A bard was a poet and singer who composed and performed verse in the service of a patron, a calling attested among the ancient Celts and continued in the medieval Celtic-speaking world. The ancient bard is known from Greek and Roman authors writing about Gaul between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD, who count the bards, with the druids and the vates, among the learned orders of Gaulish society. They describe them singing the praises of chieftains, and the satire of their rivals, to an instrument resembling the lyre. The name goes back to the Proto-Celtic noun (), the source of Old Irish , Welsh , and the related forms in the other Celtic languages.
The word and the calling survived in medieval Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany, where praise and satire of rulers remained central to the poet's office. The word bard had also been extended, inaccurately, to the poets and singers of the Germanic world, and it now serves loosely for poets in general, most familiarly as "the Bard" for William Shakespeare.
Etymology The English term bard is a loanword from the Gaelic and Irish .Bard, n.¹. In Oxford English dictionary: "Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from Gaelic. Partly a borrowing from Irish." Linguistically related terms appear in various Celtic languages, including Gaulish bardo- ('bard, poet'), Middle Irish ('bard, poet'), Middle Welsh ('singer, poet'), Middle Breton barz ('minstrel'), and Old Cornish ('jester').
The ancient Gaulish *bardos is attested as (sing.) in Latin and as (plur.) in Ancient Greek. It is also found as a stem in the compound words bardo-cucullus ('bard's hood'), bardo-magus ('field of the bard'), barditus (a song to fire soldiers), and in bardala ('crested lark', a singing bird).
All of these terms come from the Proto-Celtic noun ('poet-singer, minstrel'), itself derived, with regular Celtic sound shift > , from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) compound , which literally means 'praise-maker'. It is cognate with Sanskrit: ('calls', 'praise'), ('grateful', 'pleasant', 'delightful'), ('praise'), and Armenian: ('raise voice').
Another Celtic word for a 'poet', , is attested in Gaulish pritios, Old Irish , Middle Welsh , and Old Cornish . It derives from Proto-Celtic *kwritus ('magical transformation, shape'), itself from PIE ('to make, cause'). Further words related to the Celtic art of poetry can also be reconstructed, including ('poem, song, incantation'), ('funerary poem, eulogy'), ('poem') and ('poetic inspiration'), although it is uncertain if they can be linked to the ancient bards.
Classical accounts The earliest descriptions of the bard are given by Greek and Roman authors writing about Gaul between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD. The fullest go back to the lost history of Posidonius, who travelled in southern Gaul in the early 1st century BC and whose account of the Gauls survives only through later writers who excerpted it, chiefly Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Athenaeus. Further notices appear in Ammianus Marcellinus, who drew on the lost work of Timagenes, in the poet Lucan, in Appian, and in the Latin lexicographical tradition. These writers describe the bards as professional poet-singers in the service of chieftains, and place them, together with the druids and the vates, among the learned orders of Gaulish society.
Sources Diodorus Siculus, writing in the later 1st century BC, reports that the Gauls have lyric poets called bards who sing to instruments resembling lyres, some of their songs in praise and others in mockery.Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 5.31.2 (= Posidonius, FGrHist 87 F 116). A passage of Athenaeus that cites Posidonius likewise describes praise-singers among the Celts, called bards, who recite their eulogies in song before the assembled company.Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 6.49 (= Posidonius, FGrHist 87 F 17). Strabo, who also drew on Posidonius for his account of Gaul, names the bards among the three classes held in particular honour by all the Gauls, alongside the vates and the druids, and defines the bards as singers and poets.Strabo, Geographica, 4.4.4.
The later notices repeat this picture. Ammianus Marcellinus, drawing on Timagenes, lists the bards with the euhages and the druids and states that the bards sang the brave deeds of famous men in heroic verse.Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, 15.9.8 (= Timagenes, FGrHist 88 F 2). The poet Lucan, in the first book of the Pharsalia, addresses the bards directly as those who, through their praises, send into long ages the brave souls of men slain in war.Lucan, Pharsalia, 1.447–449. The Latin lexicographical tradition preserves the same sense: the epitome by Paulus Diaconus of Festus's De verborum significatu explains bardus as the Gaulish word for a singer who sings the praises of brave men.Paulus Diaconus, epitome of Festus, De verborum significatu, 34 (Lindsay).
Because Diodorus, Strabo, and the Posidonian passages of Athenaeus descend from a single source, they are not independent witnesses but one tradition. Caesar, who described the druids at length, does not mention the bards or the vates at all, a silence that has been read as a sign that his account of Gaul did not depend on Posidonius.
Craft and status
The sources agree on what the bard did. His central activity was praise poetry, along with satire or mockery, a polarity already drawn by Diodorus. The power to raise or lower a patron's standing gave the most successful bards a privileged and well-paid position, and later Irish sources confirm that the bard's satire was feared by the nobility.
The bard performed to a stringed instrument. Diodorus compares it to a lyre, and Miranda Aldhouse-Green relates this notice to surviving tuning-pegs for instruments of the kind. The reward such performance could bring is illustrated by the feast of the Arvernian Louernios, described by Posidonius through Athenaeus. A Celtic poet, generally identified as a bard, arrived after the feast had ended and sang of the king's greatness while lamenting his own late arrival. Louernios, pleased, threw him a bag of gold, whereupon the poet sang a second song declaring that even the tracks of the king's chariot gave gold and benefits to men.Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, 4.37 (= Posidonius, FGrHist 87 F 18).
The bard also had a part in public affairs. Appian's account of an embassy sent to the Romans by the Arvernian king Bituitus describes a musician in the envoy's train who sang, in the barbarian manner, the praises first of the king, then of his people, and then of the envoy himself, his birth, his courage, and his wealth, which Appian gives as the reason that envoys of rank took such singers with them.Appian, Celtica, fragment 12. Diodorus adds that the bards, together with the druids, could step between two armies drawn up for battle and bring them to a halt.Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, 5.31.5.
Learned triad In Diodorus, Strabo, and Ammianus the bards form one of three honoured classes, the others being the vates (seers) and the druids. Of the three, the druids held the highest standing, credited with natural and moral philosophy and with a part in every sacrifice, while the bards were the poets and the seers the diviners. The same threefold division, with the bard set beside a seer (fáith) and a druid (druí), recurs in early medieval Ireland.
Medieval Celtic bards The word and the calling outlived the Roman conquest in the Celtic-speaking lands of the British Isles, but the term came to be used very differently in the two main traditions. In medieval Wales bardd stayed the ordinary and prestigious word for a poet, whereas in medieval Ireland bard was kept for a lower grade of poet, ranked below the file. In both countries the praise, and the satire of rulers remained at the centre of the professional poet's office. Wales
In Welsh, bardd was the usual word for any poet, and the office of court poet was an old and prestigious one. The eulogistic and elegiac verse attributed to Aneirin and Taliesin is dated to the 6th century, and the poets of the great age of bardic eulogy, the Gogynfeirdd or Poets of the Princes of the 12th and 13th centuries, set themselves consciously in that tradition, composing praise and elegy for the princes and noblemen of independent Wales. After the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, the poets, now known as the Cywyddwyr, continued to compose for the gentry, but the bard's sense of being indispensable to society faded with the political power of his patrons.
The bards formed a professional order with recognised rights, set out in the Laws of Hywel Dda, which name three classes of poet. Highest was the pencerdd ('chief of song'), the master-poet who headed the bardic community of a region, won his chair by competition, and had the right to train novices. He sang first in the royal hall, a song of God and then a song of kings, and received a harp from the king and held his land free. Below him the bardd teulu (household bard) was attached to a particular royal household.
Praise and elegy were the core of the bard's work, composed in strict and complex metres. A body of theoretical writing, the bardic grammars (Gramadegau'r Penceirddiaid), set out the craft and reserved praise for the prydydd, the true poet, while assigning satire to a lesser grade of entertainer, the clerwr. Welsh poems nonetheless imply a belief in the poet's power to harm a patron who treated him unjustly. The order declined and broke up in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
A persistent Welsh tradition holds that Edward I, after the conquest of Wales in 1282, had the Welsh bards put to death for sedition, but no medieval source records the event and historian Prys Morgan treats it as a fable. The story first gained currency in the History of the Gwydir Family, written by Sir John Wynn early in the 17th century. It passed through Thomas Carte's A General History of England to the poet Thomas Gray, whose Pindaric ode "The Bard" (1757) fixed the legend in the public mind. From the 1770s the doomed bard became a favoured subject in painting, and the legend reached as far as Hungary in the ballad "A walesi bárdok" by János Arany, where Edward stands for a conqueror crushing a subject nation.
Ireland
Medieval Irish usually called the poet file (plural filid) and kept bard (plural baird) for a lower grade. The distinction was one of learning. The filid passed through a long training and commanded a wide range of skills, whereas the baird were held to rely on innate talent without a formal scholarly education, and their work was confined for the most part to panegyric and lyric verse.
By the 8th century the law-tracts, among them Uraicecht na Ríar, Uraicecht Becc, and Bretha Nemed, set out seven grades for the filid, modelled on the seven grades of the Church and ranked from the ollam at the top down through the ánruth, clí, cano, dos, and macfhuirmid to the fochloc. Each grade carried its own honour-price and a defined body of learning, the ollam being required to master some 350 tales along with the historical and legal sciences.
The professional poets belonged to hereditary learned families, the aos ealadhan, who trained in the bardic schools and shared a fixed literary language, Classical Irish, used for formal verse from about 1200 to about 1600 in both Ireland and Gaelic-speaking Scotland. Their eulogies and elegies for the reigning chieftains were composed in regulated syllabic metres, the dán díreach, and the poet's satire was widely feared. Early Irish sources describe the blisters of shame that public ridicule was thought to raise on its victim's face, the Old Irish word for 'face', enech, being also the word for 'honour'. As an institution Irish bardic poetry lasted into the 17th century, longer than its Welsh counterpart, until it fell with the Gaelic order it served.
Scotland