An interesting discourse Alasdair, what was the earliest date of the
manuscript of the text? Toirm is also sometimes used in later verse
in relation to the bagpipes but it would seem to be applied to the
drones.

Your mention of the survival of the word 'blaodhach' in Welsh and
Scots Gaelic is very topical given the current Welsh season on
Simon's site and the interest in the horsehair strung harp. Whether
correct or not, a recent new look at the period from 789 to 1070
published last year, (From Pictland to Alba, 789-1070, by Alex
Woolf), has a refreshing take on the whole question of the
relationship of Irish and Scots Gaelic and modern Welsh. Boiled down
to its essentials, he advances the case that when early Welsh and
Gaelic split from their common route, the version spoken in what is
now Wales underwent faster and wider changes due to its proximity to
Roman Latin.

The impact of Larin on the Welsh language is apparently generally
accepted. But Mr Woolf advances the intriguing suggestion that other
early Welsh speaking areas like for example the 'Picts' continued
with a form that was far closer to the common root with Gaelic and
that made for an easier assimilation of the languages spoken by the
Scottish Gaels and the Picts. Staying in context of your observation
and the harp it is of course intersting to note how the word 'Ceard',
( in all its linguistic forms), specifically came to be used of a
harper in Wales while it retained it's older form of just an expert
craftsman in Gaelic, before settling down into its modern meaning of
a 'fine' or precious metal smith and eventually a tinsmith or tinker.

Staying with a sort of Welsh theme and the possible impact of cross
fertilisation of harp music between Ireland and Wales, I was thinking
about a comment I made at the Irish Harp School at Kilkenny this
year. It concerned the fact that the name 'Walsh' is currently about
the fourth most common name in Ireland today. Sitting dreaming on a
train, (and I have no end of praise for the trains between Kilkenny
and Dublin, a very civilised experience), it suddenly occurred to me
that no Gaelic speaking inhabitant of Ireland or Scotland would have
referred to someone from Wales as 'Walsh'. They would have used the
Gaelic 'Cuimridh' with the 'nach' end form, or
alternatively 'Breathnach' or Briton.

So how and where did all those Walsh's come from? Well there does
seem to be a simple explanation which certainly opens a new avenue on
the harping links between the two countries. Firstly, the name Walsh
or its modern form Welsh is derived of course from Wales, but that
was in fact an Anglo Saxon term based on the Germanic word 'Wal'
meaning 'Foreign' and was used by the incoming Anglo Saxons to
describe the indigenous inhabitants of Briton. It is the same element
that can be seen in the name of the Walnut, (or foreign nut), and the
Scottish surname Wallace, presumably given to the native inhabitants
of that part of southern Scotland by the Northumbrians as they
pressed northwards.

Following the Norman conquest of most of England it would seem a
reasonable speculation that the Normans adopted the Anglo Saxon name
for the inhabitants of 'Wales' and that when the by then Norman Welsh
lords who had established themselves in Wales, in turn became part of
the early Norman incursion into Ireland, it was the indigenous
followers from their Welsh estates who escribed by their Norman lords
as 'Walsh' became the ancestors of their modern Irish namesakes.

I suppose it would be theoretically possible to compute the relative
proportions of people named Walsh against the proportion of the total
Irish population bearing the names of the original Norman Welsh lords
and estimate the relative numbers of the native Welsh followers
brought with them to Ireland by the Normans, anybody got the time or
inclination?

Best wishes

Keith