More Miyamoto wisdom

[A Black Falcon]

Are you sure? Everything I've heard says that before widespread literacy, the vast majority of a populace lived in total ignorance of even base things like more than a few generations back in their family (note: I myself live in total ignorance of more than a few generations in my family line, I'm really what you call a "mutt", which is how I prefer it). Aren't there even a few nations in the real world that slowly migrated and over time many forgot they had migrated? I seem to recall some special on the history channel saying something to that effect... I will say this though. It's impossible for that sort of thing to happen NOW. No one is ever going to forget ANYTHING at this point, or at least society as a whole will ALWAYS have all information everything forever. That's why distant future sci-fi stories where everyone for some reason doesn't know where the nuclear piles of today are stored always seem ridiculous. I mean, when you think about it, how many civilizations have ANY tales talking about travelling from Kenya to where they are? That's apparently what happened, prehistorically, but history holds no tales, no myths, that actually reveal this. Some legends have zero truth whatsoever to them. I mean Europe treated Africa like some newly discovered "savage land" rather than the place Europeans came from. I don't think it's all that far fetched that several generations would lead to all but a few scholars and some ancient books in a forgotten language remembering that they actually came from another land of Hyrule ages ago. They do make it clear that the language in OOT is supposed to be the same language as all those ancient scripts in LTTP you have to find some book to translate. Link is a 5th level genius or something, running around solving puzzles in a few minutes that years of research failed to solve. Indy Jones (and Tucan Sam) seem equally capable.

You mostly missed my point, DJ. I mean honestly, humanity's origins in Africa, tens of thousands of years ago? You're right, oral tradition doesn't go back anywhere remotely that far. I tried to account for that when I talked about "within a culture." Oral traditions last within cultures.

It does seem that civilized cultures are more likely to want to remember their histories than more primitive ones, which would explain part of that. Surely the first migrants to the Americas remembered the voyages of their ancestors to the new continent from Asia, but yes, over time that was indeed forgotten... and yes, peoples everywhere made up stories to try to explain what they did not know.

But of course, not all of those stories are completely made up... just think of the aforementioned Illiad and Odyssey. Once scholars thought that those were simply stories too, before they learned that they were actually based on real historical events. Myths often do say something about the culture that created them. But anyway, there's a big difference between something that happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago and something that happened hundreds of years ago. A big, BIG difference. In the latter case, expecting a culture to hold historical memory of important events of a couple of centuries ago is entirely reasonable and should be expected.

As I said,before there was written history, there was oral history. This is a tradition of stories and tales told by one generation to the next. In these cultures, people had far better powers of memorization than we do, because they had to learn everything that way. The next person would memorize the entire oral history of the tribe to memory, and pass it on that way. Indeed over time some things would be forgotten, and the longer the amount of time passes the more from the distant past may be forgotten, but not everything will be... and in any society with writing, very little of importance will be.

For instance, in Rome, the debate wasn't what had happened since their culture started writing things down. The debate was about what exactly had happened before then. There were oral traditions saying what had happened, but they were not entirely reliable... so a history was constructed. Not all people believed it of course, the ties to the Trojans and all that, but the effort was made to fill in the blanks... but my point is, for cultures with writing, this should not be a problem. Things that happened get written down -- the achievements of the leaders, etc. So we know a lot about which Mayan rulers conquered which cities when and all that... we know little about many other things, but the leaders made sure to write down their most important exploits (true or not, as Ramses II or Egypt would tell you :D). But their ancestors had very long ago forgotten about the trip to the Americas, so they could not have known that... over the thousands of years between the arrival of people in the Americas and the rise of civilizations here, the trip had been long forgotten (but as I said, if it had been a continuing civilized culture that had made the trip, it'd probably have been less likely that it would have been forgotten. Think of the Vikings and their trips to the Americas...they didn't stay long, but they wrote a few books about it. Those books were long forgotten, but when people thought about it again and looked for them, they were there... and then when they looked for the physical evidence, they found L'Anse aux Meadows. It was not completely forgotten.

To the point:

Hyrule has writing.

The Hyrulean civilization survives.

They would have written down what happened to them. "It was lost" is not an excuse (unless civilization was truly totally destroyed, which in this case it was not); think of how Greek and Roman civilization fell, and a thousand years later when people wanted to go find their old books again, they found that a surprisingly large amount of it was still around... something as important as moving from the old land to a new land across a sea would not simply be forgotten in a few centuries! Whether through oral or written traditions, such a major event would certainly last that long in the memory of that civilization.

And I'm supposed to believe that in just a few generations people have completely forgotten everything?


The only way out of this is if there's a really, really big gap of time between WW and the next game (LttP) in that timeline, and in between Hyrulean civilization collapses (repeatedly?) or something...