In medieval Gaelic and British culture a bard was a professional poet, employed by a patron, such as a monarch or nobleman, to commemorate the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities.
Originally a specific class of poet, contrasting with another class known as fili in Ireland and Highland Scotland, the term "bard", with the decline of living bardic tradition in the modern period, acquired generic meanings of an epic author/singer/narrator, comparable with the terms in other cultures (minstrel, skald, scop, rhapsode, udgatar, griot, ashik) or any poets, especially famous ones. For example, William Shakespeare is known as The Immortal Bard.
Read more about Bard: Etymology and Origin, Irish Bards, History of Irish Bards, Scottish Bards, Welsh Bards, Revival
Famous quotes containing the word bard:
“A bard whom there were none to praise,
And very few to read.”
—Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849)
“All right, so there he is, our representative to the world, Mr. Western Civilization, in codpiece and pantyhose up there on the boards, firing away at the rapt groundlings with his blank verses, not less of a word-slinger and spellbinder than the Bard himself and therefore not to be considered too curiously on such matters as relevance, coherence, consistency, propriety, sanity, common decency.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“You feel you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road [Brixton] and that apartment in New York where I could be tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren’t deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)