Yaruga

Yaruga
Information
Variation(s)	Yarra
Type	River
Region	Northern Kingdoms
Location	Starts in the mountains and ends at the Great Sea
Map(s)
World
World
Appearance(s)
Books	Blood of Elves Time of Contempt (mentioned) Baptism of Fire The Tower of the Swallow The Lady of the Lake
Games	The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (mentioned)
Other	The World of the Witcher

	At present, the border between us and the South — dominated by Nilfgaard — is demarcated, as you can see, by the Yaruga River. It constitutes an obstacle which is practically insurmountable. It hardly ever freezes over, and during the rainy season it can carry so much water that its bed is almost a mile wide. For a long stretch it flows between precipitous, inaccessible banks, between the rocks of Mahakam...
- pg. 269, Blood of Elves (U.K. edition)

Yaruga (Polish: Jaruga), or Yarra to the Nilfgaardians, is the largest river in the Northern Kingdoms, beginning in the Fiery or Blue Mountains and flowing westward all the way to the Great Sea. The kingdoms of Cintra and Verden are located at the mouth of the river.

History

Eastern expansion along the Yaruga following the First Landing.

During the First Landing, the first humans landed their ships in the mouth of the Yaruga, before colonising slowly eastward.

Northern Wars

In 1263, midway through the First Northern War, the Nilfgaardian Army crossed the Yaruga after conquering Cintra and Upper Sodden, and was defeated in the Battle of Sodden Hill. They retreated back over the river and both the Nilfgaardians and the Northern armies reached a stalement with each side on either bank of the river. Some years later, in July 1267, Nilfgaardian troops crossed the river again starting the Second Northern War.

By August, the Nilfgaardians set up a blockade across the mouth of the Yaruga against the Redanians, blocking their ships and goods from access to Skellige.

Notes

• Danusia Stok, in her translation of The Last Wish, kept the Polish name spelling of the river, calling it Jaruga, but then switched to "Yaruga" in Blood of Elves.

Trivia

• The Yarra River, historically known as the Yarra Yarra, is a real river in Victoria, Australia. In the native Bunwurrung language, yarro is a word designsting a waterfall that was mistakenly applied to the whole river – originally named the Birrarung, "ever-flowing" – by European settlers.
• Jaruga is a Serbo-Croatian word that generally translates as "pit" but more accurately translates as "gully".