When my friend Richard Hutt and I began making folk harps in the mid-seventies, we decided to call our partnership Pendragon Harps , which seemed natural enough. Pendragon was an ancient British (i.e., Welsh) title given to military leaders who organized the Christian kingdoms against invasions by Irish pirates and land-hungry Saxons and Angles who had succeeded in occupying the southeastern coast. The most famous of the legendary Pendragons were Uther and his son Arthur, who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries. (For a fascinating account of the role played by horses and horseshoes in Arthur’s campaigns against the Saxons, see Anne McCaffrey’s prize-winning novel, Black Horses for the King, published by Harcourt Brace. Anne and I also collaborated on A Diversity of Dragons , which was published by HarperPrism in 1997.)

The Brian Boru