bards

• “Britons, as there are good authorities to show the long time they had poets, which they called bards: so through all the conquests of Romans,”

  English literary criticism

• “In Wales, the true remnant of the ancient Britons, as there are good authorities to show the long time they had poets which they called bards, so through all the conquests of Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, some of whom did seek to ruin all memory of learning from among them, yet do their poets even to this day last; so as it is not more notable in soon beginning, than in long continuing.”

  The Defense of Poesy

• “These storytellers have been called bards, griots, oral historians, and many other names – these guys are often the only reason we have a history of anything that happened before 1000 A.D.”

  The Past and the Future of Digital Storytelling

• “The stricter Moslems called their bards “enemies of Allah”; and when the Prophet, who hated verse and could not even quote it correctly, was asked who was the best poet of the Peninsula he answered that the “Man of Al – Kays,” i.e. the worshipper of the Priapus-idol, would usher them all into Hell.”

  The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

• “The bards are the grand recorders of fame, and the volume of precedent is always resorted to by citing the liberality of former chiefs; while the dread of their satire”

  The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India Volume II

• “He calls it _barditus_ by mistake, borrowing a term from the custom of the Gauls, who sang before battle by proxy, -- that is, their bards chanted the national songs.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862

• “Ireland also the bards were a distinct class with peculiar and hereditary privileges.”

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 "Banks" to "Bassoon"

• “The bards were the _senachies_ or historians of the clans, and were recognized as a very important factor in society.”

  An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America

• “This is a dramatic poem, with a chorus of British bards, which is several times quoted and commended in Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope.”

  A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

• “Caerleon and call the bards to him, if they will come, and ask them to sing the songs they made thereon.”

  A King's Comrade A Story of Old Hereford

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