Witch World

The Witch World by Andre Norton is a long series of fantasy novels set in a parallel universe where magic works and, at the beginning of the series, is exclusively performed by women. The series combines many traits of high fantasy and sword and sorcery. It begins with what is now called the Estcarp cycle. These describe the adventures of Simon Tregarth from Earth, his witch wife Jaelithe, and their three children Kyllan, Kemoc and Kaththea.

The series was expanded greatly with the High Hallack cycle, starting with Year of the Unicorn in 1965 and its sequels Jargoon Pard and Gryphon in Glory. The Dales of High Hallack are on a different continent from Estcarp and its neighboring lands.

Mostly these cycles are organized by continent, Estcarp and its neighboring countries being situated on an eastern continent and High Hallack on a western one, with a wide sea between.

The Turning sequence is about events which convinced conservative witches that men could handle magic responsibly. The Secrets of the Witch World trilogy brings many of these story lines to a climax. Both deal with worldwide events. Except for the last of the Secrets of the Witch World books most of these were written in collaboration with Miss Norton's fans. The Witch World series can be considered the first romantic fantasy series, both because of the content and because these books were a primary inspiration to later romantic fantasy authors like Mercedes Lackey.

On the Witch World, magical ability is considered to be exclusively female and exercised only by virgins, with the sexual act depriving a witch of her power. Estcarp's male-dominated enemies consider rape as a convenient way of neutralising captive witches. The advent of Simon Tregarth, a man who turns out to possess some magical power and who forms a magical link with the witch Jaelithe after she becomes his wife, poses an uncomfortable challenge to the conservative witch hierarchy, which is by slow degrees forced to accept that males - and females who have relationships with them - can and do possess magic power.

In the above, Witch World is a mirror image of Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea" series, where to begin with magic is shown as male-dominated, with women's magic despised as "weak" and "wicked", and where it is assumed that "a mage who makes love thereby unmakes his power" - with both assumptions being increasingly challenged in later books of the series and shown be derived from prejudices of a conservative male hierarchy.

Here is a list of Witch World stories:

Read more about Witch World:  High Hallack Cycle, The Turning, Short Stories

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