Guild Wars 2

I was thinking about the poor human background of my character and I think that he could never learned how to read and write, so the knowledge he has of the world could be given orally by other people who share his same living conditions.

I sadly have not a big knowledge of the lore, so I’m here asking you if there is – or there was -, in the history of Tyria, an organization, a tribe, a cult which were known to be heavily users of the same druidic way to trasmit knowledge between their members. I just know about GW2 principal races and dwarves, but they all use books, technology or something that’s not oral.

Grawls, maybe? Centaurs? Hyleks? Maybe Skritts?

You mean a race than uses oral story telling traditions over written word?

The norn. While they seem to have written word, a lot of their legends and lore is passed down orally in stories and song.

Also a note. Tyria has already invented the Printing Press (Charr innovation at it’s finest), which means that literacy is going to be going up by a large margin very quickly. Larger, cheaper, and more easily obtainable literature for everyone! So your human being poor doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t read.

Jotun and Krait elders/leading-wise figures are known to transmit knowledge to the next generation (in the case of Krait each generation manipulates and changes the history to better manipulate their people, in the case of the Jotun this method have caused some errors in their stories like the one that appears in Hoelbrak giving not 100% accurate info).

But I don’t think any of them could relate to your human character (Krait are evil guys, Jotun have mostly become hostile barbarians and are way too far from Divinity’s Reach and Kryta). In fact I don’t think any other race would teach your character anything, if anything other poor humans, there could be some wise men or war veterans that somehow ended up in poverty but they still have a good share of wisdom so your character could learn from them.

Whether or not your character could read and write would really depend on the education system for Divinity’s Reach – and then whether or not there was ever anyone willing to teach someone who can’t read/write how to do so. Which isn’t delved into so much.

But lore wise, the New Krytan alphabet was supposedly developed so that it would be easier to use than the Old Krytan alphabet, and thus allowing even the common folks to learn how to read and write, which is why it is now used everywhere while in GW1 even Ascalonian (which uses the same language system but different letters even in lore) wasn’t used much (folks didn’t know how to read, but they learned to recognize the symbols well enough for when it was placed on store signs).

Edit: Ah, while going for my source on the last but, I found this in said source:

The Durmand Priory set out to promote literacy and make the use of the new alphabet commonplace, so that all intelligent beings could read and understand the words that were appearing all around them.

Today, every citizen of Tyria, regardless of their origins, is given the opportunity and the education to read and understand the alphabet of New Krytan.

So I think the Priory would be teaching the poor how to read and write, so as to improve the passing and recording of history and knowledge.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cultural_Diffusion_in_Contemporary_Kryta

Konig Des Todes.2086:

So I think the Priory would be teaching the poor how to read and write, so as to improve the passing and recording of history and knowledge.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Cultural_Diffusion_in_Contemporary_Kryta

This is exactly what I was thinking about.

In any case the idea was not to live, in some way, near Jotun or Krait or anyother tribe to learn their transmission method, but just having the awareness that in the world exist creatures that still use this way to hand down knowledge. Thanks guys