Anonymous, Fúbún fúibh, a shluagh Gaoidheal (Fooboon upon you, ye hosts of the Gael)

"There is amongst the Irish a certain kind of people called bards, which are to them instead of poets, whose profession is to set forth the praises or dispraises of men in their poems or rhymes, the which are had in so high regard and estimation amongst them, that none dare displease them for fear to run into reproach through their offense, and to be made infamous in the mouths of all men." Edmund Spenser's attitude towards Ireland's bardic class was highly ambivalent, a mixture of dark suspicion and scarcely concealed envy. Like John Derricke, Spenser saw the bards as fomenters of rebellion; through a mixture of flattery and harangue, they spurred their patrons on to make war against the English. Yet what English poet could avoid a twinge of envy when considering the honor and influence which Irish poets enjoyed within their society? As Philip Sidney acknowledged in his Defense of Poesy, "in our neighbor country Ireland, where truly learning goes very bare, yet are their poets held in a devout reverence." For Spenser and Sidney, the contrast with the marginal role accorded to poetry in their own culture can only have been painful.

English observers certainly did not exaggerate the prestige and power of the bards in traditional Gaelic culture. The role of the bard, for which men were prepared by rigorous training in the bardic schools, combined those of poet, historian, and legal arbiter. A qualified bard would generally attach himself to the household of an Irish lord, and his chief duty was to supply poems celebrating his lord's achievements and ancestry, somewhat in the manner of a poet laureate. But the bard was never merely a paid flatterer. His role allowed him a freedom of speech for which there was no parallel in English society and, as Spenser notes, the bards were masters of scornful reproach as well as of praise.

Fúbún fúibh, a shluagh Gaoidheal, the work of an anonymous bard writing in the early 1540s, is remarkable in that it castigates the entire Irish ruling class. The word "fúbún" cannot be directly translated, but it carries the sense of "shame on you." The bard reproaches Ireland's clan leaders for acknowledging the supremacy of England's Henry VIII, who was declared King of Ireland in 1541. At the time, this acknowledgement must have seemed a fairly minor compromise to Gaelic lords secure in their dominance over their own territories. From the perspective of the author of Fúbún fúibh, however, they had effectively signed the death warrant of an ancient culture.

This English version of Fúbún fúibh was published by the Irish scholar and nationalist Douglas Hyde in A Literary History of Ireland (1901). It is a free and vigorous translation, and very much a product of its time. Himself a founding member of the Gaelic League, Hyde clearly aimed to stir the blood of contemporary Irish readers chafing under British rule. Wherever Hyde's translation departs significantly from the original, the hypertext footnotes provide the literal sense. Fúbún fúibh in the original Gaelic is also available online.