Nairn, a crofter’s son (“crofter” being a rental farmer), was musically inclined from the beginning, having been given a pipe by a passing tinker after hearing his singing. He left home early, and traveled around the countryside, learning new songs and new instruments, playing for his dinner. At a rustic tavern on the edge of the lonely northern sea, he met Declan, a bard, with a harp, refined songs, and intense perception that saw power in Nairn. The harp had jewels which entranced Nairn, so at an invitation from Declan, he sung so passionately-magically with desire that the jewels melted off the harp and Declan gave them to him. Immediately after the song, soldiers from the king came and pressed Nairn into service as an army musician, to keep time for the march. The invading king, Oroh, won the battle easily—on his continent, bards knew magic, and his bard, Declan, wove a magic of mist, and the king’s soldiers mostly fought themselves while the invaders watched.

Nairn wandered in lonely places on the plain, until he eventually found the school that Nairn had founded to train bards for the king after he retired. He was poor at formal learning, but sang and played excellently. Declan started teaching him how to write, except that, as Nairn found out to his surprise, the writing was old ancient runes, such as had been carved on the standing stones littered about the plain (which in later years were said to move places in the night on occasion). Declan told him that this land had its ancient words which held power, but no one now knew how they were pronounced. He was hoping Nairn and the others that he had selected could learn the language, since they were natives of this continent and he was not.

The replacement bard Declan had suggested for the king after his retirement died, and so Declan announced a competition. No sooner had it been announced than an old bard, named Welkin, with a harp carved all over with runes showed up. He could actually speak the ancient words, and it was clear that he had power (and charisma). It was also clear to Declan that he wanted power for himself, and that he would not put it to good use, but he was the best bard by far. However, he thought that it was only his the harp that gave the bard his brilliance. He told Nairn that he needed to win the competition at all costs. After a couple days of the competition, Nairn challenged the bard. They played all day, taking turns to start a song and the other to join in; the competition would be won when one bard knew a song that the other did not. They continued all night and through the next day. Nairn found himself no longer at a campfire on the plain, but in a tower, and there were the ancient dead. There was a poem about this competition, Bone Plain, that it required three elements, and if you failed, you became immortal but lost your bardic abilities, trapped without everything that gave you life. Nairn realized that the ancient bard knew the old songs of the dead, which he did not. One song came to him, but the next did not, and in order to avoid losing, he played a low note along with the magic of need, that snapped the strings of the bard’s harp, destroying his abilities.

However, Nairn had apparently lost the competition. The roof of the tower at Declan’s bardic school was destroyed, and Nairn found that he was now effectively tone-deaf. He could not keep a harp in tune, and his singing might pass for that of a vagabond, but nothing more. He became a crofter like his dad had planned for him, married and had children, but he outlived them all. He outlived several families, and wandered for a while, ending up back at the school, which had now become a settlement. Wandering among the standing stones one night, in despair, he called to the stones desiring to become like them, unheeding of the years. He became a stone, and slumbered for several centuries. One of the bardic students was practicing where he was, and he woke up and desired to live again. He became human again, surprising the student, and then he walked into the kitchen at the school to get food. The cook was, traditionally, the bookkeeper’s daughter, and the bookkeeper, who was of the line of the original bookkeeper, recognized Nairn from some accounting notes in the old books. Shortly afterwards he vanished from history.

In the present, Phelan was a student at the bardic school in Caerau, now the capital city. He was skilled as a bard, but did not care; he was there because his father made him go there, and he was eagerly anticipating completing his dissertation so that he could leave. He chose an easy topic, Bone Plain, but as he researched Nairn, he discovered that the most solid historical evidence for Nairn was in the accounting records of the school. He began piecing together an outline of Nairn’s story from the purchasing records, such as for materials to fix what was now the roof of the lower room in the tower. He was also good friends with Zoe Wren, the daughter of the bookkeeper, who was the guest bard at the school, and also cooked for her father and Phelan when he came; they had known each other a long time and were close friends, although not lovers.

Phelan’s father was a drunkard who often slept outdoors among the standing stones, but he had a lot of money, and he financed archeological digs. Beatrice, the king’s daughter, excitedly worked at one of the sites. Her mother was constantly appalled at her lack of decorum and proper attire, but her father saw nothing at all wrong with her digging. In fact, he was invariably interested in the things that were dug up, and hosted a museum of artifacts. Phelan’s mother was from minor nobility, and mostly spent her days with do-gooding, but she did have Phelan find his father when there were official events at the castle that he needed to attend. His father was known and liked by the king, but did not enjoy court events at all. However, despite his complaints, he did attend.

A new bard turned up at the king’s court, who claimed to be from some backwater part of the country, but his singing and his harping on a harp carved with ancient runes held people spellbound. He was talking with Zoe and the king’s bard, Quennel, when the Quennel choked on bone in a piece of salmon, and could not sing for the king for next the several days. When Zoe, Quennel’s protege, went to see him the next day, he was sure that the bard had tried kill him with magic. Although he had been intending to die singing, he quickly resigned and the competition was announced. Bards crowded into the city for weeks on end, but the bard outshone them all. Quennel had been preparing Zoe to succeed him, and he told her she needed to win at all costs; he did not trust this bard.

Zoe asked Phelan to enter the competition for companionship and nerves; he had no desire to and considered himself poor, but he did so for her. Meanwhile, the bard attracted the interest of certain students who had an interest in the magic of barding. At a gathering at one tavern, Phelan was there when he clearly used bardic power resulting in an explosion of some sort. More passively, he also attracted the attention of Phelan’s father, who intensely disliked him, and tried to track him down to his night excursions with the students. At some point, Phelan was tracking his father, and Beatrice ran into them. None of them found the bard, but Phelan hit it off with Princess Beatrice; he was more of a historian than a bard, so their interests overlapped. Despite society being at the Victorian sort of transition from a pre-modern age to a fantasy / steampunk age, and despite them knowing nothing about each other, they end up in bed like “liberated” moderns.

The next day was the first day of the competition, and Beatrice said she would attend in the morning and hopefully hear he. He was scheduled first, and expected to fail out the first day. However, he Beatrice and sang to her. As his father said later, he was a lousy performer, except when singing to her, and then he was fantastic, so he advanced to the second round. The next day he played a duet with Zoe, and the bard joined them. Then Phelan’s father came and joined. At that point Phelan stopped and listened. Phelan’s father did all he could to outdo the bard, and Phelan noticed that the stadium had faded away and they were in a tower. When the playing stopped, Phelan understood what had happened: his father had brought them to Bone Plain. He realized that his father was Nairn, and he had rescued himself. This time the three elements were there: the speaking stone (Nairn), the full cauldron (Zoe had left a cauldron of stew cooking at the school), and the spiral tower (where they had gone by magic). The bard, who Phelan (and presumably Phelan’s father) had recognized as Welkin was invited to be the next Royal Bard, but he declined, so it was given to Zoe. To Phelan, who asked where he came from, he simply said that he went where the music was.

The Bards of Bone Plain is a fun read, with themes of the magical musical performance, ancient bardic magic, and modern textual analysis. The book is structured in the reverse of my summary: as Phelan slowly undercovers who Nairn was, the narrative animates that period of Nairn’s life, while at the same time, the modern story is progressing toward the recapitulation of Nairn’s competition. Thus, its structure is uncovering a mystery, except that the mystery is simply hiding information by telling the story backwards, the same technique used by the The Three Body Problem (later books are completely different). Contrast with the Harry Potter books, which are also hidden mysteries, but they are not simply told backwards. Rather, the process of discovery is the plot, while the mystery is simply something unknown until revealed. (Nor does the reveal feel like a deus ex machina, since the mechanism has already been disclosed in some tossed-off line earlier.)

The book is set in a transitional period into modernity. The princess drives a steam car, for example, but it is expensive and people are not comfortable with it. There are steam trams acting as public transport for everyone else. People are just discovering the principles of archeology and are busy uncovering the past. Yet, the monarchy shows no signs of being in jeopardy, and bards still occupy the high status that they did in ancient Ireland. It probably helps that a skilled bard can hold people spellbound, and that bards have access to a magical power which sometimes comes out, even though they cannot speak the ancient words of power. The combination works for the book, although I wonder how the rationalism that is required for scientific advances will interact with the humanities-oriented bards. In our world, bards have no place in society, because we have the written word to record our history, whereas they were the keeper of history in Ireland. The bards in this book, however, are not keepers of history, and their only function is that of sung literature. When recording technology becomes available, it seems like there will be need for fewer bards.

Unlike some of her other books, magic here is not just an innate power. There is some of that, accessible with strong desire or emotion (Nairn singing the jewels he coveted; Phelan performing superbly only when he is singing to Beatrice), but the real magic is the original, ancient words of the land. It is unclear why Declan was unable to transfer the knowledge he had, which worked well enough to enable his king to conquer the continent, It is also unclear why the ancient language has power but the modern one does not. In Leguin’s Earthsea, Truespeech is magical because someone or thing’s true name gives power over it (a feature of some pre-modern beliefs), because that is the language that the Creator used to create. However, McKillip just presents it with no justification.

McKillip keeps a sense of wonder by keeping the ancient secrets of magic unknown. They are clearly knowable, since the unknown bard could speak in that language, but even at the end, no one else is able to access them. This implies that the focus is on Nairn’s redemption, except that the essence of the book is the progressive revelation of what a bard is: someone who can sing a large repertoire of literature-songs and poetry-songs (poetry in the literary sense) as a skilled performer that can, at their best, hold an audience spellbound, but also someone who, in theory, has access to magic from the ancient words.