Master Poets and Their Kings in Late Celtic Society by Bennett Blumenberg (2004).pdf

Master Poets and Their Kings in Late Celtic Society

©ANCIENT HISTORY and RELIGION TIMELINE PROJECT

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"When man created language with wisdom,

As if winnowing cornflower through a sieve,

Friends acknowledged the signs of friendship,

And their speech retained its touch." Rg Veda 10.71

"Whatever is happening is happening for good...."

Krsna to Arjuna in the Bhagvad Gita

August 1, 2004

Contents

On the Nature of ‘Mythical’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Celtic Poets and Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The Celtic Goddess as Druidess and Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Continuity with Earlier Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

The Training of a Poet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

The Poet and the King: the Nature of Sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Druidic Lore in the Poetry of Early Medieval Ireland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39

The Theme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

On the Nature of ‘Mythical’

Mythical is too often taken to mean ‘fantasy’ or fairy tale. Such is the fate to which our

society consigns mytho-poetics, that true poetry by which men and women of former times

communicated with the gods. Let us take the words of Robert Graves seriously, for he was an

historical novelist, poet, and mythographer of great depth who lamented the crass cynicism and

materialism of our times as destructive of the human soul. If mythology literally structured

societies duiring most of human history, what do we really know?

“It is unfortunate that, despite the strong mythical element in Christianity, ‘mythical’ has

come to mean ‘fanciful, absurd, unhistorical’; for fancy played a negligible part in the

development of the Greek, Latin and Palestinian myths, or of the Celtic myths until the Norman-

French trovères worked them up into irresponsible romances of chivalry. They are all grave

records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their

language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription,

misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political

reasons. Some myths of course have survived in a far purer form than others; for example the

Fables of Hyginus, the Library of Appolodorus and the earlier tales of the Welsh Mabinogion

make easy reading compared with the deceptive simple chronicles of Genesis , Exodus , Judges

and Samuel . Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving mythological problems is that:

Conquering gods their titles take

From the foes they captive make,

and that to know the name of the deity at any given place or period, is far less important than to

know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was then offered. The powers of the gods were

continuously being redefined. The Greek god, Apollo, for instance seems to have begun as the

Demon of a Mouse fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradualy rose in divine rank by

force of arms, blackmail and fraud until he became the patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts

and finally, in some regions at least, ousted his ‘father’ Zeus from the Sovereignty of the

Universe by identifying himself with Belinus the intellellectual God of Light. Jehovah, the God of

the Jews has still more complex history” (Graves 1960: 13-14).

The Royal Court, Celtic Poets and Poetry

Celtic kings were literate to an amazing degree and demanded the finest poetry in their

courts. But such poetry had to serve the honour of the king and the relationship between the

gods and royalty. On that relationship depended the welfare of the entire kingdom; no free form

expression of personal emotion could even be imagined yet alone articulated. When the poet

touched upon mythic truth, your gut would tighten and tears would come to your eye for those

words reached the divine in mankind and thus sparked a brief connection with divinity.

“... The elements of the single, infinitely variable Theme are to be found in certain ancient

poetic myths which though manipulated to conform with each epoch of religious change-yet

remain constant in general outline. Perfect faithfulness to the Theme affects the reader of a

poem with a strange feeling, between delight and horror, of which the purely physical effect is

that the hair literally stands on end. A.E. Houseman's test of a true poem was simple and

practical: does it make the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving? But

he did not explain why the hairs should bristle.

“The ancient Celts carefully distinguished the poet, who was originally a priest and a

judge as well and whose person was sacrosanct, from the mere gleeman. He was in Irish call

fili , a seer; in Welsh drwydd , or oak-seer, which is the probable derivation of ‘Druid’. Even

kings came under moral tutelage. When two armies engaged in battle, the poets of both sides

would withdraw together to a hill and there judiciously discuss the fighing. In a sixth century

Welsh poem, the Golodin , it is remarked that ‘the poets of the world assess the men of valour’;

and the combatants - whom they often parted by a sudden intervention - would afterwards

accept their version of the fight, if worth commemorating in a poem with reverence as well as

pleasure. The gleeman, on the other hand, was a joculator , or entertainer, not a priest; a mere

client of the military oligarchs and without the poets professional training. He would often make

a variety turn of his performance, with mime and tumbling. In Wales, he was styled an eirchiad .

or suppliant, one who does not belong to an endowed profession but is dependent for his living

upon the occasional generosity of chieftains. As early as the first century B.C., we hear from

Poseidonius the Stoic of a bag of gold flung to a Celtic gleeman in Gaul, and this at a time when

the Druidic system was at its strongest there. If the gleeman's flattery of his patrons were

handsome enough and his son sweetly attuned to their mead-sodden minds, they would load

him with gold torques and honey cakes; if not, they would pelt him with beef bones. But let a

man offer the least indignity to an Irish poet, even centuries after he had forfeited his priestly

functions to the Christian cleric, and he would compose a satire on his assailant which would

being out black blotches on his face and turn his bowels to water, or throw a ‘madman's wisp’

in his face and drive him insane; and surviving examples of the cursing poems of Welsh minstrels

show that they were also to be reckoned with. The court poets of Wales, on the other hand,

were forbidden to use curses or satire, and had to depend on legal redress for any insult to their

dignity; according to a tenth century digest of laws affecting the Welsh ‘household bard’ they

could demand an eric 1 of ‘nine cows, and nine score pence of money besides’. The figure nine

recalls the nine-fold Muse, their former patroness.

“In ancient Ireland, the ollav , or master poet, sat next to the king at table and was

privileged, as none else but the queen was, to wear six different colours in his clothes. The

word ‘bard’, which in medieval Wales stood for a master-poet, had a different sense in Ireland,

where it meant an inferior poet who had not passed throught the ‘seven degrees of wisdom’

which made him an ollav after a very difficult twelve year course. The position of the Irish bard

is defined in the seventh century Sequel to the Crith Gabhlach Law : ‘A bard is one without

lawful learning but his own intellect’; but in the later Book of Ollavs (bound up in the fourteenth

century Book of Ballymore ) it is made clear that to have got as far as the seventh year of his

poetic education entitled a student to the ‘failed B.A.’ dignity of bardism. He had memorized

only half the presecribed tales and poems, had not studied advanced prosody and metrical

composition and was deficient in knowledge of Old Goidelic. However, the seven year’s

course that he had taken was a great deal more severe than that insisted upon in the poetic

schools of Wales, where the bards had proportionately lower status. According to Welsh

Laws, the Penkerdd , or Chief Bard, was only the tenth dignitary at Court and sat on the left of

the Heir Apparent, being reckoned equal in honour with the Chief Smith. 2

“The Irish ollav’ s chief interest was the refinement of complex poetic truth to exact

statement. He knew the history and mythic value of every word he used and can have cared

nothing for the ordinary man's appreciation of his work; he valued only the judgement of his

colleagues, whom he seldom met without a lively exchange of poetic wit in contemporary verse.

Yet it cannot be pretended that he was always true to the Theme. His education, which was a

very good one, including history, music, law, science and divination, encourage him to versify in

all these departments of knowledge so that often Ogma the God of Eloquence seemed more

important than Brigit, the Three-fold Muse. And it is a paradox that in medieveal Wales the

admired court poet had become a client of the prince to whom he addressed formal begging

odes and forgotten the Theme almost entirely; while the despised and unendowed minstrel who

seemed to be a mere gleeman showed greater poetic integrity, even though his verse was not so

highly polished” (Graves 1966: 21-23).

Nikolai Tolstoy is the grandnephew of the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy and has

researched the legendary Merlin exhaustively.

“A very great poet would be much in demand, with kings vying for his services. Equally

the bard might miscalculate, and sue for reconciliation with a monarch he had rashly deserted.

1 The Oxford English Dictionary derives ‘eric’ from the Irish ‘ciric’ and illustrates its usage by reference to a

blood fine or recompence for a violent crime. In medieval Wales, ‘eric’ was the compensation demanded by

a bard.

2 In the early Middle Ages in Wales, smiths still had such an exalted status which reflected their former

mythic rank.

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