In the backstory, the boy protagonist (named Luke in the film) has a grandmother (known as just Grandmamma in the book, and named Helga in the film) who is the nemesis of The Grand High Witch. The grandmother had once been one of the very best of the witch-hunters and has travelled all over the globe trying to track down the fabled and elusive Grand High Witch, who might be the key to finally defeat her evil kind. The Grand High Witch has a heavy foreign accent and it is implied to have been originally from Germany. As discovered about her at the end of the book, after she is destroyed: "Nobody in the world had the faintest idea who she was except the other witches. Wherever she went, people simply knew her as a nice lady (...) Even in her home district, in the village where she lived, people knew her as a kindly and very wealthy Baroness who gave large sums of money to charity." The original version of character is relatively asexual compared to the highly sexualized portrayal in the film adaptation, as she described only in terms such as being young and "very pretty". In the film version she travels with her black cat, whom she calls Liebchen.