Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8297680" data-attributes="member: 6803643">The Fili of Ireland were not Bards, and they didn't exist outside of the Gaelic realms. Fili were trained in Christian Monasteries; Bards were trained in Bardic Orders as masters and apprentices. The Fili rose up to greater prominence in later medieval period in Ireland while the Bard term was denigrated down into low-level entertainers and satirists, but the Bards were the source of the cycle history, the Fili were a later invention, a product of Christianization. Note that originally Bards had both the roles of satirists to ruin the lives of their enemies and as hype-men and history-makers for their patrons (making sure the people who paid them looked good in the annals of history by telling really good stories about them). And of course if the patron does bad by them, they could turn around and make the patron look bad…The Bards however indeed were a shamanic tradition, and coterminous with the •owatis or Vates referred to by Strabo, which are themselves coterminous with the Druids. But the term Owatis or Watis has more in common with the lyrical and musical inspiration of the Bards than it does with the oakey-nomiclature of the Druids. And Posidonius, Strabo, and others saw a bit of a distinction, with the Druids more as natural philosophers, scientists, and theologians, and Vates as seers, prophets, and sages (and the Bardos as hype-men to nobles). We can probably understand the roles as semi-interchangable but more and more distinct with the passing of time, roles that arose out of a single priestly or literati class (akin to the Brahmins of India).</blockquote>

Verification