Contention of the bards

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The contention of the bards (

There were 30 contributions to the Contention, which took the form of a bitter debate over the relative merits of the two halves of Ireland: the north, dominated by the Eremonian descendants of the Milesians, and the south, dominated by the Eberian descendants.

The verses were first published in print in two volumes produced by the Irish Texts Society in 1918 edited by Lambert McKenna who acknowledged the significant contribution of Eleanor Knott to the accompanying translations.

Context

The Contention took place in the context of the settlement of the country following on the Tudor conquest of Ireland, when full domination by Stuart royal authority had led to the Flight of the Earls (1607) and the Plantation of Ulster (1610).

The occasion for the Contention was a dispute over the allegiance of the

For centuries before 1616, the bards had been sponsored by the Irish Gaelic dynasties, and confirmed their paternal lineages by recitals at social events, so they had a political importance as well as a cultural impact. In a society where most were illiterate, bardic recital in public was the primary method of recalling a clan's history back to its claimed Milesian origins.

Substance

In 1616 the Earl of Thomond's bard,

The poems of the Contention share a sense of national culture, but their political allegiance is clan-centred. It was a period of decline for the court bards, and the fact that they were addressing each other suggests a realisation that their audience was losing its influence and that few within the new dispensation were paying heed to them.

In the course of the exchange, the theme of North-South rivalry was developed to include a debate about the struggle between tradition and iconoclasm. That allowed the poets to vent their bitterness at the late conquest and colonisation of the country and at the collapse of the political order upon which they depended.

Throughout the Contention, each side had eagerly and jealously claimed

The Ireland that the poems traced in their lore was past, and it seems that the bards were incapable of adapting their ways. The Contention proved to be the last flourish of Dán Díreach courtly poetic style: within decades the great school metres had been abandoned in favour of the looser Amhrán or Aisling, and the esteem in which the bards had been held in Gaelic Ireland was never regained.

References

• Richard Bagwell, Ireland under the Stuarts 3 vols. (London, 1895).
• John O'Donovan (ed.) Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters (1851).
• Lambert McKenna (ed.) The Contention of the Bards 2 vols. (Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1918).
• Joep Leerssen, The Contention of the Bards’ and its place in Irish political and literary history (London 1994).
• Ó Maolchonaire, Flaithrí. "Lughaidh, Tadhg agus Torna". Retrieved 9 August 2020.

See also

• Bardic poetry
• Contention of the Bards in Gwynedd
• Irish poetry
• List of poetry collections
• Medieval poetry