Sources on literacy in Medieval Europe seem to be all over the place, reaching from the popular “Almost nobody could even sign their name” to “There was at least one person in most households who could read and write”. Here’s a discussion on Stackexchange that lists some sources.
The sad truth is, we may never know how literate people actually were. We can be relatively sure that especially poor people didn’t have any formal education and couldn’t afford expensive handwritten books. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people couldn’t read and write at all. A basic level of literacy was useful for a lot of people, especially craftsmen and traders. Not so much that they’d read and write whole books but enough for basic bookkeeping or passing notes to someone who lives in a neighboring village. The thing is, those are not the kind of things that would be preserved until today. Paper and parchment were too expensive for such trivialities but we have evidence from Russia that people wrote everyday correspondence on birch bark. With no need to store these writings, most people would have probably just reused whatever they were written on to light fires or just thrown them outside where they would decompose within a few weeks.
(this kind of ties into a fun fact about why so few authentic chainmail shirts have survived until today. Not because they got destroyed by rust but because after they lost their usefulness in early modern times, they were cut up and reused to scrub pots)
The thing is, those are not the kind of things that would be preserved until today
Moving away from clay tablets for these purposes was a mistake!
Cave walls all the way. Can’t risk someone accidentally break or throw away what you’ve written.
I wonder if those are truly mutually exclusive?
If a family unity could consist of up to 5 or 6, potentially more if it was a multi-generational home, and “at least one person per home” could read, that could be quite a low percentage point.
I guess it depends on what is meant by “almost nobody could read”, since that isn’t an exact figure. Does it mean 1%? 5%? 10%?
I guess they would at least recognize general shape of common words after some time like anyone spending a couple of weeks in a foreign country with a different alphabet would.
The noble and cleric can’t read? Classes that effectively have to read in 5e and similar systems:
Bard: plays, music, stories Cleric: holy texts Monk: holy texts if they are the monastery type of monks Paladin: if trained w/clerics or in a temple. not if they are wild-sprouted paladins. Rogue: thieves’ cant, smugglers for manifests, forgery. really just the average cutpurse and enforcer wouldn’t need to Wizard: a nerd’s nerd
Artificer: inventor’s notes.
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 was a blind bard
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
Oral history existed for eons before writing was ever invented.
I know this is a ttrpg community rather than a video game community, but I’d like to chime in and say this is something I really liked about Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
You start off illiterate, but there’s a quest to learn to read and afterwards, reading more books and such will improve your reading skills. Starting off, anything you read is literal gibberish, but then it becomes semi-coherent text with typos, and as you progress, it just gets clearer.
I could see this being something you could also incorporate in a ttrpg to add an extra challenge to your players.
There’s also something like this in The Outer Wilds. The player character is given a tool to translate the writings of an alien race that’s long extinct. In the Echoes Of The Eye DLC you investigate the colony ship of another alien race, but you have no way of translating their writings. Your only option is to infer what happened to them via investigations and by viewing picture slides.
I was not prepared for how significant an impression it would on me to not be able to read everything. This already-spooky new location where all the furniture is distinctly far too big for me suddenly felt so much more alien
I always thought it was a neat touch that all of the writing on walls and non-interactable terminals in Warframe were some space-gibberish that meant fuck-all to me. That’s the only other example I can think of.
Fun fact: People could commonly read in the Middle Ages.
There is wide spread belief that medieval Europeans couldn’t read and write, but most peasants could read and write in their VERNACULAR languages. The idea that only 10% of the population could read and write comes from that fact that only 10% of the population could read LATIN, which is the only reading that they thought mattered.
They weren’t wrong to think this too. Latin was one of the only standardized languages due to its use by the church. Vernacular languages varied very widely from place to place, such that it was very common that two peasants from neighboring towns or regions would not be able to understand each other, even if they could read and write some form of “German”.
Most peasant would then be able to read and write their own notes and records, but probably wouldn’t be able to sent letters to next town or read any books.
Bro what?! You have a source? This is very interesting
One example that I mentioned below are letters written on birch bark that were found in several places in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript#Old_Slavonic_script. I’m not an expert but from the contents it seems like at least some of the authors were commoners.
This is neat. Thanks. You also put right instead of write, but just once
Yeah…
I type on mobile. Let me fix it.
Quests:
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You have scurvy. Find a citrus. (Spoiler, there are no citrus on the whole map.)
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Watch these sheep for 12 hours. And again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. Until you die.
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A minstrel is in town. Watch for a minute on your way to watch your sheep.
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Your wife has died of the plague. Bury her, then go watch your sheep.
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Don’t shag your sheep. (Difficulty: impossible)
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You have the plague. Lie down in bed until you die.
You have the plague. Lie down in bed until you die.
Damn. Who is going to watch these sheep?
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While its true that the average person wasn’t what we would consider literate, its not true that they could literally read nothing.
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I loved when older editions had barbarians needed to be illiterate unless they took a feat. No books just RAGE!!!
Additionally, remember that there probably isn’t any standardized spelling, so if you give your players notes you can misspell however you like.
This could even be a clue that a letter has been forged, if the previous letters were spelled one way and the forged one is spelled differently!
It’s perfectly acceptable that magic exists, but people being able to read is wildly unrealistic.
I mean the wizards would more often than not be the ones who could read since they’d need to be able to study the magic texts.
yeah, but maybe they’re only able to read some arcane dead language.
Imagine a mini game where it looks like an ancient language and you half to play a mini game to uncover curtain words.
Once you uncover those words about 40% is missing the next time you see it and each time you see them less and less letters are obscured.
Clever typos or oblivious poster?
Boy, I’m bad at typing while walking. Auto complete has failed me again.
This is basically the entire premise of Heaven’s Vault and (I think, but I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet) Chants of Sennaar
I’ll have to check it out sometime, sounds neat.
We know how reading works.
Suspension of disbelief is an agreement to change things - but you have to convey that they are changed, or else everyone applies the rules they already know. Healing magic is made-up and can work however you want. Getting stabbed is real. You don’t get stabbed and immediately go “guess I’m fine,” except through the application of something made-up.
Admittedly, reading is so commonplace now, we assume it’s universal. Literacy is the rule we apply by default.
But D&D still specifies which languages your character can speak.
That’s why we keep the low level wizard around
Then deliver quests via talking owl, like in Zelda
Shadow of the Demon Lord does this. Each language can have speak, read, write. Players have to invest to do these things. it’s kind of neat, but I can see it also being pointless book keeping to some.
