Not a Bard

I rambled on at length in my early posts about why I dislike being called a bard in the SCA. At one point I mentioned Donald Jay Grout’s “A History of Western Music” as a source of some of my crazy ideas. I was just in the process of moving my music room and came across that very work. Below is part of the section about minstrels from the Third Edition of the book (published by W W Norton.)

“The people who sang the chansons de geste and other secular songs in the Middle Ages were the jongleurs or menestrals (“minstrels”), a class of professional musicians who first appear about the tenth century: men and women wandering singly or in small groups from village to village, from castle to castle, gaining a precarious livelihood by singing, playing, performing tricks and exhibiting trained animals-social outcasts often denied the protection of the laws and the sacraments of the Church…”People of no great wit but with amazing memory, very industrious, and impudent beyond measure,” Petrarch wrote of them.”

I can’t imagine a more fitting description of Ciann the Minstrel. Plus, it goes on, including a description of what we call “filking.”

“The minstrels, as a class, were neither poets or composers in exactly the sense we give to those terms. They sang, played and danced to songs composed by others or taken from the common domain of popular music, no doubt altering them or making up their own versions as they went along.”

Look, research! (Sloppy though it may be.) So please remember, “bard” is a four-letter word.