seanchaí

A seanchaí ( or ; plural: ) is a traditional Gaelic storyteller or historian, serving as an oral repository. In Scottish Gaelic the word is (; plural: ). The word is often anglicised as shanachie ( ).

The word , which was spelled (plural ) before the Irish spelling reform of 1948, means a bearer of "old lore" (). In the Gaelic culture, long lyric poems which were recited by bards ( in the original pre-1948 spelling) in a tradition echoed by the .