Well, our next couple of chapters are on Islam, and from the introduction, I could make a few allusions. @_@ The dancer/bard thing reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics and Ragnarok Online. Apparently, some young girls traveled to this one country in order to show off her dancing skills...but it turns out that there were many other girls who had skills faaaar better than her own. Okay, that part was from the poem, but basically, people with talent went across to show it off - and plenty of them got recognized for it. Maybe they weren't recognized all that well, but there were some artistic things made with the dancers and bards in mind. Verrrry interesting...