Ghrythan is a contemporary orc scholar writing in the Seventh Dawn from within the oral tradition he studies rather than from a library or archive. He was trained as a voiceholder in the tribal tradition, responsible for memorizing genealogies and migration histories that were never written down, and at some point in his middle years he became furious enough about written scholarship's treatment of those traditions to begin writing them down himself, to force written scholars to acknowledge that the record they were ignoring existed rather than to replace the oral form.
His methodological position is explicit and polemical. Ghrythan worships Solas (the daemon of cunning, wit, and humor) and he approaches the academy as an adversary to be outmaneuvered rather than an institution to be joined. He has made it his life's project to demonstrate that what Shoryaven calls "the Great Expansion's ascent of human civilization" is largely a record of other peoples' memory being overwritten. He does this with precision rather than outrage: his Speaking Memory compilation cross-references oral genealogies from orc, goblin, and several human steppe-cultures against the written record, finding systematic gaps where the written record conveniently stops recording what the oral tradition remembers.
His era and theme is races, migrations, and languages — the movement of peoples across Alaria from the Lost Ages through the modern settlement, with particular attention to the cultures that left no written record. He is the only major scholar writing from within a non-literate tradition, and this gives him access to data that all the others lack and a blind spot for cultures that genuinely did not preserve oral memory. His acidity toward Shoryaven is famous; his respect for Oblexan's field methods is genuine and surprising to both parties.