Creature Feature: "Noonwraiths" in the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Alex Finley, Contributing Editor
“Despite what is commonly thought, peasants do not interrupt their labors at midday to get out of the sun – they do it to avoid Noonwraiths.” - Vlad Reymond, Peasants and Their Customs (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Bestiary: Noonwraiths)
The rising popularity of The Witcher 3, together with the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher, provides an opportunity to take a look at one of the scariest and most unique creatures in the game. By following our main character Geralt (aka The Witcher) we encounter the truly frightening daytime specter called the Noonwraith, feared by peasants and every gamer playing in a dimly lit room.
Noonwraiths are all born of tragic stories and horrific deaths, which is one of the reasons I chose to focus on them. Noonwraiths typically appear under the immense heat of the sun and on summer days. They are so powerful in the sun that they are thought to cause heat strokes to anyone in the area nearby. They are weakened at night, so they use the daytime hours to call farmers and travelers to join them in a dangerous dance on hot windless days in the fields.
Given that the game is filled with monsters of all imaginable types, it might seem surprising that a creature that appears in the heat of the day is one of the game’s most haunting. Much of this has to do with their backstory. Noonwraiths are brides who died tragically. They are trapped by their proposal gifts and to the areas where they died (or where they were murdered). They patrol the area they died in, looking to kill those who crossed them—or their betraying lover.
In the beginning of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we encounter the Noonwraith in White Orchard. This story begins with a couple soon to marry. As expected in any Noonwraith story, the bride receives a bracelet, or ring, from her fiancé as an engagement gift. Leaving the village of a drunk, power-abusive Lord, the couple set up three hovels near a well. After some time, the couple hear of the Lord losing his son. The Lord comes to beg them to return to the village. After the couple refuses to return to the village, the Lord takes his anger out by killing everyone that settled in the hovels. He then hangs the bride in the well, leaving the skeleton to decompose. Her bracelet and arm eventually fall into the well water for Geralt (and us) to find.
If we are checking off boxes of what a monster should be, the Noonwraith fits the bill. She is scary and paranormal. She is aggressive, vengeful, and hateful. She multiplies herself and kills, almost blindly. The Noonwraith is a creature of anger and intense emotions, wanting only revenge. She kills everything living, human and animals alike. With a quick glance, it is easy to peg her as a monster.
It is actually Geralt’s reaction to her death that should cause us to pause and assess what exactly makes this creature monstrous. After the Noonwraith is slayed, the investigation closed, and the ghost cleansing done, we see Geralt, the greatest monster slayer in the lands, affected by this encounter. This is very unusual for a witcher.
While witchers are known for their lack of emotions, this is a creature he felt sympathy for. Again, in the Bestiary entry for the “Devil by the Well”, we see: “For a long time he was haunted by thoughts of the young woman whose horrible death and powerful emotions had transformed her into that terrible monster.”
A human feeling sympathy for a murdered bride is to be expected, but for a witcher to feel emotion is significant in this fantasy world. Witchers are made by altering youth (typically orphans) with magic to combat the many monsters that roam the land. These witchers are tasked with killing creatures, and in doing so are often viewed as monsters themselves. Despite being a seasoned warrior who has killed monsters of all sizes and origins, Geralt feels sympathy for the Noonwraith he kills.
What exactly causes Geralt, and possibly us, to sympathize with this murdered-bride-turned-Noonwraith? The creation of the Noonwraith signals truer monstrosities—those perpetrated by humans (in this case, one man).
The purity of the Noonwraith’s previous human life, gestured to by the color white in White Orchard and her origins as a bride, suggests that she was not born evil. Rather, she was reborn evil. Her death at the hands of human corruption and hate, recast and remold her into something more vengeful and powerful than she could be in life.
This particular Noonwraith’s story signals the corrupt and violent power stemming from humans. The switch from human woman to Noonwraith also suggests the normative idea that women’s strongest emotion is love, and therefore the opposite emotion, derived from men, is hate. In this case, the normatively masculine emotion of hate is more powerful than love.
The monstrous form of this Noonwraith illustrates the kind of transformative power that men can enact within and over other bodies, especially women’s bodies. The lord that killed the bride in the White Orchard was just a regular man, but his wrath becomes paranormally amplified through the wraith. The amplification and long-lasting effects of hatred are highlighted by the fact that it takes a human injected with unique power to lay this rage to rest.
Geralt understands that not all creatures begin evil, but they may be reborn so. In this case, Noonwraiths become the product of a human’s, in this case a man’s, thirst for power over others. The worst monsters are often a product of a greedy desire for power and control, which is often achieved through violence. The Noonwraith is the most interesting and monstrous creature in the game because she reminds us that the worst monsters are the products of human desire, making us question who the true monster really is.
If you enjoyed Alex’s take on Noonwraiths in Witcher 3, why not check out our other “Creature Pieces,” like Heather Lamb on The Flood in Halo or Nate Schmidt on Isaac in The Binding of Isaac?
