Start of Something Big

I have embarked on a quest, to create…

“the Global & Connected Bards”

I have a series of essays I started writing, that will establish the foundations of global and connected bardistry.

(15th c.) from Scottish Gaelic bàrd, from Old Irish bard, from Proto-Celtic *bardos (“bard, poet”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʷerH- (“praise”), and reinforced by Latin bardus, borrowed from Celtic. Cognate with Latin grātus (“grateful, pleasant, delightful”), Sanskrit गृणाति (gṛṇāti, “calls, praises”), Old Church Slavonic жрьти (žrĭti, “to sacrifice”).

bard – Wiktionary

Praise! That is what a Bard does!

For a long time I’ve been burning with the power of this one word, Bard. I used to listen to the Bard’s Song all the time in high school. Those were the years when I truly became passionate about it. I was looking into myths from Scandinavia. I was awestruck by my discoveries: I was learning about Norwegian folk tales, collected for the first time by Asbjørnsen og Moe. That was also when I discovered that old norse tales still exist–in the form of Eddas.

My discoveries about Norse Mythology was initially seeded by reading the Hobbit at a young age. I forgot that I even read it, but it affected me so much; it gave me a love for nature, and for the people and creatures that exist with/within it. “the hearts of dwarves“, elves and magic; a love for adventure, for exploring the different kinds of people living so far away from our reach: the elves in their forests, in their mystic revelry; the dwarves in the caves inside their mountains, hammering away day after day, crafting unrivalled gems and armor.

When I read the Prose Edda, one of the oldest surviving sources of Norse Mythology, I found that it had dwarves in it too! I was ecstatic. For the first time, I was finding that the creatures, who I thought were only modern inventions, existed in centuries old documents, part of the stories and the world-view of a real people!

I was blown away by my discovery. I felt like I was now part of a select few, who had access to hidden connections between the old and the modern. The most ancient form of fantasy fiction, The Norse Mythology, was connecting with the Hobbit, right before my very eyes!!

This connection between the ancestral–and the contemporary–is going to be a primary focus in my essays, as you will see.

I have been encouraged to start writing essays again after reading Visakan Veerasamy’s writings. I found his work a month or two ago, and they somehow reignited this connection in me. (The connection between ancestral and contemporary) wasn’t on the top of mind anymore, but turns out it was lying dormant inside all these years, still alive since high school…

I later found out that a lot of other people also knew about this connection. It was actually a well known fact that J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit, took inspiration from Norse folklore! But you see, I was a Turkish boy, living in a small city in Turkey with no relatives who had any connections to any other country or ethnicity–let alone to the Scandinavians. I thought I was the only person in the world who would make the effort to go back and read the Prose Edda, guided only by my endless and unrelenting search for “folk tales”.

This curiosity is inherent in the Bard, or as they are called in the North, the Skald. They go from land to land, exploring, sharing… That is the main thing a bard does: they travel! Also, they sing the tales of old. They connect to the ancestors, they remember their stories, and bring them to the future.

The global and connected bards will do just that: Go land to land, sing the tales of old, sing the tales of people–bear witness, and make it live on!