Seanchaidh

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A traditional Gaelic storyteller who preserves and passes on a community's history, genealogy, legends and lore by memory
2. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic culture, a keeper of oral tradition who recounts ancestry, tales and local history
3. A custodian of ancient lore in the Gaelic tradition, responsible for remembering and retelling a clan's stories and genealogies

Etymology: In the Gaelic world, a seanchaidh was a keeper of memory, someone who carried a community's history in speech rather than in writing. Such a person might recite genealogies, the boundaries of land, the deeds of ancestors, and the old tales, often from memory and often at length. The role was valued because it preserved the information a family or clan needed to know who it was and what it owned. The word is built from "sean," meaning "old," and a second element connected to lore or tradition. The Irish form is "seanchaí," and the two forms reflect the close relationship between Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Both belong to a culture where the spoken word was the main vehicle of learning, so the title describes a skill as much as a job.

Synonyms: storyteller, bard, historian