Bard

• 1. Introduction

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  The bard of Celtic tradition was a poet who, according to Irish belief, could raise boils on a man's face with a well-aimed satire. The Irish called such a verse a glam dicenn, and its target was said to suffer for it.

  That is a strange kind of power for someone whose day job was singing in a chieftain's hall. It raises a string of questions. What exactly did a king or chieftain buy when he hired a bard? Why did a society without written histories lean so heavily on these poets? Did every region of the Celtic world treat them the same way? And how did a title tied to Gaelic and Welsh courts end up far from them, attached to famous writers and to modern entertainment?

  The answers begin with the word itself, which is far older than the courts it later described.

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• 2. A Word for Praise

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  The Greeks wrote it as bárdoi, and the Latin-speaking world wrote it as bardus. Both were borrowing a Gaulish word, bardos, which meant a poet or bard.

  The English word bard comes from the Celtic languages, and its cousins show how the meaning spread. Welsh has bardd, meaning singer or poet. Middle Breton has barz, meaning minstrel, while Old Cornish has barth, meaning jester.

  Going back further, the Celtic noun descends from a Proto-Indo-European compound that literally meant praise-maker. Its relatives include Sanskrit gṛṇā́ti, meaning to call or praise, and Armenian kardam, meaning to raise the voice.

  The root also turns up in odd corners of the Gaulish vocabulary. There was bardo-cucullus, a bard's hood, and bardo-magus, a field of the bard. There was even bardala, the crested lark, a bird known for its song.

  The strangest relative is barditus, a song meant to fire up soldiers. It hints that praise could be sung as a weapon as well as a gift.

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• 3. Memory for Hire

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  The Oxford English Dictionary pictures the bards as an ancient Celtic order of minstrel-poets who sang, usually to the harp. Their verses celebrated the achievements of chiefs and warriors.

  Those verses carried more than flattery. They also held historical and traditional facts, religious precepts, laws and genealogies. The pre-Christian Celts kept no written histories, so a detailed oral record lived in memory, passed along by bards and by the filid, a related class of poets. Metre, rhyme and other formulaic devices made that memorizing possible.

  In medieval Gaelic and Welsh society, a bard was a professional poet hired to compose elegies for his lord. The arrangement had teeth. If the employer failed to pay the proper amount, the bard could turn to satire instead.

  Other Indo-European societies had their own versions of the job. Skalds, rhapsodes, minstrels and scops all filled a similar role. By comparing the position of poets in medieval Ireland with that of poets in ancient India, scholars have reconstructed a hereditary caste of professional poets in Proto-Indo-European society itself.

  Ireland offers the clearest picture of how such a caste was organized, and of how its members ranked against one another.

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• 4. Ireland's Two Ranks

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  The early Irish law text on status, Uraicecht Becc, places bards below another group of poets, the fili. According to that text, bards were a lesser class and could not take on the higher poetic roles reserved for the filid.

  Not everyone accepts the distinction as ancient. It has been argued that the split between fili and bard was a creation of Christian Ireland, with the filid more closely tied to the church. By the Early Modern Period, the two names were being used interchangeably.

  Whatever their rank, Irish bards formed a hereditary caste of highly trained and learned poets. They were steeped in the history and traditions of their clan and country. They also mastered a demanding syllabic verse technique, which relied on assonance, half rhyme and alliteration, among other conventions. As officials of a king's or chieftain's court, they served as chroniclers and as the voice of their employers' reputation.

  The earliest mention of the bardic profession in Ireland sits inside a legend. The Book of Invasions tells of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who invaded and settled Ireland in the tenth year of the reign of the last Fir Bolg monarch. They later became the aos sí, the folk of the mound, comparable to the Norse alfr and the British fairy.

  The Tuatha Dé Danann were said to be divided into three tribes. The Tuatha were the nobility, the De were the priests, and the Danann were the bards. This account is legendary, but it was an integral part of the oral history the bards themselves told.

  Another great bard of Irish mythology was Amergin Glúingel, who served the Milesians as bard, druid and judge.

  The real profession lasted until the mid-17th century in Ireland. Its fortunes had always been bound to the Gaelic aristocracy, and both declined together during the Tudor reconquest.

  Across the sea in Scotland, the system held on for several decades longer, carried largely by one family.

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• 5. The MacMhuirich Family

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  The MacMhuirich family, centred in the Hebrides, produced the best-known bards in Scotland. They flourished from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

  The family claimed descent from a 13th-century Irish bard who, according to legend, had been exiled to Scotland. At first the Lords of the Isles employed the MacMhuirichs as poets, lawyers and physicians.

  When the Lordship of the Isles fell in the 15th century, the family found a new patron in the chiefs of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. The records show some members working as musicians in the early 16th century. Others appear as clergymen, possibly as early as the early 15th century.

  The bardic system in Scotland lasted into the early 18th century. The last member of the family to practise classical Gaelic poetry was Domhnall MacMhuirich, who lived on South Uist in that century.

  The tradition did not vanish with him. In Gaelic-speaking areas, a village bard, or bàrd-baile, is a local poet who composes in a traditional style about his or her own community. Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna is among the notable village bards.

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• 6. Songs for Britain's Kings

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  Four medieval Welsh manuscripts preserve the bards of Welsh mythology: the Red Book of Hergest, the White Book of Rhydderch, the Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin. The bards Aneirin and Taliesin may be legendary reflections of real poets active in the 6th and 7th centuries.

  Very little survives about the court tradition of Dark Age Wales. The Middle Welsh material, however, became the nucleus of the Matter of Britain and of Arthurian legend as they developed from the 13th century.

  The Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda, first compiled around 900, name the bard as a member of the king's household. One of his duties came at a tense moment, when the bodyguard were dividing the booty. He sang the sovereignty of Britain. That may be why the genealogies of the British high kings survived long enough to enter the written record.

  A large number of Welsh bards were blind.

  The royal form of the tradition ended in the 13th century, when the Edwardian conquest of 1282 permanently ended the rule of the Welsh princes. Legend tells of the suicide of The Last Bard around 1283.

  That story echoed long afterwards. In 1857, the Hungarian poet János Arany commemorated it in a poem, The Bards of Wales, as a way of encoding resistance to the suppressive politics of his own time.

  The poetry itself did not die with the princes, and its next champions worked in the 14th century.

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• 7. The Eisteddfod Endures

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  Dafydd ap Gwilym and Iolo Goch, two noted poets of the 14th century, show that Welsh poetic and musical traditions carried on through the Middle Ages. Alongside them, the custom of gathering bards at an eisteddfod never lapsed.

  It grew stronger in 1792, when Iolo Morganwg formed the Gorsedd.

  The National Eisteddfod of Wales, Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru, was first held in 1880. It meets every year, and its bards are chaired and crowned. The Urdd National Eisteddfod is also held annually, and many schools run their own yearly eisteddfodau in imitation of bardic tradition.

  This makes Wales a leading Celtic upholder of the bardic tradition in the twenty-first century.

  Scholars have studied the Welsh tradition for a long time. Published works include those by Williams in 1850, Parry-Williams in 1947, Morgan in 1983 and Jones in 1986.

  Outside Wales, the word had a very different career.

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• 8. A Title Borrowed

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  In 16th-century Scotland, bard became an insult, a label for a wandering musician. Sir Walter Scott, who lived from 1771 to 1832, later romanticised the figure.

  Romanticism gave the word new life as a nickname for celebrated poets. Martin Hearty is the Bard of Armagh, and Robert Burns is the Bard of Ayrshire, or simply the Bard in Scotland. William Shakespeare is the Bard of Avon, the Immortal Bard, or in England just the Bard.

  The list runs on. Rabindranath Tagore is the Bard of Bengal. William Cowper is the Bard of Olney, William Wordsworth the Bard of Rydal Mount and Alexander Pope the Bard of Twickenham. John Cooper Clarke is the Bard of Salford, and Robert W. Service is the Bard of the Yukon. Australian bush poets such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson are called bush bards. Bob Dylan, Jim MacCool and the band Blind Guardian have also been termed bards.

  The Romantic idea of a bard as a minstrel with the qualities of a priest, magician or seer then moved into fantasy between the 1960s and the 1980s. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder both have a bard class. Keith Taylor wrote Bard in 1981, and Morgan Llywelyn wrote Bard: The Odyssey of the Irish in 1984. The video game The Bard's Tale followed in 1985.

  Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher books, published from 1986 to 2013, carry the figure forward. Lauren Schmidt Hissrich adapted them for television in 2019.

  As of 2020, an online trend called bardcore has people covering modern songs with medieval-style instruments, sometimes rewriting the lyrics in a medieval voice. In 2023, Google gave the old word to its chatbot, Bard.

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