Ode to Fear Flatha Ó'Gnímh

John Duncan, Saint Bride, 1913, National Galleries, Scotland

Nicholas Pierce

Uncover your harp, release that waterfall 
of light melodies — fresh airs to quell a fever.
Submit. Travel in song; give way to the call 
to soothe my sorrow, succour my sadness.

A warp to bind golden threads for the blind:
a loom to weft our slumbering spirits.
See how women in labour rest, the lost find:
the stark claret blood of soldiers is arrested.

Men turn from anguish as notes rush down 
Rory’s Glen in Kilwaughter, where cuckoos 
laud  you. Magician, where is your fairy mound,
for you must descend from divine gods of lore? 

​

​Did he, Craiftine, teach you the magic music,
or was it the she-wolf charmer Caschorach?
Were you, like Dhoreann, bewitched by demonic
strains of Abhartach in the time of Dana?

Was it Cú Raoi mac Dáire, Blathanaid’s sorcerer 
and king, friend of Fionn mac Cumhaill?
Did they banish you from Tír Tairngire?
Did the gods envy your gift of chorus?

If heaven is promised to the pure, Craiftine 
of Cashel’s secrets will see you through its gates.
Harper Nicholas, salve to sores unseen,
pluck your cascading stream, shower us in music.


After Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh (c.1631), based on the translation by Osborn Bergin. 
Modern adaptation by Angeline King

From Osborn Bergin, ‘Unpublished Irish Poems: VIII On a Blind Harper’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 8. 32 (1919), 611–13.  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30092835> [ Accessed 9 April 2026]



Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh (c.1580-1645)

In the late 1500s and 1600s, Larne was home to the Ó Gnímh / Agnew family, hereditary poets and ollamhs who served Gaelic dynasties like the MacDonnells and O’Neills. One of the poets may have lived in the townland of Lisnadrumbard, ‘the ridge of the bard's fort’, now Moordyke, Kilwaughter. Fear Flatha Ó Gnímh, son of the poet Brían Ó Gnímh, professed MacDonnell lineage and wrote of the downfall of the Gael in the early 1600s. If he lived in Kilwaughter, he was right next to many Galloway tenant farmers and the Agnew landowners who built the Scottish-style castle in the 1620s. 

Above is my adaptation of Osborn Bergin’s translation of Fear Flatha O Gnímnh’s poem, ‘Niocláis, nocht an gcláirsigh!’ about the Harper Nicholas Pierce from County Kerry.