What is a Bard?

Bards were entertainers, but this was only a secondary job, a side job as it were. They were really record keepers, and lineage holders, for the bards could determine a king's legitimacy. To satirize a king was to declare his access to the throne suspect. The role of the bard was that of historian and social commentator. They taught about the past and glorified heroes while insulting cowards and villains. They were both the newspaper and the opinion page. In cultures without written media, people had to learn through living sources. As such, events were not simply words on a page but dramas of vice and virtue.

Bards spoke mostly of human events with harps and staffs, and occasionally drums. They sometimes described relationships between the generations with the dead or the Fair Folk having revenge upon or giving blessings to descendants. The subject of their songs were ancestors of kings, heroes, owners of property, rights to natural resources, and the ownership of objects. The real owners knew the other owners, and bards were like lawyers with the memories of the exchanges in a time when few people wrote things down. They were specialized libraries of status and property. The bards knew who inherited from whom. This was the function for which they were paid, and falsification of records was considered a great evil. 

For commercial transactions, bards were the truth-tellers.This role of bards has been submerged in history, and they are remembered as a sort of wandering folk singer. Certainly they entertained people on cold winter nights before fires at inns, and before bonfires at holidays, and indeed for bards at the minor levels, this was all they knew how to do. But there were classes and levels of bards, and the more advanced ones went through years of memory training. In cultures without writing, memory became extremely important, and those with the best memories rose to political heights.

For Celtic people, bards and druids were mostly separate. Bards were librarians reading out loud to audiences, but the priestly group of druids was tied to gods, to nature, to magical control of the environment, and to fighting competing priests. When groups fought each other, the names of the gods of the losers were erased and forgotten. Memory of magic and nature stayed. This is why today there has been a fusion of the ancient gods with nature and magic. Their separate categories have been forgotten. Indeed, how many people remember Lir or Danu today? Their names were erased, first by warring tribes, and then by outsider religions. Their stories are gone.

This is the result of forgetting, and of no longer having bards. The silence of the bards and the loss of the bardic tradition cannot be repaired. But have we already begun anew?