Celtic Bards

The Bard (ca. 1817), by John Martin.

A bard was one of a caste of poets and scholars of medieval and early modern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

The word is a loanword from Proto-Celtic *bardos, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *g^werh₂: "to raise the voice; praise". The first recorded example is in 1449 from the Scottish Gaelic language into Lowland Scots, denoting an itinerant musician, usually with a contemptuous connotation. A Scots ordinance of ca. 1500 orders that "All vagabundis, fulis, bardis, scudlaris, and siclike idill pepill, sall be brint on the cheek". The word subsequently entered the English language via Scottish English.

Secondly, in medieval Welsh and Gaelic society, a bard (Scottish Gaelic or Irish Gaelic bard, Welsh bardd) was a professional poet, employed to compose eulogies for his lord. If the employer failed to pay the proper amount, the bard would then compose a satire. In other European societies, the same function was fulfilled by skalds, rhapsodes, minstrels, etc.

Bards were those who sang the songs recalling the tribal warriors' deeds of bravery as well as the genealogies and family histories of the ruling strata among Celtic societies. The ancient Celtic peoples recorded no written histories; however, Celtic peoples did maintain an often intricate spoken history committed to memory and transmitted by bards. Bards facilitated the memorization of such materials by the use of poetic meter and rhyme.

During the era of Romanticism, when knowledge of Celtic culture was overlaid by legends and fictions, the word was reintroduced into the West Germanic languages, this time directly into the English language, in the sense of "lyric poet", idealised by writers such as the Scottish romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. The word was taken from Latin bardus, Greek bardos, in turn loanwords from the Gaulish language, describing a class of Celtic priest (c. f. druid, vates). From this romantic use came the epitheton The Bard applied to William Shakespeare and Robert Burns.

Irish bards 

Irish bards formed a professional hereditary caste of highly trained, learned poets. The bards were steeped in the history and traditions of clan and country, as well as in the technical requirements of a verse technique that was syllabic and used assonance, half rhyme and alliteration. As officials of the court of king or chieftain, they performed a number of official roles. They were chroniclers and satirists whose job it was to praise their employers and damn those who crossed them. It was believed that a well-aimed bardic satire, glam dicin, could raise boils on the face of its target. However, much of their work would not strike the modern reader as being poetry at all, consisting as it does of extended genealogies and almost journalistic accounts of the deeds of their lords and ancestors.

The bardic schools were extinct by the mid 17th century in Ireland and by the early 18th century in Scotland.

Revival

In modern Wales the Gorsedd of Bards (Welsh: Gorsedd y Beirdd) is a society whose honorary membership is extended to those who have done great things for Wales.

In the 20th Century, the word lost much of its original connotation of Celtic revivalism or Romanticism, and could refer to any professional poet or singer, sometimes in a mildly ironic tone. In the Soviet Union, singers who were outside the establishment were called bards from the 1960s.

Bards make up one of the three grades of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, a Neo-Druidic order based in England.

In 18th and 19th century Romanticism, The Bard became attached as a title to various poets,

• The Bard of Avon (or in England, simply The Bard) is William Shakespeare
• The Bard of Ayrshire (or in Scotland, simply The Bard) is Robert Burns
• The Bard of Olney is William Cowper
• The Bard of Rydal Mount is William Wordsworth
• The Bard of Twickenham is Alexander Pope

Examples of bards

Notable bards of Britain

• Taliesin, a 6th century Welsh bard who wrote the Book of Taliesin.
• Aneirin, a late 6th century Brythonic poet who wrote the Book of Aneirin.
• Dafydd ap Gwilym, a 14th century Welsh poet, generally regarded as the greatest Welsh poet of all time.
• Iolo Morganwg, an 18th century Welsh rogue and bard, famous for his forgeries and lies.

Fictional bards of Britain

• Kevin the bard from Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
• Several characters in the Bardic Voices Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey
• Fflewddur Fflam in the Prydain series, written by Lloyd Alexander