Nayanmars

During the period 5th and 10th century there lived a number of saintly devotees. They were staunch devotees of Lord Shiva. They were responsible to a large extent in spreading the Shaivism in South India (especially in TamilNadu). They were 63 in numbers and together they are known as Nayanmars. They hailed from almost all walks of life. Some of them were kings, farmers and so on. Some of them were bramhacharis, grahasthis, sanyasis and so on. In them also included some females. Besides these, wives of Nayanmars were also equally devoted to Lord Shiva. Some of the Nayanmars were highly learned scholars whereas some of them had not learnt any scripture and some of them were illiterate. They excelled in their poetic skills due to the grace of Lord Shiva. They sang a number of sacred hymns but all of them were devoted to Lord Shiva in their own way. They followed their routine service, profession but had a lot of time for their devotion to Lord Shiva. They visited number of temples and sang hymns in praise of Lord Shiva. The places where they sang hymns are 275 in numbers and are known as Paadal Petra Sthalam.

The volumes of Tamil Saiva hymns sung by them are known as Tirumurai. In almost all these 275 Shiva temples and some other famous temples we find the idols of these 63 Naynmars. There we also come across, along with their idols, the Tamil month and Nakshatra in which they were born. During the festivals in most of the temples the idols of Nayanmars are also taken in procession along with idols of Shiva, Parvati, Ganapati and Skanda. 

The life story of all Nayanmars can be found in Periya Puranam.

The names of Nayanmars and other relevant details can be found in Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayanars