10th Mount Haemus Lecture: What is a Bard?

It may seem strange to be asking a roomful of Druids, ‘what is a Bard?’, for they of all people ought to know. Bardism – the quest for poetic or artistic inspiration – forms the foundation of the modern druidic path to self-knowledge and spiritual wisdom. That today’s Druids centralise bardism is evident in my original brief for this paper, an invitation by Philip Carr-Gomm to compare and contrast some bardic methods offered by Druid authors around the world. So why the question? Well, implicit in the invitation is an understanding that bardism may be done differently. If those differences are substantial then how are we to chose between them? Which method makes the better Bard? Or are the differences merely semantic, of style and not substance?