this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Many musicians have famously come from poor illiterate backgrounds, being able to play a tune, sing, or recite a story doesn’t require reading skills. It requires good memory to recall what youve heard or creativity to make up something new. So i an totally get behind a bard that cant read.
A "bard" isn't just any musician. They're a highly educated experienced user of language. Telling stories, composing poems & songs, and being in the employ of a noble to do so. In popular culture there's also often the implication that they use these skills and that access to be involved in espionage in some way.
I think Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series does an especially good job of this. It has gleemen, which are reasonably well-trained in music, storytelling, and other performing arts. Gleemen travel around from town to town making their living playing at taverns and the like. Then a step up from gleemen it has bards, which are more well trained and who perform explicitly for nobles. In either case you can expect a great level of artistic skill, but I'd be shocked to hear of an illiterate bard, but maybe only mildly surprised to hear about an illiterate gleeman.
Education isn't dependent on literacy. Aristotle famously decried that (paraphrasing) "kids these days don't know anything anymore because they just write it down and don't actually memorize it"
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is a work of fantasy written in the last 50 years, not an accurate account of historical humanity.
In real life, bards were specifically Celtic minstrels who maintained an oral history for the pre-Christian Celtic people, who notably didn't write down their history. They used meter, rhyme, and song structure to help them commit the words to memory.
The Iliad was transferred entirely orally for centuries, and was the elite high status performance.
It's entirely possible for very very complicated musical traditions to be communicated without writing, and pretty common.
Bards aren't just the run of the mill musicians. They are so much more than that.
And most of that "so much more" requires extensive training. Which requires some form of reading.
Bards are historians and have some magic of their own.
Homer was a blind bard well before the invention of Braille.
Homer may not even have existed, let alone been blind. And if he did exist, may not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey. And if he did write them, very well may not have written them from scratch (but was instead just the person responsible for writing down what became the definitive version of a more widespread oral tradition). So he's perhaps not the best example to use. (The notion that he's blind is based on the assumption that a certain bardic character in his writing was a self-insert.)
And we know the works of Homer because they were written down.
... by other people, yeah. The point is that the bard himself didn't write. He went around and recited his epic poems from memory.
Reciting from memory is a bardic skill, but those "other people" were his dedicated assistants.
Well, possibly. We don't know when Homer went blind, or if he was ever actually blind.
All we really know is that the two biographies written about him were written at least 400 years after his death. Both are highly questionable, but both still say that Homer was literate, or at least well educated, before losing his sight.
All we actually know is that Homer wrote the Iliad (or parts of it) and the Odyssey.
Centuries later