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RE-BRANDING
THE ‘BARD’ The
term ‘BARD’ has many meanings in British Culture and has been
comparable to similar functionaries in other cultures worldwide. Today
it simply means ‘POET’ or a member of the Gorsedd of Bards who are
admitted for honourable service to Wales. Looking
at the history of the bardic type persona with a world wide perspective,
we have a person who is a maker of verse and song and music, a
storyteller, sometimes a member of an hereditary cast that has some
function relating to the spiritual and to law and to matters relating to
mortality, spiritual and corporeal, genealogical data and who will have
had some experience of at least one of the martial arts, such as
fencing. They have tended to hold second rank positions in hierarchies. In
times past such persons have been charged with the preservation of
knowledge of the past and with passing this on, together with fresh news
that becomes part of the knowledge of the past. The
need to preserve knowledge of the past orally has declined, first
because of writing, then of printing and then of audio recording and,
latterly, with the whole progressive science of information technology. Those
who carried out these functions in the past are less required personally
to keep alive existing traditional material. There function is now to
communicate by means of verse and music the awareness of history that
may have been overlooked and current happenings in an entertaining way
and to assist in matters of spiritual awareness, often through the
improvisation on simple musical instruments of sound that speaks
directly to the emotional side of nature and to advise, where called
upon, on the spiritual health and welfare outside, but with awareness
of, the various religious beliefs that existed and that exist world
wide. As
the term ‘BARD’ has become so restricted in meaning should we seek
another term? We live in an age when categorisation, ‘Brand naming’,
is seen to be of paramount importance.
TONY
MORRIS – BARD? Tony
is a maker of verse, song, music and a storyteller with a keen interest
in both Past and Present and their interlinking fibres, genealogy and
both the corporeal and spiritual aspects of mortality. In his youth he
was a skilled fencer at University and international level. He was also
a skilled hunter of Hounds versed in the ways of the countryside and
wrote and broadcast on Natural History. He improvises and extemporizes
on a wide variety of instruments with which he accompanies the spoken
word, Lyre, Native American Style Flute, Bardic Harp and others. He
has patrilineal descent from a tribe of bards, who were second only to
high priests, predating the Christian Era by many thousands of years. Having
trained in the Law, he spent over thirty years as a judge in various
tribunals, as a coroner, for fifteen years, investigating sudden and
violent deaths and twenty-seven years as an employment law judge, where
he interpreted, developed and made Law. |