Andre Norton's Witch World

Cultures of the Witch World

The Witch World stories bring together people from many cultures. Andre Norton's gift for story-telling includes the ability to interweave cultural differences and similarities into her characters. Friends and allies bridge cultural divides to develop unified purposes throughout the stories. But the relationships often occur on both sides of the moral line which divides the Forces of Light from the Forces of Darkness. They all know and understand the need to work together for a common goal.

It is Andre's commitment to exploring the strengths and weaknesses of many of the cultures she introduces that helps move the stories forward. Each culture in Witch World has been tremendously affected by the past and may harbor deep wounds from other times, other conflicts. They don't simply exist for the sake of telling the story, but rather exist because they have a part in the story.

When Simon Tregarth first enters the Witch World one easily gets the impression that life is pretty simple. At that time in both Andre and the reader's imagination, many things had yet to be revealed. The idea that everything in Witch World was based on pseudo-medieval technology coupled with ancient magic provided to be extremely flexible. Witch World showed itself to be something other than primitive and simple.

The complexity of the storyscape still intrigues readers. How well-connected were all the nations of Witch World? How did they come to know about each other? What were their motivations for helping or hating one another?

The most dominant races in Witch World appear to be various groups of humans who crossed over from other worlds. They are all able to intermarry and produce offspring, so the scientific aspect behind Witch World implies there is a connection between all the source worlds. Ultimately, all the ancestors must have come from one world.

But the paths they have taken to reach their places in the Witch World diverged and wandered in many directions. Half the fun of reading the Witch World books is learning about peoples and places who may once have thrived but whose final destinies are shrouded in mysteries as deep and unfathomable as their origins.

Few other writers of the 20th Century achieved this level of intricate complexity and depth. J.R.R. Tolkien certainly comes to mind, and many people have compared Andre Norton's achievement to his own. There are similarities and differences. The essay "Almost Middle-earth" takes a look at those qualities.

Indagare compiled a list of races of the Witch World at SF-Fandom.

• Almost Middle-earth
• The Dalesmen
• The Falconers
• The Old Race
• The Sulcar
• Other Cultures