Beginning of a new week, and as usual, I’ll mark it with a Fantasy with Friends post! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on witches in fantasy:

What are some interesting witches in fantasy? Is there a certain portrayal of a character that makes them a “witch” vs. a “sorceress” or other magic worker, in your opinion?

As ever, as soon as I’m asked a question like this, my brain goes completely blank. So let’s have a think: there are various ways witches get into fantasy stories, and different shapes they come in, which maybe will help me think of some examples! There are magical worlds where witches are a part of a wider magical landscape and everybody knows about them; one example that I’ve got started with but not finished is Samantha Birch’s Cat Dragon, for instance. There’s witches-as-known-entities, which Thorn is at the start of An Ancient Witch’s Guide to Modern Dating, and witches who are mostly secret among “normal people”, which she essentially becomes when she enters the modern world. And there are good and evil witches in fairytales.

I think “sorceress” is somewhat more often used when female characters have more power and agency than your standard witch — it has a bit more authority and a ring of scariness in a lot of worlds, and for me that’s probably the dividing line in a lot of cases. Witches might also be called sorceresses in a more formal context: I think there’s more “court sorceresses” than “court witches”, and more “hedge witches” than “village sorceresses”, in general. I suppose I might also associate it with something more formal: anyone can be a witch, but a sorceress has done a degree (so to speak).

Overall I don’t think there’s a super solid consensus on the difference between “witch” and “sorceress” and some of the other magic-workers: sometimes a witch is just what you call a female wizard, sometimes it’s a derogatory term, sometimes it mostly just means a weird older lady who knows her herbs.

I think a favourite exploration of women’s magic and what makes a witch or wizard would be Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books. I didn’t love it as a teen, but it all grew on me as I revisited, and realised what she was doing in The Tombs of Atuan and especially in Tehanu: re-examining the assumptions she’d made herself in writing A Wizard of Earthsea and making it (much as I think it is beautiful and important) way too much of a sausage fest. She wrote some fairly typical fantasy in that book, not at all unusual for its day in terms of the way she portrayed men and women… and then she came back to it and insisted on not sweeping it under the rug but interrogating it.

Pretty sure there’s a big space somewhere in here where I should discuss Discworld’s witches, as well, but sadly I never quite got on with the books in the series I tried to read, and haven’t yet had chance to go back to it after finding I did enjoy Going Postal… so I’ll have to leave it here.