend to avoid reflecting on or putting into perspective.

Vilgefortz is able to disgust and nurture in us a deep contempt, hatred and indignation... which is something that happens perfectly in scenes like, for example, Yennefer's captivity, where she is tortured in his castle, and with a description Vilgefortz's perversely playful and detailed account of what he would do with her. From using the memory of past cases, which he uses to intimidate her, to creating mental images of the countless people he treated like lab rats in his experiments, who inflicted extreme, acute pain, who were nothing more than an object of use and disposal.

Vilgefortz lacks any moral compass or element of empathy. Even with the character that was perhaps the most faithful and closest to him, which was the sorceress Lydia van Bredevoort, she was nothing more than a simple object in his eyes. A resource to materialize the downfall of Thanedd and the permanent destruction of the Chapter of Sorcerers as we know it. He doesn't seem to feel absolutely anything for anyone other than himself and being his puppet was the fate of virtually everyone who had any closer involvement with him, whether this involvement was unconscious, by choice or even by coercion, captivity. Not to mention the political puppets that he also willingly made use of. It's always good to remember the decisive role that his contact with Ehmyr var Emreis, years before the main plot of the saga began. The impact this meeting had on the emperor's relentless and greedy pursuit of power, affecting the lives of the inhabitants not only of the northern kingdoms, but also Nilfgaard for decades. The stratospheric number of people who ended up meeting their deaths because of the seed of avarice that Vilgefortz planted in Ehmyr. He ensured, through spies and alliances within the Nilfgaardian empire, that this seed remained well watered and flourished enough that, in a scenario of chaos and instability, he could orchestrate the fall of the most powerful institutions on the Continent. Thus, he could seized his much-desired unlimited power coming from the Her Ichaer, being able to build a new world and system of government where everyone would be subject to him and his warped moral compass. Something that, with most of the kingdoms extinct and the rest weakened by many wars, would not be very difficult to achieve.

And that's it, my dears. I believe I have justified what leads me to name Vilgefortz as the main villain of The Witcher books. Thank you all for following me once again. 

Corvid greetings!