Topic: Query: poetry and literature in Kulthea

[PhillipAEllis]

G'day, Terry!

My crack (elsewhere) about a Kulthean poetry collection has got me thinking: what thought have you given towards describing the various genres of Kulthean literature? I ask because I find them useful as skill specialisations, using in my games such genres as Satire, the Lyric, the Epic, Narrative Verse, Gnomic Verse, etcetera for poetry, and genres such as the Beast Fable, the Bildungsroman, Enconiums, etcetera for basic compositional skills.

Would you mind, if there's room to explore this, if I opened up a dialogue about possible genres with you?

[Terry K. Amthor]

G'day, Terry!

My crack (elsewhere) about a Kulthean poetry collection has got me thinking: what thought have you given towards describing the various genres of Kulthean literature? I ask because I find them useful as skill specialisations, using in my games such genres as Satire, the Lyric, the Epic, Narrative Verse, Gnomic Verse, etcetera for poetry, and genres such as the Beast Fable, the Bildungsroman, Enconiums, etcetera for basic compositional skills.

Would you mind, if there's room to explore this, if I opened up a dialogue about possible genres with you?

Go for it!

[PhillipAEllis]

Before I get stuck into gnawing at the concept of the genres, I was wondering, Terry, how far you saw the cross-cultural influences play out in literature. For example, using real world analogues, there is a degree of cultural porousness in Western Europe in terms of literature, in part due to the importance of the combined early focus of literacy in the monasteries & the cross-cultural influence of the use of Mediaeval Latin by the Church. So, as an analogue in Kulthea, there could be the influence of the Loremasters, with the use of a limited lingua franca encouraged, among their members and contacts, a degree of non-fiction genres and non-fiction poetry, maybe with a side-serving of interest in translations of ballads (and other popular narrative poems).

[Terry K. Amthor]

Before I get stuck into gnawing at the concept of the genres, I was wondering, Terry, how far you saw the cross-cultural influences play out in literature. For example, using real world analogues, there is a degree of cultural porousness in Western Europe in terms of literature, in part due to the importance of the combined early focus of literacy in the monasteries & the cross-cultural influence of the use of Mediaeval Latin by the Church. So, as an analogue in Kulthea, there could be the influence of the Loremasters, with the use of a limited lingua franca encouraged, among their members and contacts, a degree of non-fiction genres and non-fiction poetry, maybe with a side-serving of interest in translations of ballads (and other popular narrative poems).

(My head hurts!) That sounds like a good analogue, with Erlin being the SW version of Latin, and possibly the root of many other languages; it's much older than any mortal language, and the one that Elves would actually teach mortals. Books are going to be more commonly written in Erlin than, say Rhaya or Shay, not only because it's more widely known, but because a greater vocabulary?

[PhillipAEllis]

And I would suspect, also, having that longer, literary history, that Erlin has not only developed a distinctive literary vocabulary but also a certain degree of poetic diction (eg. equivalent to English "o'er" and "ween").