bardic poetry

bardic poetry in its most general sense refers to verse composed by the professional poetic class found in all Celtic societies, the bards, who earned rich rewards for singing poems in praise of their patrons, or satires against their patrons' enemies. However, surviving verse compositions in Irish from before c.1200 are religious or historical in character, the product of the learned fili, rather than straightforward eulogies to the aristocracy such as the bards composed orally. It is not until the amalgamation of these two classes in the course of the 12th century to produce hereditary, literate professional praise‐poets, the filidh or firdhána of the later Middle Ages, that a substantial body of praise‐poems begins to survive in written form. As part of this development, by 1200 the poets had forged a new standard literary language, Classical Early Modern Irish, and evolved strict rules of metre and rhyme to be rigidly observed in their most prized mode of composition, dán díreach, or ‘straight poetry’. The less demanding mode, brúilingeacht, used by less educated poets, or by hereditary Irish historians, lawyers, or clerics when composing in verse, observed the same rules of metre, but used imperfect rhymes, while a third, even easier mode, óglachas, used by amateurs and comic poets, employed much simplified versions of the metres and imperfect rhymes.

The majority of such poems are formally addressed to lay patrons, Irish chieftains, Anglo‐Irish barons, and their respective relatives. These consist of eulogies to be recited at banquets hosted by the patrons, elegies to grace their funerals or commemorative feasts, epithalamiums for weddings, poems to celebrate newly built palaces or churches, and occasionally inauguration poems or incitements to battle. A further 20 per cent or so are poems on religious subjects, though composed by the same professional bards who were responsible for the secular eulogies. The remaining compositions consist of Tudor and Jacobean poems of courtly love, in the style of contemporary English verse though in bardic metres, political exhortations, poetic contentions, and miscellaneous personal pieces. Works of 16th‐and early 17th‐century poets like Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa, and Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird are best preserved, because at that date a literate reading public collected their work in anthologies based on artistic merit. Surviving medieval manuscript collections normally contain poems addressed to a particular ruling family, for example the 14th-century Book of Magauran, or composed by a particular poet or family of poets such as the lost duanaire or poem‐book of Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh (fl. 1213), or the Ó hUiginn poems in the so‐called ‘Yellow Book of Lecan’.

The value of these texts for a historian lies partly in their factual information: it was a poet's duty to immortalize a list of his patron's victories, and when he extolled a subject's relatives he included wives, mothers, and grandmothers, who are normally unrecorded in formal genealogies. But they are most interesting as testimony to the public image a patron wished to have propagated. When the subject is urged to make war or peace with the English, for example, the poet is unlikely to be offering unwelcome advice, as his payment depended on the patron's satisfaction with his poem. An unwarlike man, however, like Cúchonnacht Maguire (Mág Uidhir) (d. 1589), could be praised as dashing and aggressive, if he paid well enough.

Bibliography

Bergin, O. , Irish Bardic Poetry, ed. D. Greene and F. Kelly (1970)
Knott, E. , Irish Classical Poetry (1960)
Simms, K. , ‘Bardic Poetry as a Historical Source’, in T. Dunne (ed.), The Writer as Witness (1987)

Katharine Simms