Читать книгу 366 Celt: A Year and A Day of Celtic Wisdom and Lore - Carl McColman - Страница 40

So what could a bard do when an important element of the lore had been lost? In a way, the loss of The Tain is a metaphor for the loss of the entire pre-Christian Celtic tradition. We see how Senchán Torpéist attempted to remedy the problem: first, by gathering what fragments existed and by attempting to reconstruct the story from them, almost as one would try to repair a broken piece of fine crystal by reassembling the various fragments. So the bard’s role as archivist could extend to being a historical detective, looking at all that we do know as a way of trying to close the gap on what we don’t know. After all, to understand who we are today, and to guess where we’re going, it’s fairly important to recognize who we’ve been and where we’re coming from. So by carefully preserving (or investigating) the past, the bard gives us in the present perhaps the most valuable gift possible: self-knowledge.