The poetry that made a Highland Chief

I’ve never been naturally drawn to poetry, but Gaelic praise poetry caught me off guard once I understood what it was doing. Think about how you get news across a country where most people will never see a written page. Put it into a poem, give it to somebody who can remember and perform it, and the news can travel well beyond the hall where it was first heard. People learn who has fought, who has died and who has inherited, along with a fairly strong opinion about who deserves to be in charge. You’ve got something of the radio and television of the day, although the person delivering it has to carry the whole programme in their head.

The poet responsible has spent years learning the craft, and a chief who employs one is paying for somebody who knows how to make his name worth remembering. Courage matters, but so do ancestry, hospitality and generosity. If you want to be praised as a great leader, you’re expected to feed people, reward service and offer protection. Scholars call the shared language of that praise the panegyric code, but you can hear what it means in an image like the sheltering tree. The chief is the person under whose branches others ought to be safe, and the people listening know what that asks of him.

Getting those expectations into a memorable performance takes considerable skill. Classical Gaelic poets work with tightly controlled syllables, rhyme and patterns of sound, so a poem has to satisfy the ear as well as say something worth hearing. That gives the words some protection as they pass from one person to another, because a clumsy alteration can spoil the pattern and alert somebody who knows what they’re listening for. It helps explain how poetry can carry a reputation across considerable distances, with the shape of the verse helping people remember what was said.

Of course, the poet has to eat as well, and the generosity he celebrates ought to extend to the person doing the celebrating. He may be rewarded with cattle, land, protection or gifts, while the chief gets his good name carried into places he may never visit himself. You can see why both would take the arrangement seriously. A fine poem can make a chief’s generosity famous, but a poet who leaves feeling poorly treated has just as much skill available to describe his disappointment. Once you begin listening for that relationship, there’s a good deal more going on in the hall than somebody politely admiring the verse.

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