Hi Pear! I've been struggling with the history of my world- or, more specifically, the records of that history. Do you have any tips or ideas about how my characters might come to learn about history? Many of my characters are long-lived (through magical means) and I imagine the existence of people who are 200-300 years old might affect this too, but I'm having trouble envisioning it. (At one point I planned for history to be remembered through song, but I'm not much of a poet... lol) Thanks!!
History and the way people handle memory is a really fascinating topic, not to mention the added consideration of how that collective memory gets stored.
On one hand, it very much depends on the technology available to your cultures (and in this case, magic as well), but on the other, the ideals and values of the culture matters significantly, too.
You’ll have to take each culture aside and look at what matters to them. Is history even a part of that? Is pride in what they’ve achieved something they think about? What about remembrance, is that even important to them?
Each culture is built around preserving what they believe is important. For some cultures, yes, history and remembering their past roots is absolutely crucial to understanding who they are as a people, and their cultural habits are built around sustaining that. But for other cultures, no, it’s more focused on the moment and living in the present, so history and story-telling of older stories isn’t important at all.
You’ll have to sit down with each group and figure out where on the spectrum they are. What kinds of events would they remember, and which would they forget? What do they emphasize in their saved memories?
Not a single version of history is without bias because what we choose to go down in the history books is decided upon based on our culture’s values. Your world will be no different. One culture may remember a certain family while forgetting the big wars; another may be more focused on the lives lost during an incursion than the Big Blizzard of ‘34. Sit down and really evaluate what kinds of things your cultures would bother to remember.
Next think about their art and literacy rates. Art is one of the most common places for cultures to save their collective memories. Murals, basket weaving, cave paintings, manuscript illumination, poetry, song, books and folios, engravings, statues, the naming of constellations, the art of story-telling in general through oral means, special styles of knot-tying, fabric patterns, architectural details, even floral arrangement and landscaping can tell the story of a historical event. But if your peoples aren’t literate on a large-scale, they’ll be less likely to utilize things like writing.
Technology and magic opens up the possibilities of storing them physically somehow within an item, like computers store data for us, or crystals could potentially. With magic, you can pretty much will the memories and histories to manifest however you like, from a glow within a pocket watch that bestows a vision to a crystal you cast an incantation over to bring out a hologram of some kind.
I think the age thing will certainly impact which events are chosen to remember (we’re talking collectively, here, as a group of people, not an individual. Personality and individual choice on what to remember still remains). The longer lived, the more things happen to them, so the fewer things they choose to remember because there’s so many things to choose from. If they wanted to keep more complete histories, it’s likely they’d have someone dedicated to pooling that information simply because how can you keep every minor significant event in your mind?
Finally, consider how accessible knowledge is in general to an average person. Can these expressions of history and memory be easily accessed? Do the interpretations and stories that go along with the artistic expressions exist in an easy-to-find way? If not, the historical aspects of some of those things will inevitably be lost over time without some dedicated effort to pass it along. Consider the symbolic interpretations of Hawaiian hula dancing. Every movement means something, and entire epics can be told through dance, but not if the culture ceased to teach those meanings. It’s easy to lose history when it’s not being told year after year as part of ritual within the culture.
Anyway, I don’t know that any of that was particularly helpful to you, Tith, but hopefully it gave you some things to think about at the very least. Good luck! -Pear
