A “bard” isn’t just any musician. They’re a highly educated experienced user of language. Telling stories, composing poems & songs, and being in the employ of a noble to do so. In popular culture there’s also often the implication that they use these skills and that access to be involved in espionage in some way.
I think Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series does an especially good job of this. It has gleemen, which are reasonably well-trained in music, storytelling, and other performing arts. Gleemen travel around from town to town making their living playing at taverns and the like. Then a step up from gleemen it has bards, which are more well trained and who perform explicitly for nobles. In either case you can expect a great level of artistic skill, but I’d be shocked to hear of an illiterate bard, but maybe only mildly surprised to hear about an illiterate gleeman.
Education isn’t dependent on literacy. Aristotle famously decried that (paraphrasing) “kids these days don’t know anything anymore because they just write it down and don’t actually memorize it”
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is a work of fantasy written in the last 50 years, not an accurate account of historical humanity.
In real life, bards were specifically Celtic minstrels who maintained an oral history for the pre-Christian Celtic people, who notably didn’t write down their history. They used meter, rhyme, and song structure to help them commit the words to memory.
A “bard” isn’t just any musician. They’re a highly educated experienced user of language. Telling stories, composing poems & songs, and being in the employ of a noble to do so. In popular culture there’s also often the implication that they use these skills and that access to be involved in espionage in some way.
I think Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series does an especially good job of this. It has gleemen, which are reasonably well-trained in music, storytelling, and other performing arts. Gleemen travel around from town to town making their living playing at taverns and the like. Then a step up from gleemen it has bards, which are more well trained and who perform explicitly for nobles. In either case you can expect a great level of artistic skill, but I’d be shocked to hear of an illiterate bard, but maybe only mildly surprised to hear about an illiterate gleeman.
Education isn’t dependent on literacy. Aristotle famously decried that (paraphrasing) “kids these days don’t know anything anymore because they just write it down and don’t actually memorize it”
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is a work of fantasy written in the last 50 years, not an accurate account of historical humanity.
In real life, bards were specifically Celtic minstrels who maintained an oral history for the pre-Christian Celtic people, who notably didn’t write down their history. They used meter, rhyme, and song structure to help them commit the words to memory.
The Iliad was transferred entirely orally for centuries, and was the elite high status performance.
It’s entirely possible for very very complicated musical traditions to be communicated without writing, and pretty common.