Journals
From MYSTlore
Journals and diaries have played a significant part in the exploration of D'ni history and culture, and of Atrus's family.
Due perhaps in part to his grandmother's influence, and in part to his own introspective nature, Atrus was an assiduous journaler all his life. It's known that before he was seven years old, he was already keeping a daily journal with accounts of his experiments. In addition to a series of personal journals, he appears to have kept a separate journal for each Age he wrote, beginning not with the writing of the Age itself, but with his first Link to it. Unfortunately most of these were lost, along with their respective descriptive books, in the mass destruction of his library in 1806.
In fact, Atrus's entire family appear to have been inveterate diarists. Whether Aitrus the elder kept a journal is not known, but Anna's sketchbooks apparently served her in lieu of a written chronicle of her life. Gehn kept journals as well during his life, but none are known to have survived: those seen in the gameplay of Riven may have been based on speculation and on the Stranger's memories (as told to Atrus and Catherine, and possibly to Yeesha). Catherine, as well, wrote a series of emotional journals during her life, which have proved an invaluable resource for researchers.
Achenar had been keeping a journal for some time before his initial link to Haven; at least one volume has survived, and this book -- or, more likely, a redaction of it (see below) -- is seen in the Ship[1]. Whether Sirrus kept a journal in his youth is not known, but both the brothers began writing early in their respective tenures on Haven and Spire. Yeesha, too, at her father's encouragement, began writing a journal in her childhood.
[edit] Texts or redactions?
It is possible to speculate that the journals as we see them in gameplay are not the actual journals, but redactions. It's likely that Atrus's chronicles of the Ages he wrote were much longer and more detailed than what's seen in MYST. Also, in the journal for Stoneship, he gives measurements in meters and centimeters; at the time he was writing, the metric system was still in its earliest stages of development in France.
A more complex issue is the use of language in the family's journals. The use of late-20th- and early-21st-century idioms in the journals of Sirrus and Achenar is too glaring an anachronism to require further exploration. More subtle, but deeply interesting, is the use of English as seen in the journals of Atrus himself, as compared to what is recorded of his life.
Atrus, it must be remembered, was born in 1755 AD (9411 DE). He is known to have grown up in near-complete isolation, learning English from his grandmother, who herself learned it from her own parents. Anna was born in 1694 AD (9350 DE); her father was a contemporary of Samuel Pepys, and would have spoken and written in the mode of the seventeenth century. This is the English that Atrus would have used in his youth. Thus it's very likely that Atrus's actual journals were written in what would be regarded today as an archaic style, marked by such elements as extreme run-on sentences, frequent capitalization of common nouns, and use of the "-eth" ending (although he would not have used it in speech) and of "be" rather than "is" for the subjunctive. Possibly at the behest of the DRC, the journals appear to have been redacted to make them appealing – and comprehensible – to a modern readership primarily interested not in historical research, but in entertaining gameplay.
