Books do not truly let you experience other cultures. You experience other cultures by actually experiencing those cultures. Stories, travelogues, all those are things which are best heard upfront. Books only let you see a single snapshot of one curated perspective at most. This is doubly so when the advantage of a book - the ability to be read by multiple people - is being tossed to winds by the simple dint of being in a different language. Is being lost to the fact that someone with Charred Soul can record their personal experiences more faithfully than any book could ever hope to. When I say 'experience those cultures', I mean, talk to those people about their cultures.
Instead of finding a book on Frisians, go visit Frisia and talk to Frisians. Instead of finding a book about FInnish magic, talk to our brother Sten about Finnish Cultivation and Magic. Thinking books are the first resort is backwards. For people to have written a book, they had to experience first, then write 2nd-hand. Or get the experience after, then write 3rd-hand. Each passage diminishes the value of information so inscribed.
As for power. I point out that we learned Latin from a person. Not a book. We learned the method by examining an armor. Not a book. Our secrets of cultivation were written by ourselves. For Norsepeople. The power a non-Norseperson could get from our poetry is scant and bare compared to what a Norseperson could, simply by dint of cultivation. The same is true if we were to go and read the NQ equivalent of Beowolf. We had Jerasmus read out the Bible to us for a full sitting and the only insight we got was 'hey maybe we could make a book'.
I have to seriously question what kind of teachers you intend to have available at schools if we expect teachers to know multiple languages. This is not the 21st century. We are literally the one person in the Hading who knows how to read Latin or English once Bartholomew leaves. Nobody here knows how to read Greek or French. People will only follow ideas if they think the idea is a good one. An idea which does not convert to power is a bad one. It's also hideously impractical on many levels.
Do you know how much of a pain is it to teach people a language, let alone multiple, that they're probably never going to use in their life? To read books which will not meaningfully help with their life? You are boondoogling this school project with ideas that are already dead on arrival simply for lack of utility to Norsemen. Not to mention that because books are so f***ing expensive no other schools will bother keeping expensive and difficult to use foreign language books that the vast majority of Norsemen are going to give approximately 0 fucks about.
You could not be more wrong about the value of education. Education is the key that opens the door, it's the Promethean flame, it is the thing which sets people free. And the idea that writing cannot allow us to understand or experience other viewpoints or cultures should be obviously patently absurd given that we are communicating over the internet, in a fictional secondary world inspired by a dead culture which is only known through its preservation via written mediums. The fact that books are not a
perfect method of communicating ideas, thoughts and cultures does not equate to them being unable to do so.
Norse culture does not value book learning very much. Instead, Norse culture values, as you put it "going and talking to people". Or to put it more accurately, going and fighting people, taking their things, and occasionally learning their cultivation secrets, and then dying unceremoniously like dogs with no legacy, like every previous generation of Norse warriors. Norse culture is to put it bluntly,
fucking pig-ignorant, utterly stagnant, and trapped in a slow and inescapable death-spiral. Norse culture needs to change drastically if it is to survive past the period when it was absorbed into Christendom historically. This is something we have been told explicitly and repeatedly.
Planting the seed of a literate class of Norse scholars, aristocrats and artisans who can take from the learning of other cultures whilst remaining rooted in their own traditions is by no means a certain means to avert the inevitable death of our culture. The death may be inevitable no matter what we do. But new ideas and innovations are the only thing that have a
chance of working, of thwarting the Enemy and defeating the Curse of Steel. We've already been told this. Realistically, offering to foster some local kids for a year or two and teach them is not going to change the world overnight, but it can be the first spark of something much bigger, a flame we can tend in multiple lifetimes. A new breed of Norsemen and Norsewomen.
Lastly, it would be extremely odd if tutors we hired were
not multilingual. Knowing multiple languages was a prerequisite to being truly educated in a medieval society, due to how many languages were spoken, and the necessity of knowing Latin or Greek to access most classical learning. Most scholars, and indeed most well-travelled people or nobles would speak multiple languages. There's the famous quote from Charles V: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.". Remember that
Halla herself speaks three languages at this point and is currently learning a fourth.
Learning in Latin or Greek specifically is a marker of higher education, and I think Greek might be a little out of our reach at the moment, but Halla already knows Latin and it's a prerequisite for a lot of valuable stuff.
I think people are misunderstanding me here.
What I intend to do is follow one plotline to completion, then move on to the next, and then the third after that.
Apologies for any miscommunication - I did understand that when I read your post, and the reservations I expressed were with that in mind. There is also the question of scope creep - it can be hard to know where a storyline is going when you start it. If it was in effect three separate sequels organised in a rough series, then perhaps? But consider the task you're setting yourself.
