Performance

Gaelic lays were sometimes recited, but more frequently they were sung in a manner which bears a broad resemblance to the performance of heroic verse in other unrelated cultures. Their tunes resembled ecclesiastical plain-chant.  These tunes may well give us an insight into the way in which syllabic verse was sung generally in the Gaelic world in the Middle Ages.

The role of the performer was essentially that of a transmitter, and the lays were not normally recomposed in the process of singing or recitation.  The fact that we can identify certain families of poems, distinguished by shared features of language, phrasing and overall structure, demonstrates that there were groups of texts which retained their shape in spite of being transmitted orally or in manuscript.  However, it has to be said that the texts were by no means rigidly fixed; there was room for some degree of alteration to the poems.  Thus, there were formulaic sequences within the tradition (for example, a descriptive sequence telling of the raising of the banners of the Fian) which could be moved from one poem to another as a kind of dramatic ornament to embellish the story; similarly catalogues of warrior names and warrior weapons could be deployed in different lays, and they could be expanded or reduced.

It also seems likely that certain poems grew with time, acquiring verses which may once have belonged to other poems or which may have been part of the common floating tradition of verse about the Fian.  Nevertheless, a wholesale process of oral recomposition is not suggested by the surviving evidence.  In the course of many performances, across the centuries, the language of the texts could be modernised, perhaps by an almost unconscious 'drift' of assimilation to the vernacular.  This helped the texts to survive within the tradition, especially after 1600 and the decline and eventual collapse of the bardic schools.  Gradually, however, even the most popular texts experienced loss of quatrains and confusion of lines, as their reciters, in succeeding generations, became less familiar with the conventions of the tradition.  Although the tradition thus lost its links with the classical conventions which governed its style and form in the Middle Ages, it remained creative, and continued to produce verse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.