Ancient British Bard, Storyteller,Musician,Songwriter,Poet,healer

TONY MORRIS – BRITISH BARD IN THE ANCIENT TRADITION

Tony is a maker of verse, song, music and a storyteller with a keen interest in both Past and Present and their interlinking fibres, genealogy and both the corporeal and spiritual aspects of mortality. In his youth he was a skilled fencer at University and international level. He was also a skilled hunter of Hounds versed in the ways of the countryside and wrote and broadcast on Natural History. He improvises and extemporizes on a wide variety of instruments with which he accompanies the spoken word, Lyre, Native American Style Flute, Bardic Harp and others.

He has patri-lineal descent from a tribe of bards, who were second only to high priests, predating the Christian Era by many thousands of years.

Having trained in the Law, he spent over thirty years as a judge in various tribunals, as a coroner, for fifteen years, investigating sudden and violent deaths and twenty-seven years as an employment law judge, where he interpreted, developed and made Law.

FOOTNOTE:

The term ‘BARD’ has many meanings in British Culture and has been comparable to similar functionaries in other cultures worldwide.

Today, it is commonly used simply to mean ‘POET’ or a member of the Gorsedd of Bards who is admitted for honourable service to Wales.

Looking at the history of the bardic type persona with a world wide perspective, we have a person who is a maker of verse and song and music, a storyteller, sometimes a member of an hereditary cast that has some function relating to the spiritual and to law and to matters relating to mortality, spiritual and corporeal, genealogical data and who will have had some experience of at least one of the martial arts, such as fencing. They have tended to hold second rank positions in hierarchies.

In times past such persons have been charged with the preservation of knowledge of the past and with passing this on, together with fresh news that becomes part of the knowledge of the past.

The need to preserve knowledge of the past orally has declined, first because of writing, then of printing and then of audio recording and, latterly, with the whole progressive science of information technology.

Those who carried out these functions in the past are less required personally to keep alive existing traditional material. There function is now to communicate by means of verse and music the awareness of history that may have been overlooked and current happenings in an entertaining way and to assist in matters of spiritual awareness, often through the improvisation on simple musical instruments of sound that speaks directly to the emotional side of nature and to advise, where called upon, on the spiritual health and welfare outside, but with awareness of, the various religious beliefs that existed and that exist world wide.

As the term ‘BARD’ has become so restricted in meaning should we seek another term? We live in an age when categorisation, ‘Brand naming’, is seen to be of paramount importance. Many people who know Tony Morris and his work are convinced that he his not merely a Poet but a British Bard working in the Ancient Tradition, one of as few as ten currently practising in the British Isles.