Bard - Welsh Bards

Welsh Bards

A number of legendary bards in Welsh mythology have been preserved in medieval Welsh literature such as the Red Book of Hergest, the White Book of Rhydderch, the Book of Aneirin and the Book of Taliesin. The bards Aneirin and Taliesin may be legendary reflections of historical bards active in the 6th to 7th centuries. Very little historical information about Dark Age Welsh court tradition survives, but the Middle Welsh material came to be the nucleus of the Matter of Britain and Arthurian legend as they developed from the 13th century. The (Welsh) Laws of Hywel Dda, originally compiled around 900 A.D, identify a bard as a member of a King's household. His duties, when the bodyguard were sharing out booty taken in a strange (sic) country, included the singing of the Sovereignty of Britain - possibly why the genealogies of the British High Kings survived into the written historical record.

Welsh bardic tradition appears to end in the same 13th century, the Welsh campaigns of Edward I supposedly culminating in the legendary suicide of The Last Bard (c. 1283), as commemorated in the poem The Bards of Wales by the Hungarian poet János Arany in 1857 as a way of encoded resistance to the suppressive politics of his own time. There seems to be some continuity of Early Medieval Welsh tradition into the Late Middle Ages, with 14th century poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym and Iolo Goch, and even to the present day with the Gorsedd of Bards.