THE BARD
In Celtic cultures, a bard is a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron (such as a monarch or chieftain) to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities.
With the decline of a living bardic tradition in the modern period, the term has loosened to mean a generic minstrel or author (especially a famous one). For example, William Shakespeare and Rabindranath Tagore are respectively known as "the Bard of Avon" (often simply "the Bard") and "the Bard of Bengal".[1][2] In 16th-century Scotland, it turned into a derogatory term for an itinerant musician; nonetheless it was later romanticised by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).[1]
Etymology
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The English term bard is a loan word from the Celtic languages: Gaulish: bardo- ('bard, poet'), Middle Irish: bard and Scottish Gaelic: bàrd ('bard, poet'), Middle Welsh: bardd ('singer, poet'), Middle Breton: barz ('minstrel'), Old Cornish: barth ('jester').[3][4] The ancient Gaulish *bardos is attested as bardus (sing.) in Latin and as bárdoi (plur.) in Ancient Greek. It also appears as a stem in bardo-cucullus ('bard's hood'), bardo-magus ('field of the bard'), barditus (a song to fire soldiers), and in bardala ('crested lark', a singing bird).[3]
All of these terms come from the Proto-Celtic noun *bardos ('poet-singer, minstrel'), itself derived, with regular Celtic sound shift gʷ > b, from the Proto-Indo-European compound *gʷrH-dʰh₁-o-s, which literally means 'praise-maker'.[3][5][4] It is cognate with Sanskrit: gṛṇā́ti ('calls, praise'), Latin: grātus ('grateful, pleasant, delightful'), Lithuanian: gìrti ('praise'), and Armenian: kardam ('raise voice').[3][4]