D&D 5E Bards: How did these become a thing?

[Cristian Andreu]

For me, the coolest historical equivalent of the D&D Bard are the performer-duelists from the Spanish Golden Age. Think of guys like Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Gongora, who spent their time reciting poetry in the streets (often ridiculing each other), then meeting at taverns to tell stories (often at the expense of each other), only to finish the day with a good old-fashioned sword duel (with each other).

They personify the flamboyant artist and swashbuckling adventurous aspects of the Bard. Just add magic and voila.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Obvious follow-up question: Why would a bard exist in a society where books are commonplace? Why would any single civilization have both bards and wizards?

Just because books exist doesn't mean literacy is universal. Indeed, without the printing press, logically, literacy should be rare as books are really expensive to produce. The human mind is more than capable of storing enough information to survive in a medieval society without the aid of books or writing. Basically nobody knows more than whatever someone else has taught them directly through apprenticeship. Get this: Most medieval libraries didn't organize the books and scrolls they had because there wasn't enough knowledge to demand categorization.

Look at Western history. Books were lost completely, or in languages like Greek, Latin and Arabic by the time people went looking for them, meaning you'd basically have to learn another language just to learn how to read. Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Pythagoras were all pre-Christian. Ptolemy was 2nd century. Galen was 3rd century. Rome fell in the 5th, and about the same time Martianus Capella wrote his work detailing the seven liberal arts: the trivium, which includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric to be able to speak and write intelligently; and the quadvium, which was arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy which was really everything related to numeric information that was known. And that work was pretty much the basis of Western knowledge and information theory for the next 800 to 1000 years. You'd learn that, and that would be the basics from which you could then study theology, philosophy, politics, etc. Imagine living in this time. Everything these people knew, even if you were an intellectual, was old. You can start to understand how revolutionary the idea was that you could go out and check the facts you'd read in a book against the natural world, or even find new facts that nobody had thought of before.

Not much else changed until the West decided to recapture the Moorish lands in Spain in the 11th century (El Cid) and they discovered the Muslim nations had much more advanced knowledge than they did, which encouraged people to start looking for all those old books. The Renaissance didn't start until the 14th century, but it wasn't until the Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the printing press towards the end of the 15th century that rational thought really took off again.

Oh, and for reference, the Bardic system survived into the 19th century.

 

[Mephista]

Or this too.

[video]https://youtu.be/0dfZ9BXaNyE?t=25[/video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvipPYFebWc

 

[77IM]

There's two conflated concepts here. One is the bard who sings magic songs; the other is the Celtic warrior-loremaster. I think the warrior-loremaster concept came first and somehow evolved and became more musical over time. I blame the "spoony bard" Edward from Final Fantasy IV.

As a friend of mine likes to say, "Fflewddur Fflam was a bard who knew all kinds of tales and epic poems, but he didn't sing songs during battle because he was too busy killing people with a longsword and riding a saber-toothed tiger."

 

[steeldragons]

I assure you, bards were toting around harps (or lutes or lyres or mandolins) and using music/weaving magic through music well before there was a Final Fantasy IV. And those bards -who were trained loremasters, trained warriors AND trained to sing magic songs, all at the same time- as well as their possible contemporaries (the norse skalds) and historic successors in medieval troubadour/wandering minstrels (like Alan A Dale or the Pied Piper), were integrated into D&D 1e, as all the classes were, from myth, legend, history and literature.

So, no. There are no concepts conflating here. The singer of magical songs and the "Celtic warrior-loremaster" are/were one and the same.

 

[famousringo]

The magic power of music is truly ancient in myth, folklore, and fantasy. Some examples:

Orpheus's music was said to be able to charm all sorts of creatures and even trees and rocks. It was so powerful that it even swayed the heart of Hades, letting him bring his beloved Eurydice back to life on the condition that he wasn't allowed to look at her until they had left the Underworld (which he of course failed at - he had an awesome check for Musical Instrument Proficiency: Lyre, but not so good with the Will save).

In Hávamál, part of the Poetic Edda, Odin speaks of the eighteen magic songs he learned that lets him bring good fortune, heal, stay the swords and staves of foes, and other things.

Music plays a huge part of the magic of the gods, particularly Väinamöinen, in the Finnish national epic Kalevala.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin used magic music to lure first rats, and then children away.

In the Silmarillion, the world is sung into existence by the chorus of the Ainur. Music also plays a large role when it comes to later magic in Tolkien's works.

In the real world, music is one of the most primal forms of art, and it is excellent at provoking emotions in people. It is an important part of many religions. It is, to quote Queen, "A Kind of Magic." Oh, and here are some more examples.

Don't forget Scheherazade. Deliberately put herself in harms way and kept a story going for three years so she could end a misogynistic killing spree.

That's bard power.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Just because books exist doesn't mean literacy is universal. Indeed, without the printing press, logically, literacy should be rare as books are really expensive to produce.

Does the printing press exist within the Realms? I know they have spells that automatically copy texts. And we know from the PHB that everyone is literate, as a default, unless the DM goes out of their way to change that.

 

[Riley37]

Does the printing press exist within the Realms? I know they have spells that automatically copy texts. And we know from the PHB that everyone is literate, as a default, unless the DM goes out of their way to change that.

If you count "all PCs" as "everyone".

PCs are what percentage of humanity/demi-humanity?

Just outside the city, there are lots of farms, worked by NPCs who don't have class levels, nor literacy.

 

[Thyrwyn]

We know all PCs are literate - that is very different from everyone. YMMV

 

[The Crimson Binome]

We know all PCs are literate - that is very different from everyone. YMMV

We don't have information on people who aren't adventurers, but we know that all adventurers are literate. That would imply that literacy is not at all uncommon. I mean, there's nothing anywhere about how adventurers might be hired as scribes, since they possess this incredibly rare skill.

Even if your background is peasant, it's just a given that you're literate. That says something about the world as a whole.