fili

fili, professional poet in ancient Ireland whose official duties were to know and preserve the tales and genealogies of the ruling class and to compose poems recalling the past and present glory of that class. The filid constituted a large aristocratic class who were expensive to support, and they were severely censured for their extravagant demands on patrons as early as the assembly of Druim Cetta in 575; they were defended at the assembly by St. Columba. Their power was not checked, however, since they could enforce their demands by the feared lampoon (áer), or poet’s curse, which not only could take away a patron’s reputation but also cause physical damage or even death, according to a widely held ancient belief. Although by law a fili could be penalized for abuse of the áer, belief in the powers of its curse was strong and continued after the collapse of the Gaelic order.

After Christianity began to spread throughout Ireland in the 5th century, the filid assumed the poetic function of the Druids, a powerful learned class of the ancient Celts that had become outlawed. The filid were often associated with monasteries, which were important centers of learning.

Filid were divided into seven grades. One of the lower and less learned grades was bard. The highest grade was the ollamh, achieved after at least 12 years of study, during which the poet mastered more than 300 difficult meters and 250 primary stories and 100 secondary stories. Attaining the highest grade entitled a fili to wear a cloak of crimson-colored bird feathers and carry a wand, signifying the ollamh status. Although at first the filid wrote in a verse form similar to the alliterative verse prevalent in Germanic languages, they later developed intricate rules of prosody and rigid and complicated verse forms, the most popular of which was the debide (modern Irish deibide: “cut in two”), a quatrain composed of two couplets, linked by the rhyme of a stressed syllable with an unstressed one.

After the 6th century, filid were granted land. They were required not only to write official poetry but also to instruct the residents of the area in law (in particular, the ancient Brehon laws), literature, and national history. These seats of learning formed the basis for the great bardic colleges that developed in the Middle Ages and continued into the 17th century.

By the 12th century, filid were composing lyrical nature poetry and personal poems that praised the human qualities of their patrons, especially their generosity, rather than the patrons’ heroic exploits or ancestors. They no longer strictly adhered to set rules of prosody. The distinction between the fili and the bard gradually broke down; by the 13th century, the status of the filid had given way to the supremacy of the bards.