[quote=ActRaiserTheReturned]
Hellenism is bad kay? As is ancient Greco-Roman Culture. It's not a miracle that civilization's foundations for later orders came from the Greeks and Romans, it's a miracle that they weren't all somehow mentally retarded by the time they died with some of their cultural attitudes and norms. Seriously. One of the most brilliant cultures in all of history, didn't have a word for the English equilavent of "humble". These are the two cultures that revolutionized hygiene, philosophy, medicine and music, law and order, etcetera. This is also the same culture that worshiped statues with fertility goddesses who had rows and rows of marble tits. (Not that different from other cultures, but bare with me), had established usury, (look it up), drunken orgies, littered their streets with abandoned children, where creeping horrors from the anus of Humanity could pick up and do God knows what with them. Spartans legalized the murder of Helots. You had to murder a Human being in order to become a Spartan warrior. Yes you were punished harshly if you were caught, but if you got away with it, you were golden. Despite revisionist nonsense to the contrary, Spartans liked to molest younger men. The idea was to groom other soldiers as "lovers" so they would fight for each other on the field of battle that much harder. -_-Celts and maybe even Germans had a good point in hating Roman culture, despite early interactions with the Romans. There was plenty to admire and respect about Romans, like the rule of law, and to an extent, something of a half-assed peace. Hygiene, medicine, etcetera, things I already mentioned. Even then, if you were a vaunted Roman soldier, if you so much as got out of line but charging in battle before you were given the order, they cut your junk off. (Maybe testicles to, I don't remember). Oh, did I mention they experiment with surgery on prisoners? Of course Western Europeans also had bad, maybe even to an extent, worse ethics than Romans. Now you are probably going to ask, "What does this have to do with writing?" Well, my point is that while I get your point in that the Western European Pagans could have adapted writing from their Eastern "neighbors", there wold have been a religious emphasis on resisting change. Keeping traditions mostly or totally oral was a religious matter, not a matter of pragmatism. It's kind of like some people in the days of the old Arabic Empires and Middle Eastern powers looking down on coffee houses. They would see something morally wrong with such a thing, as absurd as it sounds to us. It could take at least a hundred, two hundred or more years before the West would adopt the Eastern cultures enough to replicate the same thing that had happened in real world history.
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^this. The oral traditions of the Norse, the last germanic pagans. They did not write down their religious beliefs until they were allegedly christianized and couldn't rely on memorization and oral tradition any more. They were happy to never write the prose and poetic Eddas until they had to.