It would be difficult to overrate the importance of the colleges of the hereditary bards and the influence they exercised in the life of the sixteenth century. They fairly reflected public opinion, and they also helped to make it what it was. There is a great difference between their poems and the memoria technicha verses of the ancient ollamhs, whose historical and genealogical poems, which they composed in their official capacity, are crowded with inorganic phrases and "chevilles" of all kinds. The sixteenth-century poet was a man of wit and learning, and frequently a better and more clear-seeing statesman than his chief, who was in matters of policy frequently directed by his bard's advice. They certainly had more national feeling than any other class in Ireland, and were less the slaves of circumstances or of mere local accidents, for they traversed the island from end to end, were equally welcome north, south, east, and west, and had unrivalled opportunities for becoming acquainted with the trend of public affairs, and with political movements.
Most people, owing to their comparative neglect of Irish history, seem to be of opinion that the bards were harpers, or at least musicians of some sort. But they were nothing of the kind. The popular conception of the bard with the long white beard and the big harp is grotesquely wrong. The bards were verse-makers, pure and simple, and they were no more musicians than the poet laureate of England. Their business was to construct their poems after the wonderful and complex models of the schools, and when—as only sometimes happened—they wrote a eulogy or panegyric on a patron, and brought it to him, they introduced along with themselves a harper and possibly a singer to whom they had taught their poem, and in the presence of their patron to the sound of the harp, the only instrument allowed to be touched on such occasions, the poem was solemnly recited or sung. The real name of the musician was not bard—the bard was a verse-maker—but oirfideadh [errh-fid-yă], and the musicians, though a numerous and honourable class, were absolutely distinct from the bards and filés. It was only after the complete break-up of the Gaelic polity, after the wars of Cromwell and of William, that the verse-maker merges in the musician, and the harper and the bard become fused in one, as was the case with Carolan, commonly called the last of the bards, but whom his patron, O'Conor of Belanagare, calls in his obituary of him, not a bard, but an oirfideadh.
Down to the close of the sixteenth century and during the greater part of the seventeenth, verse, with few exceptions, continued to be made in the classical metres of Ireland, by specially trained poets, who did not go outside these metres. In the ensuing century the classical metres began to be discarded and a wonderful and far-reaching change took place, which shall be made the subject of a future chapter. We must now proceed to examine a species of popular poetry which flourished during all this period side by side with the bardic schools, although no trace remains to-day of its origin or its authors. This is the so-called Ossianic poetry.
[1] This is a kind of rhetoric; some of these unrhymed outbursts were called rosg by the Irish. Irish literature is full of such pieces. Some of the Brehon Law though printed in prose seems to have been composed in it. Other examples are the cry of the Mór-rígan, or war-goddess, in the end of the Battle of Moytura.
"Peace to heav'n "Sith go neim
Heav'n to earth Neamh go domhan,
Earth neath heav'n Domhan fá neim
Strength in each," etc. Neart i gcách," etc.
or the description of the Dun Bull of Cuailgne in the Táin Bo, or part of the first poem attributed to Finn mac Cool, or trie well-known eulogy on Goll the Fenian, or Mac Mhurighs incitement at the battle of Harlaw, or some of the verses in the preface to the Amra. About the last specimen of unrhymed poetry, in a species of Droighneach metre, I find in the Annals of Loch Cé on the death of Mac Dermot as late as 1568.
"Gég iothmar fhineamhna na n-éigeas ocus na n-ollaman,
Craobh cumra cnuais na gcliar ocus na gcerbach,
Dóss díona na ndámh ocus na ndeóraidh
Bile buadha buan fhoscaidh na mbrughaidh ocus na mbiattach."
[2] Thus the nearest approach that Columcille makes to Latin rhyme is in the final unaccented syllable. See his "Altus" beginning