We assume a lot of knowledge on the part of readers, sometimes. When we tell stories to children, we discover that we really do have to explain everything, elaborate on all the expected behaviors, and so forth, explain what people are doing — it’s part of what surprises them in the tale.

Even as adults writing for adults, we still have to think about “assumed common knowledge”. After all, you can’t explain absolutely everything — there has to be a shared background. We can introduce new concepts, hint at things that should be known, provide clues as necessary.

But we assume a pretty hefty knowledge about other countries, serious historic events, comparative religions, languages, customs, human behaviors, technology, economics, etc., etc. We assume a basic education as an adult, effectively. (Yes, lots of folks fail this background. If they read more, they’d be better off…)

The benefit of that assumption for writers, of course, is that we can refer to things without necessarily having to explain them in full, taking sufficient background for our readers for granted. Won’t work for every potential reader, but we develop a sense for what we can treat as “known” (for some value of “known”) when we tell our stories, so as not to have to plod through the “everyone knows” level of information unnecessarily. For our purposes, we expect that everyone can be assumed to know that “water is wet” even if they don’t all understand a reference to Ice-9.

The Domain of Knowledge that brought all of this to mind for me recently was reading Alma Boykin’s latest “Bard” release (as always, a good read). The mythology of her world in this series is a nicely-judged referential head-nod to all sorts of Celtic-related deity-based worldbuilding and cultural assumptions, and its impact on the behavior of her characters — their religion, their duties, their obligations, their understanding of their place in the world. The more you know about her sources, the more her creative handling of it resonates with you. The minimum skill needed as a writer is to not confuse a reader who happens not to already have significant knowledge in this area, but the upside when done well is a significant and subtle deepening of the story and its world.

Personally, I still vividly remember as a teenager stumbling over “the Matter of Britain” (Arthurian legend) as an organized field of study, not just miscellaneous random factoids, and then realizing there was also effectively a “Matter of France”, a “Matter of Rome”, etc. (“The term “the matter of” in “the Matter of Britain” originates from a 12th-century Old French literary classification created by the poet Jean Bodel.)

I was already aware of various bodies of mythology in Europe and found them fascinating, but what really sparked my interest was when I saw the concept recreated as a master work by Tolkien for his epics. He invented his own mythological “matter”, but it bore resonances from all the original matters of Britain, and France, etc., under a thin disguise, and was just as effective and consistent for being newly invented as if it were part of a larger lore. His appendices speak to some of the details, but as a reader— they’re unnecessary to the enjoyment of the story, because they resonate so well as an adaptation of the various “matters of Europe” of which we are (perhaps) already subliminally aware.

We don’t really need to know the details of these various “matters” to feel their resonances in a story, not once we are adequately steeped in them. If you knew that your readers were already so prepared, you could take advantage of that to be artful in your references. Or, like Tolkien, you could simply just assume that knowledge on the part of your readers, and give them the benefit of the doubt in how you refer to things. It’s a form of layers for the reader: tell him explicitly what he needs to know in order to follow the events of the story, and let him apply what resonances he happens to know about to deepen that understanding and expand upon its relevance.

It’s stuff like this that made me originally attempt to major in comparative mythology (and various dead languages) in college, and I’m still a sucker for it when I see it applied, as Alma has done, in many of her stories. Thanks for that.

How much does this sort of thing resonate with you and your writing?

(Note: The post illustration is The Gundestrup Cauldron). https://archaeotravel.eu/lost-myth-of-the-gundestrup-cauldron-wild-hunt-sacrifice-and-rebirth/