Guaranteeing what cannot be guaranteed. Defending and adapting bardic patronage in Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn

This paper offers a historicized close reading of Ag so an chomairce, a Chormaic ‘Here is the guarantee, Cormac’ (ca. 1585) by Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn (ca. 1550–ca. 1591), a 27-quatrain appeal to loyalist Sligo lord Cormac Ó hEadhra to be the master-poet's guarantor under the legal mechanism of booking (a form of legal registration or recording of dependents or followers of a given lord). The paper argues that the poem richly repays close literary-critical attention of the kind not usually accorded bardic poetry, displaying a remarkable rhetorical and political artistry in its deeply traditional, yet simultaneously richly innovative, defense of the patronly relationship, the native nobility that upheld it, and the bardic institution itself, as all were under threat from the transformations wrought by the expanding Tudor state.