Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Thu Oct 16, 2025 11:03 am
The "general knowledgeness" of almost all mythology stuff (e.g. Greek, Norse) is purely sustained by quizzes and essentially has no existence outside them.
Seems an actually good candidate for the thread - depending on what you mean by almost all. Certainly there's lots of obscure stuff on both, but that probably doesn't come up much in quizzes anyway. But there's loads that regularly pop up in actual pop culture things (films, video games, comics based on them), plus there's definitely still interest in the original myths themselves. Interested what kinds of things you'd count as quiz trivia but otherwise ignored?
I don't think I have any specific quiz questions on mythology that have come up in mind if that's what you mean. It's more of a general impression I've got. And we can change it to "almost all" plus or minus an error margin.
But on the wider point that's been raised, stuff that's purely quiz trivia (so not just mythology) does seem to be a thing.
I suppose I'd say that prior to the explosion of superhero films, Norse mythology in particular had essentially zero presence in British culture apart from maybe the fact that there's this guy Thor that has a hammer. And you'd get random quiz questions about it. And you'd think "Why this subject, as opposed any obscure piece of knowledge picked at random from the world?"
Fair - I don't really have much experience of how much Norse myth stuff there was around before say 20 years ago, but can believe that its cultural impact has grown more recently (compared to Greek being more consistently present). Though they're the kind of stories that would pop up when reading about that period - I remember reading them in Horrible Histories and similar books when I was young.
There's also surprisingly little Norse mythology anyway. All we have is 2 books written in Iceland about 300 years after the main Viking age was done. So who knows what the myths originally were and how much got lost.