Medievalist Video Games

6: “Everyone Knows Witches are Barren”: Images of Fertility, Witchcraft and Womanhood in Medievalist Video Games

Tess Watterson, @tesswatty, University of Adelaide

Representations of gendered bodies always reflect contemporary cultural imaginations. Witch’s bodies in medievalist fantasy RPGs are a layering of medieval/early modern visual culture, medievalism, and modern popular culture. (Content Warning: ableist/sexist language) As Sarah Stang argues, labelling hag's bodies as monstrous hides their harmful nature as representations. But it is both the monstrous and the medievalist that functions together to mask this misogyny (and ableism and ageism). 'Historical' inspiration lends authority and we must contextualise these monstrous female bodies as part of the long tradition of depicting witches. The today's idea and image of the hag isn't actually medieval, but developed from the late middle ages into the early modern period. Images of the witch in this form (~ 15th C.) stem from both a revival of classical stories and a new interest in depicting naked bodies (See S. Schade, C. Zika, L. Roper). Witch images also shared visual codes, e.g. sagging breasts, with art of the embodiment of Envy. The iconography of the breast was used to convey beliefs and anxieties about fertility and female sexuality. Through most of the Middle Ages, breasts were most commonly depicted in images of the Virgin Mary as the nursing Madonna, associated with God’s nurturing care. This shifted with what Miles calls the ‘secularisation of the breast’ in the 15th-17th C. The breast becomes common in other art, e.g. erotic and medical images. Demonised naked bodies are core to these depictions of witches, especially sagging “poison-filled” breasts. Sagging breasts/hard nipples represented the antithesis of nourishment and care. These iconographies have carried through into the design of modern hags, eg. in The Witcher. The water and grave hag monster species are “inhuman”, supernatural, and always naked.

Both water and grave hags are drawn with “deformed”, “withered” female bodies, with enlarged heads and claw-like hands, a crouched posture, and the iconic sagging breasts. All encounters with hags expect the player to fight (or flee), wherein success is killing the hag. The hag's evils relate to heteronormative "successful" femininity: e.g. a grave hag named Mourntart feasts on children’s bones (recalling witchcraft archetypes), and in the quest A Bard’s Beloved, a water hag lures men as lovers to then kill and devour them.

In the World of the Witcher book, character Dandelion jokes any who compare water hags with naiads “most certainly never saw one in daylight”, despite a folktale on the next page writing that water hags are naiads who lost their eternal youth by loving mortal men. Just like in late medieval and early modern art, the ageing hag body is depicted against the youthful seductress. The medievalism of The Witcher, and background of this visual tradition, enables these modern images to so explicitly cast failed fertility as monstrous. These images of female bodies reflect a continuity from the medieval period to today, indicating that perhaps cultural stereotypes about fertility and breasts are not as relegated to the history books (or canvases) as many would like to believe.

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