Gleemen's Dance, 9th Century. From Cleopatra, Cotton Ms. (British Museum)
In a sixth-century Welsh poem, the Gogodin, it is remarked that “the poets of the world assess the men of valour”; and the combatants—whom they often parted by a sudden intervention—would afterwards accept their version of the fight, if worth commemorating in a poem, with reverence as well as pleasure. The gleeman, on the other hand, was a joculator, or entertainer, not a priest: a mere client of the military oligarchs and without the poet’s arduous professional training. He would often make a variety turn of his performance, with mime and tumbling.
If the gleeman’s flattery of his patrons were handsome enough and his song sweetly enough attuned to their mead-sodden minds, they would load him with gold torques and honey cakes; if not, they would pelt him with beef bones.
… it is a paradox that in midiaeval Wales the admired court poet had become a client of the prince to whom he addressed formal begging odes and forgotten the Theme almost entirely; while the despised and unendowed minstral who seemed to be a mere gleeman showed the greater poetic integrity, even though his verse was not so highly polished.
NB: ... by "the Theme", Graves means “the single poetic theme of Life and Death… the question of what survives of the beloved.” Here he quotes from the Welsh poet Alun Lewis...
