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The Tain
"[A] brilliant and altogether engaging new translation" (Los Angeles Times) of the greatest epic in Irish literature
Dating from the eighth century, The Táin is the oldest Irish epic, a mythic tale on par with Beowulf and The Aeneid. Following legendary warrior Cù Chulainn into his battle against the invading army of Connacht, The Táin is the story of the emergence of a hero, a paean to the Irish landscape, and a bawdy and contentious marital farce. In its first translation in forty years, Ciaran Carson brings this seminal work of Irish literature fully to life, capturing all of its visceral power in what acclaimed poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon individually called one of the best books of the year.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 750
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* They are officially published under that name
* They are traditional stories not attributed to a specific author
* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author
Books whose authorship is merely uncertain should be attributed to Unknown.
See also: Anonymous
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 470 reviews
August 15, 2011
When I learned that China Mieville had appropriated the title "The Tain" for one of his little apocalypto-dystopic excursions back in 2002, my reaction was something like this:
BACK OFF, MIEVILLE, YOU PLUNDERING, PLAGIARIZING SASSENACH GIT! THAT TITLE'S ALREADY TAKEN.
Because, as every cultured person knows, "The Tain" (pronunciation "Thoyne") is the name given to the most important story in ancient Irish literature, the collection of tales also referred to as "The Ulster Cycle", or "The Cattle Raid of Cooley".
I sputtered with indignation at the thought that someone would steal the name of Ireland's best-known legend for some weirdo post-apocalyptic novella about a race of wraith creatures that humans have subjugated by trapping them in mirrors. Then I learned that "tain" is a legitimate English word meaning "the tinfoil used as backing in mirrors" and I felt pretty stupid. SORRY, CHINA!
Like any self-respecting national saga, the (Irish) Tain lacks a single definitive version. Most versions draw on two different ancient manuscripts, from the 12th and 14th centuries, respectively, but its origins are far older. Some of the language dates back as far as the 8th century, and most Celtic scholars believe the the story had a long oral existence before eventually being committed to writing by monastic scribes. Both the content and the style of the narrative place the events in a timeframe that predates the introduction of Christianity to Ireland in 432, possibly as far back as the first century.
Most Irish people of my generation are familiar with the 1969 translation of the epic by the poet Thomas Kinsella (with brush drawings by Louis de Brocquy). I read the Kinsella translation at some point when I was in college, largely from a sense of obligation. Its brilliance was completely wasted on me at the time. I recently stumbled across a more recent (2007) translation of the Tain, by the poet Ciaran Carson. I really liked Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno, so I was interested to see what he would make of the Tain. So this past weekend I sat down with both the Kinsella and Carson translations, to reacquaint myself with the legendary exploits of the Celtic heroes of the Tain.
Like any self-respecting national saga, whole chunks of the Tain are unreadable. But much of it is hilarious; I had forgotten how weirdly entertaining the story is. A successful national epic will presumably reflect the concerns of the listeners -- people who make a living by taking to the sea in boats worry about sea-monsters, lost ships, threats of a maritime nature. In Argentina, cattle are central to economic survival, no surprise then that the gaucho is the hero of Argentina's national epic, Martin Fierro. Cattle were important in pre-Christian Ireland as well -- at its heart the Tain is the account of a cattle-rustling expedition gone terribly, terribly wrong.
The story of the Tain is straightforward; its particular charm lies in the telling. Here are some of the details I find totally kickass:
The opening scene, in which Ailill and Maeve, the king and queen of Connacht get swept up in a competitive enumeration of the wealth and possessions each has brought to the marriage, is referred to as the "pillow talk" scene. Maeve loses the competition by a bull and vows to get even; this is the McGuffin that launches the whole disastrous expedition to steal Donn Cuailgne, the great Brown Bull of Cooley, from the neighboring kingdom of Ulster.
The men of Ulster are all laid low by "the pangs". Because of a previous incident, involving a distinct lack of chivalry towards a pregnant lady, nine generations of Ulstermen have been cursed to suffer the pains of childbirth for five days and four nights "at their moment of greatest difficulty". So, just as the marauding Connacht army reaches their border, all the men of fighting age take to their beds, howling as if each was about to give birth to twins. Oops, make that "all but one" of the men.
For unspecified reasons, the hero CuChulainn (aka the hound of Culann the blacksmith, aka Setanta) is exempt from the curse, so it falls to him to keep the marauders at bay until his fellow Ulstermen have recovered from the pangs. It's roughly 30,000 to 1 out there. In other words, a completely unfair set up. The Connacht soldiers don't stand a chance.
CuChulainn isn't your average 17-year old. He's Ireland's version of Hercules. Super-endowed physically, not particularly bright, poorly developed emotional control, no impulse control, the boy has some serious combat skilz. With a couple of nifty superpowers thrown in. That cloak of invisibility, for one thing. Those heightened sensory powers. But the worst thing you can to is to make him angry, because that can trigger the riastradh, (the twisting, or contortion), a Hulk-like physical transformation that is followed by a killing frenzy. Kinsella translates this wonderfully as the "warp spasm"; in a rare misstep, Carson tries too hard and comes up with the the "torque" (he wants to evoke the kind of Celtic collar known as a torque, but why?). The killing frenzy proceeds by repeated implementation of the "thunder-feat", wherein enemy soldiers are taken out in increments of 100. I can't imagine that there's not already a video game.
CuChulainn's deadly kill-weapon, the Gae Bolga, totally rocks (as does its name). And the passage where he ultimately has no choice but to use it to disembowel his beloved childhood friend Ferdia is simultaneously devastating (OMG, he is forced to kill his best bro Ferdy) and provocative (explicit homoerotic imagery in ancient Celtic texts, who'd a thunk it?)
There's also an entertaining array of secondary characters -- backstabbing relatives and courtiers, wild women with the gift of prophecy, assorted figures from Celtic mythology, including the very nasty shapeshifting morrigan, a kind of unpleasant Celtic valkyrie you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
Both the Kinsella and Carson translations are highly readable. There are slight differences in their choices of what to include. Kinsella's coverage is greater, because he includes full translations of certain key remsceala (backstories), where Carson limits himself to summarizing them briefly in his endnotes. Both authors comment on the particular difficulties posed by certain sections of the manuscript, those written in the specific verse form known as rosc. These sections are apparently so obscure that both authors felt obliged to include an explicit disavowal of accuracy for their attempted translations. Carson tries for a greater fidelity to the original verse form, which makes for a much choppier, less intelligible translation. Obviously I can't judge the accuracy of either translation, but I thought both authors did an impressive job in terms of clarity, fluidity, and readability. Neither translation seems clearly superior - they are just different.
I feel obliged to include a caveat. There are certain aspects of the text that make some portions eye-glazingly unreadable. Two features in particular come to mind. The first is a kind of listmania -- the number of warriors taken down by Cuchulainn is enormous, and the authors of this manuscript want you know each one by name. This leads to this kind of incandescent prose:
The second issue is related. In Carson's words, the Tain is obsessed by topography, by place-names and their etymologies . It's hard to convey just how deep this apparent obsession runs. At times it seems as if the entire manuscript is nothing more than an effort to come up with a (dubious) etymology for the name of every topographical feature of the Irish landscape.
This kind of stuff is both extraordinarily dull and highly questionable, particularly when one takes into account that the word "lethan" means "broad". One begins to suspect that the brave warrior "Lethan" might not have existed at all. There are huge swaths of this kind of material scattered throughout the Tain. The good news is that it is eminently skippable.
Bearing this caveat in mind, I think anyone would enjoy the Tain.
BACK OFF, MIEVILLE, YOU PLUNDERING, PLAGIARIZING SASSENACH GIT! THAT TITLE'S ALREADY TAKEN.
Because, as every cultured person knows, "The Tain" (pronunciation "Thoyne") is the name given to the most important story in ancient Irish literature, the collection of tales also referred to as "The Ulster Cycle", or "The Cattle Raid of Cooley".
I sputtered with indignation at the thought that someone would steal the name of Ireland's best-known legend for some weirdo post-apocalyptic novella about a race of wraith creatures that humans have subjugated by trapping them in mirrors. Then I learned that "tain" is a legitimate English word meaning "the tinfoil used as backing in mirrors" and I felt pretty stupid. SORRY, CHINA!
Like any self-respecting national saga, the (Irish) Tain lacks a single definitive version. Most versions draw on two different ancient manuscripts, from the 12th and 14th centuries, respectively, but its origins are far older. Some of the language dates back as far as the 8th century, and most Celtic scholars believe the the story had a long oral existence before eventually being committed to writing by monastic scribes. Both the content and the style of the narrative place the events in a timeframe that predates the introduction of Christianity to Ireland in 432, possibly as far back as the first century.
Most Irish people of my generation are familiar with the 1969 translation of the epic by the poet Thomas Kinsella (with brush drawings by Louis de Brocquy). I read the Kinsella translation at some point when I was in college, largely from a sense of obligation. Its brilliance was completely wasted on me at the time. I recently stumbled across a more recent (2007) translation of the Tain, by the poet Ciaran Carson. I really liked Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno, so I was interested to see what he would make of the Tain. So this past weekend I sat down with both the Kinsella and Carson translations, to reacquaint myself with the legendary exploits of the Celtic heroes of the Tain.
Like any self-respecting national saga, whole chunks of the Tain are unreadable. But much of it is hilarious; I had forgotten how weirdly entertaining the story is. A successful national epic will presumably reflect the concerns of the listeners -- people who make a living by taking to the sea in boats worry about sea-monsters, lost ships, threats of a maritime nature. In Argentina, cattle are central to economic survival, no surprise then that the gaucho is the hero of Argentina's national epic, Martin Fierro. Cattle were important in pre-Christian Ireland as well -- at its heart the Tain is the account of a cattle-rustling expedition gone terribly, terribly wrong.
The story of the Tain is straightforward; its particular charm lies in the telling. Here are some of the details I find totally kickass:
The opening scene, in which Ailill and Maeve, the king and queen of Connacht get swept up in a competitive enumeration of the wealth and possessions each has brought to the marriage, is referred to as the "pillow talk" scene. Maeve loses the competition by a bull and vows to get even; this is the McGuffin that launches the whole disastrous expedition to steal Donn Cuailgne, the great Brown Bull of Cooley, from the neighboring kingdom of Ulster.
The men of Ulster are all laid low by "the pangs". Because of a previous incident, involving a distinct lack of chivalry towards a pregnant lady, nine generations of Ulstermen have been cursed to suffer the pains of childbirth for five days and four nights "at their moment of greatest difficulty". So, just as the marauding Connacht army reaches their border, all the men of fighting age take to their beds, howling as if each was about to give birth to twins. Oops, make that "all but one" of the men.
For unspecified reasons, the hero CuChulainn (aka the hound of Culann the blacksmith, aka Setanta) is exempt from the curse, so it falls to him to keep the marauders at bay until his fellow Ulstermen have recovered from the pangs. It's roughly 30,000 to 1 out there. In other words, a completely unfair set up. The Connacht soldiers don't stand a chance.
CuChulainn isn't your average 17-year old. He's Ireland's version of Hercules. Super-endowed physically, not particularly bright, poorly developed emotional control, no impulse control, the boy has some serious combat skilz. With a couple of nifty superpowers thrown in. That cloak of invisibility, for one thing. Those heightened sensory powers. But the worst thing you can to is to make him angry, because that can trigger the riastradh, (the twisting, or contortion), a Hulk-like physical transformation that is followed by a killing frenzy. Kinsella translates this wonderfully as the "warp spasm"; in a rare misstep, Carson tries too hard and comes up with the the "torque" (he wants to evoke the kind of Celtic collar known as a torque, but why?). The killing frenzy proceeds by repeated implementation of the "thunder-feat", wherein enemy soldiers are taken out in increments of 100. I can't imagine that there's not already a video game.
CuChulainn's deadly kill-weapon, the Gae Bolga, totally rocks (as does its name). And the passage where he ultimately has no choice but to use it to disembowel his beloved childhood friend Ferdia is simultaneously devastating (OMG, he is forced to kill his best bro Ferdy) and provocative (explicit homoerotic imagery in ancient Celtic texts, who'd a thunk it?)
There's also an entertaining array of secondary characters -- backstabbing relatives and courtiers, wild women with the gift of prophecy, assorted figures from Celtic mythology, including the very nasty shapeshifting morrigan, a kind of unpleasant Celtic valkyrie you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
Both the Kinsella and Carson translations are highly readable. There are slight differences in their choices of what to include. Kinsella's coverage is greater, because he includes full translations of certain key remsceala (backstories), where Carson limits himself to summarizing them briefly in his endnotes. Both authors comment on the particular difficulties posed by certain sections of the manuscript, those written in the specific verse form known as rosc. These sections are apparently so obscure that both authors felt obliged to include an explicit disavowal of accuracy for their attempted translations. Carson tries for a greater fidelity to the original verse form, which makes for a much choppier, less intelligible translation. Obviously I can't judge the accuracy of either translation, but I thought both authors did an impressive job in terms of clarity, fluidity, and readability. Neither translation seems clearly superior - they are just different.
I feel obliged to include a caveat. There are certain aspects of the text that make some portions eye-glazingly unreadable. Two features in particular come to mind. The first is a kind of listmania -- the number of warriors taken down by Cuchulainn is enormous, and the authors of this manuscript want you know each one by name. This leads to this kind of incandescent prose:
These are the names of their chiefs and commanders: two Cruaids, two Calads, two Cirs, two Ciars, two Ecelss, three Croms, three Cauraths, three Combirges, four Feochars, four Furachars, four Casses, four Fotas, ....(varying numbers of 18 more family names)...., ten Fiachas and ten Fedelmids.
The second issue is related. In Carson's words, the Tain is obsessed by topography, by place-names and their etymologies . It's hard to convey just how deep this apparent obsession runs. At times it seems as if the entire manuscript is nothing more than an effort to come up with a (dubious) etymology for the name of every topographical feature of the Irish landscape.
Lethan came to his ford on the river Nith in Conaille. Galled by Cuchulainn's deeds, he lay in wait for him. CuChulainn cut off his head and left it with the body. Hence the name Ath Lethan.
This kind of stuff is both extraordinarily dull and highly questionable, particularly when one takes into account that the word "lethan" means "broad". One begins to suspect that the brave warrior "Lethan" might not have existed at all. There are huge swaths of this kind of material scattered throughout the Tain. The good news is that it is eminently skippable.
Bearing this caveat in mind, I think anyone would enjoy the Tain.
September 16, 2010
The Tain is epic. In fact it is Epic - at least as Epic as more famous Epics, such as the Iliad. In fact, the number of correspondences between the Cattle Raid of Cooley and the story of Achilles' rage is remarkable. (It must be - I just remarked it.) Wanna know what they are (at least some of them, anyway)? Oi - you at the back! stop saying, "No."
here we go:
Illiad: Achilles only vulnerable on one heel.
Tain: CuChulain's foster brother only vulnerable to a gae bolga shoved where the sun doesn't shine. (The gae bolga is a mysterious design of spear - the blade had backward pointing barbs - other aspects of the design are obscure and variously interpreted.)
Illiad: Lots of riding round in chariots, killing people.
Tain: Lots of riding round in chariots, killing people.
Illiad: Lots of stomping around on foot, killing people.
Tain: Lots of stomping around on foot, killing people.
Illiad: Single combat.
Tain: Single combat. Generally in a ford that gets its name from the event.
Illiad: Riding round in a chariot, dragging the corpse of your enemy behind you.
Tain: Riding round in a chariot, dragging the corpse of your enemy behind you.
Illiad: Supernatural intervention.
Tain: Supernatural intervention.
Illiad: Heaps of famous heroes.
Tain: Heaps of famous heroes, especially near the end.
Illiad: Big fight over a beautiful woman.
Tain: Big fight over a prize bull. Okay - not such a close correspondence.
Illiad: Javelins.
Tain: Spears.
Illiad: Achilles chooses a short life but ever-lasting fame. (But maybe this isn't mentioned in the Illiad - I can't remember.)
Tain: CuChulain chooses a short life rather than everlasting ridicule. (But not during the Cattle Raid.)
Illiad: Achilles' rage.
Tain: CuChulain's "warp-spasm".
Illiad: Verse.
Tain: Mainly prose - some cryptic verse.
So, by now you should be convinced that the pagan Celts in Ireland were just as crazy and violent as any ancient Achaen group you care to name and appreciated the stories of their ancestors' crazy violence as much, too.
Three fifties of Bards couldn't praise this Epic enough, so I won't even try - just read it and find out how many boys can play hurling on the back of Ulster's prize bull, how CuChulain (the Hound of Culann) got his name and weapons and the name of every ford, hill and rock that figured in CuChulain's almost single handed defense of Ulster from an army of 30,000!
here we go:
Illiad: Achilles only vulnerable on one heel.
Tain: CuChulain's foster brother only vulnerable to a gae bolga shoved where the sun doesn't shine. (The gae bolga is a mysterious design of spear - the blade had backward pointing barbs - other aspects of the design are obscure and variously interpreted.)
Illiad: Lots of riding round in chariots, killing people.
Tain: Lots of riding round in chariots, killing people.
Illiad: Lots of stomping around on foot, killing people.
Tain: Lots of stomping around on foot, killing people.
Illiad: Single combat.
Tain: Single combat. Generally in a ford that gets its name from the event.
Illiad: Riding round in a chariot, dragging the corpse of your enemy behind you.
Tain: Riding round in a chariot, dragging the corpse of your enemy behind you.
Illiad: Supernatural intervention.
Tain: Supernatural intervention.
Illiad: Heaps of famous heroes.
Tain: Heaps of famous heroes, especially near the end.
Illiad: Big fight over a beautiful woman.
Tain: Big fight over a prize bull. Okay - not such a close correspondence.
Illiad: Javelins.
Tain: Spears.
Illiad: Achilles chooses a short life but ever-lasting fame. (But maybe this isn't mentioned in the Illiad - I can't remember.)
Tain: CuChulain chooses a short life rather than everlasting ridicule. (But not during the Cattle Raid.)
Illiad: Achilles' rage.
Tain: CuChulain's "warp-spasm".
Illiad: Verse.
Tain: Mainly prose - some cryptic verse.
So, by now you should be convinced that the pagan Celts in Ireland were just as crazy and violent as any ancient Achaen group you care to name and appreciated the stories of their ancestors' crazy violence as much, too.
Three fifties of Bards couldn't praise this Epic enough, so I won't even try - just read it and find out how many boys can play hurling on the back of Ulster's prize bull, how CuChulain (the Hound of Culann) got his name and weapons and the name of every ford, hill and rock that figured in CuChulain's almost single handed defense of Ulster from an army of 30,000!
February 22, 2018
The Táin or 'An Táin' (Irish), or complete as 'The Cattle Raid of Cooley' (Táin Bó Cúailnge). Let me just say I have some questions about this translation, and about the original transcribers who more than likely put their own spin on this story. What's more there are multiple modern translations that differ in transliteration and literary style and I'd like to understand the differences.
All aside this is a tale that begins with a trivial quarrel of a queen and her lover which escalates to the point of all Ireland getting involved after a cattle deal went bad in the process of settling their domestic dispute. The End.
Beyond the explanations for how certain places got their name, it's upon the reader to extract any morals. The most obvious takes are thou shalt not covet, try to talk it out first, don't bite off more than you can chew, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
You'll find several instances of absurd Looney Tune like descriptions of violence, there's also just a lot of violence... I enjoyed the descriptive detail of costume and arms down to a man (and a woman or two). There was one point when the men of Ulster were rallying and it was like a role call of medieval superheroes.
Battles with the protagonist a.k.a. the boy hero: Cú Chulainn were over the top. When he's pissed he gets his Torque-on ...basically a fit of battle rage that transforms him into some kind of Hell-Hulk who goes on a rampage in his war chariot.
By Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
No doubts this would make a great movie script, that would probably be a lot harder for Hollywood to screw up as it's all action, and pretty predictable in the drama department.
If you're the serious type I don't recommend this, but If you have a morbid sense of humor this will be great fun I'm sure.
All aside this is a tale that begins with a trivial quarrel of a queen and her lover which escalates to the point of all Ireland getting involved after a cattle deal went bad in the process of settling their domestic dispute. The End.
Beyond the explanations for how certain places got their name, it's upon the reader to extract any morals. The most obvious takes are thou shalt not covet, try to talk it out first, don't bite off more than you can chew, and if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
You'll find several instances of absurd Looney Tune like descriptions of violence, there's also just a lot of violence... I enjoyed the descriptive detail of costume and arms down to a man (and a woman or two). There was one point when the men of Ulster were rallying and it was like a role call of medieval superheroes.
Battles with the protagonist a.k.a. the boy hero: Cú Chulainn were over the top. When he's pissed he gets his Torque-on ...basically a fit of battle rage that transforms him into some kind of Hell-Hulk who goes on a rampage in his war chariot.
By Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874 - 1951) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
No doubts this would make a great movie script, that would probably be a lot harder for Hollywood to screw up as it's all action, and pretty predictable in the drama department.
If you're the serious type I don't recommend this, but If you have a morbid sense of humor this will be great fun I'm sure.
September 7, 2018
The Tain, sortof a bizarro Irish epic - like all the other Irish epics - was one of my favorite works in college. The definitive translation is by Kinsella (1969), but there's this newish one by Ciaran Carson (2007), which I've finally gotten around to judging.
Here's the spoiler-free gist of the Tain: the Irish king Ailill and his wife Medb argue in bed over who's richer, and on the spot they insist on having every item they each own brought to them so they can tally it up - herds and all. They find that Ailill is up by an enormous bull, the equal of which can only be found in Ulster.
Here's the rest of the plot, with some
It's a terrific, bizarre, filthy story, and I haven't even mentioned that Cu Chulainn is basically the Hulk, prone to fits of rage where his body contorts into shapes that take whole pages to describe. I love the thing.
Carson's translation is fine. It modernizes the language, with the usual pros and cons of modernizations: it flows quickly and naturally, but every once in a while you get a line like "Two hearts that beat as one," and if Stacey Q references don't throw you right out of a thousand-year-old epic poem, I don't know what will. He also makes the grave mistake of trying to approach the rhyme of the original's occasional poetry breaks, despite having no rhyme skills whatsoever; witness this disgrace:
You've walked into the gap,
You're in the danger zone.
Sharp weapons will pierce you
and cleave flesh and bone.
This hero will take you
to another place
where you will find nothing
but death and disgrace. (p. 139)
Those are some shitty rhymes, man. (And, yes, another 80's music reference.) Compare Kinsella's version, in which he more or less throws his hands up at rhyme:
You have reached your doom,
your hour is come.
My sword will slash,
and not softly.
When we meet you will fall
at a hero's hands.
Never again
will you lead men. (p. 184)
Neither is terrific poetry, but Kinsella's is at least not distractingly awful.
Kinsella sporadically uses slant rhyme, which is a much better decision. And can you feel how numbingly rhythmic Carson's lines are? Like Run DMC at their worst, right? Whereas Kinsella breaks his metre up violently, which helps it feel a little less like a poem written by a sixth-grader. Carson is more faithful to the original; but metres that work in one language don't always work in another, and he should've admitted that in English, this sort of two-stress line sounds like nursery.
That's one sort of poem that recurs occasionally throughout the Tain. The other is called rosc, and it's entirely weirder. Sortof a show-off / ambiguous prophecy / flyting combination, it's purposefully obscure and pretty much impossible to deal with. Here's a comparison of the two translations, in a passage where Ailill says he doesn't really care that his wife slept with Fergus for no reason other than she's generally a trick:
Carson:
I know the game well
likewise queens and women true what they say
the first fault theirs their sweet companionable wrath
Finnabair's fair shield valorous Fergus (p. 62)
Kinsella:
I know all
about queens and women
I lay first fault
straight at women's
own sweet swellings
and loving lust
valorous Fergus (p. 105)
I chose these two passages at random. In general, both have moments of passable aesthetic value; Kinsella is generally more clear in his meaning, although that also means he's taking more liberty with the exact translation.
Overall, Carson's translation is serviceable, except for his crap poetry, and reads fast; I'm not too down on it, but Kinsella is still the king.
A bookmark
I made a bookmark out of one of Louis Le Brocquy's amazing illustrations.
More on my weird bookmark project here.
Here's the spoiler-free gist of the Tain: the Irish king Ailill and his wife Medb argue in bed over who's richer, and on the spot they insist on having every item they each own brought to them so they can tally it up - herds and all. They find that Ailill is up by an enormous bull, the equal of which can only be found in Ulster.
Here's the rest of the plot, with some
It's a terrific, bizarre, filthy story, and I haven't even mentioned that Cu Chulainn is basically the Hulk, prone to fits of rage where his body contorts into shapes that take whole pages to describe. I love the thing.
Carson's translation is fine. It modernizes the language, with the usual pros and cons of modernizations: it flows quickly and naturally, but every once in a while you get a line like "Two hearts that beat as one," and if Stacey Q references don't throw you right out of a thousand-year-old epic poem, I don't know what will. He also makes the grave mistake of trying to approach the rhyme of the original's occasional poetry breaks, despite having no rhyme skills whatsoever; witness this disgrace:
You've walked into the gap,
You're in the danger zone.
Sharp weapons will pierce you
and cleave flesh and bone.
This hero will take you
to another place
where you will find nothing
but death and disgrace. (p. 139)
Those are some shitty rhymes, man. (And, yes, another 80's music reference.) Compare Kinsella's version, in which he more or less throws his hands up at rhyme:
You have reached your doom,
your hour is come.
My sword will slash,
and not softly.
When we meet you will fall
at a hero's hands.
Never again
will you lead men. (p. 184)
Neither is terrific poetry, but Kinsella's is at least not distractingly awful.
Kinsella sporadically uses slant rhyme, which is a much better decision. And can you feel how numbingly rhythmic Carson's lines are? Like Run DMC at their worst, right? Whereas Kinsella breaks his metre up violently, which helps it feel a little less like a poem written by a sixth-grader. Carson is more faithful to the original; but metres that work in one language don't always work in another, and he should've admitted that in English, this sort of two-stress line sounds like nursery.
That's one sort of poem that recurs occasionally throughout the Tain. The other is called rosc, and it's entirely weirder. Sortof a show-off / ambiguous prophecy / flyting combination, it's purposefully obscure and pretty much impossible to deal with. Here's a comparison of the two translations, in a passage where Ailill says he doesn't really care that his wife slept with Fergus for no reason other than she's generally a trick:
Carson:
I know the game well
likewise queens and women true what they say
the first fault theirs their sweet companionable wrath
Finnabair's fair shield valorous Fergus (p. 62)
Kinsella:
I know all
about queens and women
I lay first fault
straight at women's
own sweet swellings
and loving lust
valorous Fergus (p. 105)
I chose these two passages at random. In general, both have moments of passable aesthetic value; Kinsella is generally more clear in his meaning, although that also means he's taking more liberty with the exact translation.
Overall, Carson's translation is serviceable, except for his crap poetry, and reads fast; I'm not too down on it, but Kinsella is still the king.
A bookmark
I made a bookmark out of one of Louis Le Brocquy's amazing illustrations.
More on my weird bookmark project here.
September 15, 2021
I love these myths and legends with all my heart ❤
Much of early Irish literature has been lost and anything that does survive, has been translated from mostly flawed and mutilated manuscripts.
Irish literature is thought to have had an strong oral existence before it received any literary shape.
Unfortunately, the monastic scribes that sought to record these legends inadvertently (or prehaps so) added a few traces of Christian colouring to these legends. How much of the information that has been changed or left out completely, we may never know.
The legend of the Táin Bó Cúailnge is far more ancient than the manuscripts they are recorded on. It is not known exactly when these events are meant to have taken place, and the language of the earliest form of the story is thought to date around 8CE but may in fact be two centuries older, or more.
Not detailed in this book, there are other manuscripts detailing stories centred around King's thought to have ruled between 3BCE and 8CE.
Predating even these stories, we have mythological stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who inhabited Ireland long before the Celts did.
What we do know is, pseudo-historical texts claim that Emain Macha was established as the center of the Ulaid between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE and that the power of its dynastic rulers declined in the fourth or fifth century CE. Emain Macha comprises a concentration of forty-six prehistoric monuments, central to which is Navan Fort. The centre where these stories emanate from, Emain Macha, or Navan Fort, apparently became the new focus of ritual activity from about the tenth century BCE onward.
Upon excavating the site, a large central post of the structure produced a tree-ring date of late 95 BCE or early 94 BCE.
The book itself is great. It gives you a really in depth look at the Ulster cycle and the myths leading up to the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
Some of the tales I knew well, such as the classic tale of how Sétanta became Cúchulainn and his other boyhood deeds. Ferdia and Cúchulainns battle. Some of the tales I did not remember at all, or hadn't been told. There was so much more to the Táin Bó Cúailnge than I remembered as a child.
The story itself was hard to follow at times and was difficult to read, but that more to do with the nature of the translations and the omissions to make it more readable and fluid as a whole, and I think the author did an excellent job of formatting and translating the stories. That said, it still was a difficult read.
I loved the authors notes and the forewords, they were really inciteful.
I will forever and always be completely dismayed at how much of these great stories we have lost.
Much of early Irish literature has been lost and anything that does survive, has been translated from mostly flawed and mutilated manuscripts.
Irish literature is thought to have had an strong oral existence before it received any literary shape.
Unfortunately, the monastic scribes that sought to record these legends inadvertently (or prehaps so) added a few traces of Christian colouring to these legends. How much of the information that has been changed or left out completely, we may never know.
The legend of the Táin Bó Cúailnge is far more ancient than the manuscripts they are recorded on. It is not known exactly when these events are meant to have taken place, and the language of the earliest form of the story is thought to date around 8CE but may in fact be two centuries older, or more.
Not detailed in this book, there are other manuscripts detailing stories centred around King's thought to have ruled between 3BCE and 8CE.
Predating even these stories, we have mythological stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who inhabited Ireland long before the Celts did.
What we do know is, pseudo-historical texts claim that Emain Macha was established as the center of the Ulaid between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE and that the power of its dynastic rulers declined in the fourth or fifth century CE. Emain Macha comprises a concentration of forty-six prehistoric monuments, central to which is Navan Fort. The centre where these stories emanate from, Emain Macha, or Navan Fort, apparently became the new focus of ritual activity from about the tenth century BCE onward.
Upon excavating the site, a large central post of the structure produced a tree-ring date of late 95 BCE or early 94 BCE.
The book itself is great. It gives you a really in depth look at the Ulster cycle and the myths leading up to the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
Some of the tales I knew well, such as the classic tale of how Sétanta became Cúchulainn and his other boyhood deeds. Ferdia and Cúchulainns battle. Some of the tales I did not remember at all, or hadn't been told. There was so much more to the Táin Bó Cúailnge than I remembered as a child.
The story itself was hard to follow at times and was difficult to read, but that more to do with the nature of the translations and the omissions to make it more readable and fluid as a whole, and I think the author did an excellent job of formatting and translating the stories. That said, it still was a difficult read.
I loved the authors notes and the forewords, they were really inciteful.
I will forever and always be completely dismayed at how much of these great stories we have lost.
March 21, 2022
Ireland's rather quirky answer to The Iliad. The Tain as a name sounds somewhat serious and ominous, a misleading impression -- the alternative title The Cattle-Raid of Cooley perhaps better captures the tone of the story. This is a tale that is at root about a woman wanting to win an argument with her new husband (or rather, that's the gloss, he very actively supports her in the raid). In essence, she desires a loan of a famous Ulster bull, to contrast with her husband's famous bull, and since by misunderstanding and drink this request is refused, the armies of Connacht and Munster (and possibly a few others, I lost track) go on a cattle-raid into Ulster.
The timing of the raid is fortuitous, because all the men of Ulster are laid up with labour pains (don't ask), barring our hero Cú Chulainn and his father (and some youths who are structurally not very important to the story). Upon learning of the raiding army, Cú immediately, uh, goes off to see a girl he wants to sleep with. Cú's father goes off to warn the Ulstermen (to no purpose) and the border is guarded by some improvised magic of Cú's. He eventually returns to duty and slays some of the Connacht scouts, at which point the Connacht army learns about Cú from Fergus, their extremely unreliable exiled Ulsterman, who almost constantly works against the invading army he is embedded with.
The tales of Cú are of a familiar ridiculous style -- he's faster than a javelin, can fell great trees with a single stroke, and has been singlehandedly besting ludicrous numbers of opponents since the age of five. Exactly the guy you want defending your border while all your other warriors are suffering the pains of childbirth (no really, don't ask). The current conflict is appropriately one-sided, with Cú defeating implausible numbers of opponents, and yet somehow the Connacht army also seems always to be advancing through Ulster, leaving a veritable trail of placenames commemorating their famous defeats, and there are several references to the numbers of women and cattle they have successfully captured (the prize bull itself seeming tricky to locate).
My main disappointment with the tale is that with a few exceptions the battles of Cú are told with no sense of the moment. A famous figure is introduced, sometimes with mention of how they were seduced into battle by the promise of the Connacht princess' hand (and some land), and then they go to fight Cú and then Cú kills them -- there's rarely any battle-detail or much to differentiate these figures if you didn't already know their names as the original audience must have, and there's certainly no sense of a struggle on Cú's part. The main aberration from this pattern, and the one really good fight in the story, was the multi-day combat with Fer Diad, which ended with Cú victorious but badly bloodied. (To be fair, there was a reasonable fight previously with a fellow named Loch, which also ended with Cú requiring time to heal, but its presentation was not as dramatic and the main elements seem to recur in the fight with Fer Diad).
While Cú is laid up after the fight with Fer Diad, the Ulstermen finally get over their labour pains and come to fight Connacht. Fergus does a great job demoralising the troops of Connacht by talking up the ferocity and power of every single Ulster noble described by the scout, and then there's a battle of uncertain resolution -- except at some point the Connacht troops manage to capture the prize bull they were after and take it home. At any rate the conflict ends with peace, and a lot of people get to go home feeling mighty proud of themselves.
This is not a tale of deep meanings. It's a tribal record of warfare, trickery, and often rather immoral behaviour, and whatever relation to a historical record it might have has obviously been exaggerated out of all recognition. It is however fairly entertaining, and no doubt was more so in the sort of festive setting where it was meant to be related, for people that already recognise the characters from the rest of the Ulster cycle.
Read
May 16, 2025What an epic story! Very much enjoyed, though I didn't rate it.
Check out my full book review on my channel for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHrt2...
Check out my full book review on my channel for details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHrt2...
September 22, 2011
When I came across an actual copy of this book during my visit to Chicago, I was almost afraid to buy it. I had to buy it, of course--it's not often I find real evidence of Celtic Studies works showing up in bookstores, and when I do find titles that fit the bill, I always buy them. Bookstores need to be supported and congratulated for stocking things that are outside of the mainstream.
I was afraid to read the book because I was convinced that Thomas Kinsella's translation, graced by Louis le Brocquy's genius illustrations, was the only translation I could ever love. I'm a huge fan of Carson's, so I really wanted his work to shine. Moreover, a few years ago I had a fraught, life-affirming conversation with Carson about translation and poetry and voice where he convinced me with just a few words that I should keep up my own attempts at poetry in translation. So I needed his version of this great work to be wonderful.
I needn't have worried. Carson opens the book with an introduction explaining just how hesitant he was to publish a translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, in light of Kinsella's masterful work. Carson even calls his translation an homage to Kinsella. Like Kinsella, Carson used Recension I. Carson chose not to include the remscéla, or fore-tales, which are some of my favorite bits, but which aren't physically included in Lebor na hUidre or The Yellow Book of Lecan, the two texts in which The Tain survives.
Carson is a wonderful translator. He's fluent in modern Irish, and he's a musician as well as a poet and writer, and I think those skills combine to enrich his translation. He is clearly intrigued by the true characters of Cú Chulainn, Medb, Ailill, and Fergus, and by the mores surrounding sex, violence, honor, ownership, land, family--all the big ones. Having read his and compared it to Kinsella's, I don't think I can read one without the other again. Both convince me to keep struggling through language and myth that is so distant from my daily life.
I was afraid to read the book because I was convinced that Thomas Kinsella's translation, graced by Louis le Brocquy's genius illustrations, was the only translation I could ever love. I'm a huge fan of Carson's, so I really wanted his work to shine. Moreover, a few years ago I had a fraught, life-affirming conversation with Carson about translation and poetry and voice where he convinced me with just a few words that I should keep up my own attempts at poetry in translation. So I needed his version of this great work to be wonderful.
I needn't have worried. Carson opens the book with an introduction explaining just how hesitant he was to publish a translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, in light of Kinsella's masterful work. Carson even calls his translation an homage to Kinsella. Like Kinsella, Carson used Recension I. Carson chose not to include the remscéla, or fore-tales, which are some of my favorite bits, but which aren't physically included in Lebor na hUidre or The Yellow Book of Lecan, the two texts in which The Tain survives.
Carson is a wonderful translator. He's fluent in modern Irish, and he's a musician as well as a poet and writer, and I think those skills combine to enrich his translation. He is clearly intrigued by the true characters of Cú Chulainn, Medb, Ailill, and Fergus, and by the mores surrounding sex, violence, honor, ownership, land, family--all the big ones. Having read his and compared it to Kinsella's, I don't think I can read one without the other again. Both convince me to keep struggling through language and myth that is so distant from my daily life.
June 24, 2011
I haven't read much Irish mythology at all, so it was high time I got round to reading The Táin. It's an epic based around the feats of Cù Chulainn, as he defends the land of Ulster from the armies of Ailell and Medb. It's (here's one of my favourite words again) hyperbolic and, well, it's an epic, what do you expect? There's verse and one-on-one combats and ridiculous feats of arms involving throwing spears through boulders and so on.
I was actually surprised by how little I knew about The Tain. I'm sure I've read plenty about Cù Chulainn, but knew very little about what goes on in the Cattle Raid.
The translation seems clear and is very easy to read, though I can't comment on accuracy. The introduction is helpful, and the notes are comprehensive and informative.
I was actually surprised by how little I knew about The Tain. I'm sure I've read plenty about Cù Chulainn, but knew very little about what goes on in the Cattle Raid.
The translation seems clear and is very easy to read, though I can't comment on accuracy. The introduction is helpful, and the notes are comprehensive and informative.
August 20, 2010
Imagine someone took you for a walk from the North to the South of the USA, from New England across the Mason-Dixon line and onward to Georgia, all the while using cues from the landscape to narrate the Civil War. The Táin does this, guiding the reader through an interactive map where the story and the landscape are inseparable.
While undeniably a "classic" epic, the unity of place, narrative, and heritage gives The Táin the feel of classic Indian epics, like the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, couching stories within stories and relying on a body of tales outside of the work at hand for reference. The resulting diverted and allusion-filled text offers a satisfying richness, a remarkable accomplishment given how starkly the text was written (or translated?). It paints the Irish world with a few strokes.
Indeed, one thought I had reading The Táin was a genuine surprise that neither the BBC nor the SciFi channels had thought to remake the story in mini-series form. The bare bones nature of the tale had me hungry to see the work fleshed out. I can dream, can't I?
While undeniably a "classic" epic, the unity of place, narrative, and heritage gives The Táin the feel of classic Indian epics, like the Bhagavad Gita and Ramayana, couching stories within stories and relying on a body of tales outside of the work at hand for reference. The resulting diverted and allusion-filled text offers a satisfying richness, a remarkable accomplishment given how starkly the text was written (or translated?). It paints the Irish world with a few strokes.
Indeed, one thought I had reading The Táin was a genuine surprise that neither the BBC nor the SciFi channels had thought to remake the story in mini-series form. The bare bones nature of the tale had me hungry to see the work fleshed out. I can dream, can't I?
July 26, 2023
i support women's rights AND women's wrongs
September 19, 2016
It's fascinating to read texts like this, because it's ALMOST like reading about what militant secularists wish were the case: a world with NO religion. In this pre-Christian epic, we see how people make meaning of their lives without their perspective being "muddled" by ideas about God, heaven, hell, right and wrong. What would it be like?
Much to the chagrin of an atheist/secularist/anti-Christian activist, life is hell-ish without religion.
Take sex. Secularists say Christianity spoils sex for everyone - why does have to come with promises and love and all that? Just let people have fun without moralizing everything, they say! (Except rape. Rape is wrong. That's when we're allowed to be moral. *eye roll*)
You think we live in a rape culture NOW? You think taking the morality out of sex makes it more fun? You should have lived in Ireland in the early centuries. You'd see that sex free from morality was anything but fun, ESPECIALLY for women. Men - because they call the shots, because they're bigger and stronger - make the rules. Men used sex to relieve themselves and baits fools into traps. Women were their pleasure toys. At best, women bore men sons, who could then grow up and fight and use women just like their fathers did.
The female characters with agency only obtain agency by acting as horribly as the men do. They're violent, glory-hungry, and evil. There's bloodthirsty Queen Medb, who's obsessed with one-upping her husband and leads thousands of men to their death for the sake of her pride. She has sex with Fergus to keep his military loyalty, and doesn't care that her husband knows about it. (Sounds a bit like contemporary feminist logic, doesn't it? "Two wrongs make a right!" *eyerolleyeroll*) Then there's the witch Morrigan, who randomly comes and and tries to shame Cuchulainn while he's single-handedly defending his country from Medb's men. He doesn't let her get away with it, though.
Not all women have this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" sexual survival strategy that Medb represents. Beautiful Derdriu, after being taken captive by her husband's murderer, refuses to have sex with him - which is strange, since he earned her sex through violence, of course. When he can't get her to have sex with him, she's shipped off to have sex with his best friend. In one of the only true romantic moves of the epic, she throws herself onto a boulder and is smashed to pieces to preserve her honor and stay faithful to her husband's memory. Sex DOES mean something to her, and she'd rather die than validate a worldview in which power trumps love. Another miserable women, Finnebair (Medb's daughter) learns how many men died after they were promised sex with her (hundreds). Humiliated and traumatized, she dies of shame on the spot. Her sex was only bait and a fun time to everyone except her. Rather than conform her worldview to theirs, she dies, and shows us that, despite society's opinion, sex MEANS something to her.
I could go on about this, but Wendy Shalit can probably say this all better than me. Basically, I think contemporary secularists want to believe that if only we could get rid of all this stupid Christian meaning, sex could be fun again. Well, sex was anything but fun before all the Christian meaning came along. And with girls today still killing themselves, cutting themselves, getting eating disorders, and getting raped, I think we'd better stop and wonder if we're really doing anyone any favors by trying to bring a Christian/religion free sexual landscape back to society.
Another quick note: Derdriu's suicide is actually one of the ONLY moments in the epic that features people acting as if anything other than fame and victory matters. Touchingly, another rare moment like this happens when Cuchulainn kills his foster brother Ferdia. After growing up together and fighting side by side many a battle, they now have to fight to the death. Cuchulainn begs Ferdia not to fight, since he loves him and doesn't want to kill him, but Ferdia fights anyways (because he's been promised sex with Finnebair). After Cuchulainn slays Feria, he lays by his body and weeps. This is a shocking moment, since Cuchulainn has slain hundreds of men with extraordinary violence without thought. The epic also doesn't devote any special narrational time to most deaths. It just reads "then so and so's guts spilled out and he died, and maybe a hill was named after him or something." Then we move on. But here, we get a whole monologue from Cuchulainn:
"All play, all sport,
until Ferdia came to the ford.
I thought beloved Ferdia
would live forever after me
-yesterday, a mountain-slope;
today, only a shade.
I have slaughtered, on this Tain,
three countless multitudes:
choice cattle, choice men,
choice horses, fallen everywhere!
The army, a huge multitude,
that came from cruel Cruachan
has lost between a half and third,
slaughtered in my savage sport.
Never came to the battle-field,
nor did Bamba's belly bear,
nor over sea or land came
a king's son of fairer fame."
After killing a friend, Cuchulainn learns the meaning of death. He's killed "a half and a third" of an army and not given anyone's life much thought, but Ferdia's death wakes something up in him. It *means* something to him. Like Derdriu and Finnebair, Cuchulainn life begins to have meaning after heartbreak. He becomes reflective, and even wise: "yesterday, a mountain-slope; / today, only a shade" implies a towering question: what is this all for? Life, no matter how glorious, ends for everyone; what do we make of that? What do we think?
To me, this epic is a heartbreaking, haunting, and warning portrait of what man without religion is like. He's empty, desperate, and violent. The world is cruel and life is short. But man, in the face of all this, is also questioning. Derdriu, Finnebair and Cuchulainn bring the reader sudden moments of reflection.
What is life? Does love matter? What does it mean that we die?
Is it any wonder that Christianity spread like wildfire throughout Ireland, after lives like these?
Much to the chagrin of an atheist/secularist/anti-Christian activist, life is hell-ish without religion.
Take sex. Secularists say Christianity spoils sex for everyone - why does have to come with promises and love and all that? Just let people have fun without moralizing everything, they say! (Except rape. Rape is wrong. That's when we're allowed to be moral. *eye roll*)
You think we live in a rape culture NOW? You think taking the morality out of sex makes it more fun? You should have lived in Ireland in the early centuries. You'd see that sex free from morality was anything but fun, ESPECIALLY for women. Men - because they call the shots, because they're bigger and stronger - make the rules. Men used sex to relieve themselves and baits fools into traps. Women were their pleasure toys. At best, women bore men sons, who could then grow up and fight and use women just like their fathers did.
The female characters with agency only obtain agency by acting as horribly as the men do. They're violent, glory-hungry, and evil. There's bloodthirsty Queen Medb, who's obsessed with one-upping her husband and leads thousands of men to their death for the sake of her pride. She has sex with Fergus to keep his military loyalty, and doesn't care that her husband knows about it. (Sounds a bit like contemporary feminist logic, doesn't it? "Two wrongs make a right!" *eyerolleyeroll*) Then there's the witch Morrigan, who randomly comes and and tries to shame Cuchulainn while he's single-handedly defending his country from Medb's men. He doesn't let her get away with it, though.
Not all women have this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" sexual survival strategy that Medb represents. Beautiful Derdriu, after being taken captive by her husband's murderer, refuses to have sex with him - which is strange, since he earned her sex through violence, of course. When he can't get her to have sex with him, she's shipped off to have sex with his best friend. In one of the only true romantic moves of the epic, she throws herself onto a boulder and is smashed to pieces to preserve her honor and stay faithful to her husband's memory. Sex DOES mean something to her, and she'd rather die than validate a worldview in which power trumps love. Another miserable women, Finnebair (Medb's daughter) learns how many men died after they were promised sex with her (hundreds). Humiliated and traumatized, she dies of shame on the spot. Her sex was only bait and a fun time to everyone except her. Rather than conform her worldview to theirs, she dies, and shows us that, despite society's opinion, sex MEANS something to her.
I could go on about this, but Wendy Shalit can probably say this all better than me. Basically, I think contemporary secularists want to believe that if only we could get rid of all this stupid Christian meaning, sex could be fun again. Well, sex was anything but fun before all the Christian meaning came along. And with girls today still killing themselves, cutting themselves, getting eating disorders, and getting raped, I think we'd better stop and wonder if we're really doing anyone any favors by trying to bring a Christian/religion free sexual landscape back to society.
Another quick note: Derdriu's suicide is actually one of the ONLY moments in the epic that features people acting as if anything other than fame and victory matters. Touchingly, another rare moment like this happens when Cuchulainn kills his foster brother Ferdia. After growing up together and fighting side by side many a battle, they now have to fight to the death. Cuchulainn begs Ferdia not to fight, since he loves him and doesn't want to kill him, but Ferdia fights anyways (because he's been promised sex with Finnebair). After Cuchulainn slays Feria, he lays by his body and weeps. This is a shocking moment, since Cuchulainn has slain hundreds of men with extraordinary violence without thought. The epic also doesn't devote any special narrational time to most deaths. It just reads "then so and so's guts spilled out and he died, and maybe a hill was named after him or something." Then we move on. But here, we get a whole monologue from Cuchulainn:
"All play, all sport,
until Ferdia came to the ford.
I thought beloved Ferdia
would live forever after me
-yesterday, a mountain-slope;
today, only a shade.
I have slaughtered, on this Tain,
three countless multitudes:
choice cattle, choice men,
choice horses, fallen everywhere!
The army, a huge multitude,
that came from cruel Cruachan
has lost between a half and third,
slaughtered in my savage sport.
Never came to the battle-field,
nor did Bamba's belly bear,
nor over sea or land came
a king's son of fairer fame."
After killing a friend, Cuchulainn learns the meaning of death. He's killed "a half and a third" of an army and not given anyone's life much thought, but Ferdia's death wakes something up in him. It *means* something to him. Like Derdriu and Finnebair, Cuchulainn life begins to have meaning after heartbreak. He becomes reflective, and even wise: "yesterday, a mountain-slope; / today, only a shade" implies a towering question: what is this all for? Life, no matter how glorious, ends for everyone; what do we make of that? What do we think?
To me, this epic is a heartbreaking, haunting, and warning portrait of what man without religion is like. He's empty, desperate, and violent. The world is cruel and life is short. But man, in the face of all this, is also questioning. Derdriu, Finnebair and Cuchulainn bring the reader sudden moments of reflection.
What is life? Does love matter? What does it mean that we die?
Is it any wonder that Christianity spread like wildfire throughout Ireland, after lives like these?
April 6, 2007
I just read this book for the third time, and finished teaching it this morning. I always kind of forget how very, very weird the Irish were. We just spent 30 minutes in each section talking about sex, and then 20 on whether this is a credible source or not for the 1st century. Cuchulainn kills people in the most interesting ways. Anyway, I love this book - it just is such a reminder that people think about the world differently.
Kinsella's translation is also interesting - no notes marked in the text, but lots of notes at the end (this is a pet peeve of mine, as you might be able to tell). Because of the nature of our sources, he has to choose which bits of the different manuscripts to include, and try to reconcile the mess of a story that is left (some people die several times, for example). So, it's an interesting reminder that even this book is someone's interpretation of the story.
Kinsella's translation is also interesting - no notes marked in the text, but lots of notes at the end (this is a pet peeve of mine, as you might be able to tell). Because of the nature of our sources, he has to choose which bits of the different manuscripts to include, and try to reconcile the mess of a story that is left (some people die several times, for example). So, it's an interesting reminder that even this book is someone's interpretation of the story.
June 2, 2025
I'm pretty sure they lost the war because Medb got her period, which as far as I'm concerned proves that men are responsible for preserving this tale.
Later edit: Also, let's not forget, the only reason it took Ulster so long to show up is because the entire army was completely incapacitated by feeling the pangs of childbirth because at one point the king had forced a woman in labour to race his horses. She won. And then she cursed them to feel her pain when they most needed to their strength and she died (because of course she did) and even though she could win a race against horses while in labour, this fuckers couldn't get out of bed when met with the same pain.
So, ultimately, Ulster showed up with a full army while Medb's had spent all winter being whittled down by Cuchilainn, the unstoppable demigod hero child of Lugh, who was himself the god of anything you can think of and the greatest hero of the tuatha de danann.
But yeah, definitely Madb's period was the problem.
Later edit: Also, let's not forget, the only reason it took Ulster so long to show up is because the entire army was completely incapacitated by feeling the pangs of childbirth because at one point the king had forced a woman in labour to race his horses. She won. And then she cursed them to feel her pain when they most needed to their strength and she died (because of course she did) and even though she could win a race against horses while in labour, this fuckers couldn't get out of bed when met with the same pain.
So, ultimately, Ulster showed up with a full army while Medb's had spent all winter being whittled down by Cuchilainn, the unstoppable demigod hero child of Lugh, who was himself the god of anything you can think of and the greatest hero of the tuatha de danann.
But yeah, definitely Madb's period was the problem.
November 27, 2021
The Táin is the unholy grail of story-telling.
February 12, 2022
Read for 500-1500 lit class. Sooo meh.
January 11, 2013
It's not easy to evaluate a vital classic of world literature like this. What can you say? "It's inferior to the Iliad and maybe Gilgamesh, and superior to nearly everything else." So I'll just give it five stars and be done with it.
The book itself tells the odd and sometimes-bewitching story of the raid of King Ailill and Queen Medb (pronounced "Mave") of Connaught against the land of Ulster, in their attempt to seize the brown cow. Now, you will hear from many people "This is an epic about some cattle rustlers, basically," which is analogous to saying the Odyssey is about a guy trying to get home. "Yes, but ...."
In any case, the Tain is the longest of the Middle Irish stories left to us in the fragmentary literature. It was set down in the High Middle Ages from oral sources and bears many of the unmistakable and sometimes-unlovable tropes of the oral genre. In particular, the Tain is full of specious place name etymologies ("...and that is why it came to be known as "The Forrest of the Arrow.")
There are hundreds of characters, most of whom are treated only with enough length to establish their heroic credentials before they're killed in a dazzling varieties of ways by Cu Chulainn, the strange, rowdy demigod who fights off the armies of Connaught for an entire winter while the men of Ulster lay fallow, stricken by the curse of a lady of the Sidhe, or the Tuatha de Danann.
This frame tale is, for me, the most interesting part of the book. There are obvious remnants at work of what is probably a pre-Celtic goddess culture in the mythological underpinnings of this saga, visible throughout. The curse that lays the men of Ulster low is essentially a sickening of the land comparable to the Waste Land motif of Grail saga, and there are enough symbols of fertility and renewal in this short work to keep a dozen grad students busy writing for the next ten years.
The principle action revolves around a few principle characters; primarily Medb and her captain Fergus, who plays Lancelot to her Guinevere, and Cu Chulainn, who is an unstoppable killing machine.
I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me nearly a hundred pages to realize that the bulk of the Tain is essentially a joke - it became clear enough when Cu Chulainn spent a third of a day doing his exercises before he realized he was being attacked.
The sense of humor is earthy, to put it mildly. The outlook on sex is refreshingly uninhibited, and there are at least a couple of poop jokes.
Cu Chulainn's big scene is his long duel with his foster brother Ferdiad - a scene which will, I hope, remind the attentive reader of Parzifal's duel with Feirefiz in von Eschenbach's masterpiece. Whereas the latter heroes were able to fly up out of the labyrinth, however, their Celtic counterparts were not, and duality wins out over unity.
The book itself tells the odd and sometimes-bewitching story of the raid of King Ailill and Queen Medb (pronounced "Mave") of Connaught against the land of Ulster, in their attempt to seize the brown cow. Now, you will hear from many people "This is an epic about some cattle rustlers, basically," which is analogous to saying the Odyssey is about a guy trying to get home. "Yes, but ...."
In any case, the Tain is the longest of the Middle Irish stories left to us in the fragmentary literature. It was set down in the High Middle Ages from oral sources and bears many of the unmistakable and sometimes-unlovable tropes of the oral genre. In particular, the Tain is full of specious place name etymologies ("...and that is why it came to be known as "The Forrest of the Arrow.")
There are hundreds of characters, most of whom are treated only with enough length to establish their heroic credentials before they're killed in a dazzling varieties of ways by Cu Chulainn, the strange, rowdy demigod who fights off the armies of Connaught for an entire winter while the men of Ulster lay fallow, stricken by the curse of a lady of the Sidhe, or the Tuatha de Danann.
This frame tale is, for me, the most interesting part of the book. There are obvious remnants at work of what is probably a pre-Celtic goddess culture in the mythological underpinnings of this saga, visible throughout. The curse that lays the men of Ulster low is essentially a sickening of the land comparable to the Waste Land motif of Grail saga, and there are enough symbols of fertility and renewal in this short work to keep a dozen grad students busy writing for the next ten years.
The principle action revolves around a few principle characters; primarily Medb and her captain Fergus, who plays Lancelot to her Guinevere, and Cu Chulainn, who is an unstoppable killing machine.
I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me nearly a hundred pages to realize that the bulk of the Tain is essentially a joke - it became clear enough when Cu Chulainn spent a third of a day doing his exercises before he realized he was being attacked.
The sense of humor is earthy, to put it mildly. The outlook on sex is refreshingly uninhibited, and there are at least a couple of poop jokes.
Cu Chulainn's big scene is his long duel with his foster brother Ferdiad - a scene which will, I hope, remind the attentive reader of Parzifal's duel with Feirefiz in von Eschenbach's masterpiece. Whereas the latter heroes were able to fly up out of the labyrinth, however, their Celtic counterparts were not, and duality wins out over unity.
September 4, 2008
Giving this stars seems kind of ridiculous. But I will, anyway.
It is a minor embarrassment that I had not read The Táin until last week. When my sister found out she made me, which is fair enough. We are quite immersed in many of the stories surrounding the Ulster cycle during our education: the young Cúchulainn, Medb and Ailill. We are even told a vastly simplified version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, mostly focusing on the two bulls and not the war going on around them.
My first shock was how blood-thirsty the epic is. They certainly excised that aspect of the tales in school. My second was how funny it was. And I'm still not sure if the humour is intentional. There's a section where Cathach comes back after riding his chariot off into battle alone, and he's been ripped to bits. Cúchulainn sends for healers and 15 (some say 50) of them come and each says he's done for, and every time one of them says that Cathach kills them with a fierce punch. Eventually Cúchulainn says "Come on Cathach, you can't be killing healers."
A healer eventually comes and agrees to treat Cathach, and he begins describing each wound, and each awful wound he mentions Cathach describes the man or men who inflicted them, and Cúchulainn says "Oh! I know them! That's the brothers so-and-so, they're the son of this guy and have killed that guy." This goes on for three pages, in exactly the same repetitive structure. And it's so long and elaborate that it seems like it must be comic, but I'm just not sure.
These tales were written down by monks in the 12th century from spoken stories that had been passed down for hundreds of years, since perhaps around 0AD. So they are very like Homer's works, and that you can see the repetition and exaggeration that would be characteristic of such stories. So much of Irish storytelling shows its roots in this work.
Also: the depiction of women in these stories is really interesting. There are warrior queens. Strong women. Girls decide who they will marry. Men must pursue them and gain their approval. It is simply a fundamentally different relationship to the gender roles Christianity brought to this country.
A couple of times men make harsh statements about women in general, but it's always born out of a frustration with the fact that, e.g. Medb wont stop sending warriors to kill them. Bloody women!
It is a minor embarrassment that I had not read The Táin until last week. When my sister found out she made me, which is fair enough. We are quite immersed in many of the stories surrounding the Ulster cycle during our education: the young Cúchulainn, Medb and Ailill. We are even told a vastly simplified version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, mostly focusing on the two bulls and not the war going on around them.
My first shock was how blood-thirsty the epic is. They certainly excised that aspect of the tales in school. My second was how funny it was. And I'm still not sure if the humour is intentional. There's a section where Cathach comes back after riding his chariot off into battle alone, and he's been ripped to bits. Cúchulainn sends for healers and 15 (some say 50) of them come and each says he's done for, and every time one of them says that Cathach kills them with a fierce punch. Eventually Cúchulainn says "Come on Cathach, you can't be killing healers."
A healer eventually comes and agrees to treat Cathach, and he begins describing each wound, and each awful wound he mentions Cathach describes the man or men who inflicted them, and Cúchulainn says "Oh! I know them! That's the brothers so-and-so, they're the son of this guy and have killed that guy." This goes on for three pages, in exactly the same repetitive structure. And it's so long and elaborate that it seems like it must be comic, but I'm just not sure.
These tales were written down by monks in the 12th century from spoken stories that had been passed down for hundreds of years, since perhaps around 0AD. So they are very like Homer's works, and that you can see the repetition and exaggeration that would be characteristic of such stories. So much of Irish storytelling shows its roots in this work.
Also: the depiction of women in these stories is really interesting. There are warrior queens. Strong women. Girls decide who they will marry. Men must pursue them and gain their approval. It is simply a fundamentally different relationship to the gender roles Christianity brought to this country.
A couple of times men make harsh statements about women in general, but it's always born out of a frustration with the fact that, e.g. Medb wont stop sending warriors to kill them. Bloody women!
July 23, 2015
On ne peut manquer d'être ému quand on pense que ce texte nous viens de si loin, mais quelle violence! Elle est à un degré qui m'a fait penser à l'Illiade ou à certains passages des métamorphoses d'Ovide.
October 2, 2021
The Táin Bó Cúailnge is known as maybe the greatest epic in Irish heroic age mythology. It’s been called the Irish Iliad, and is considered Ireland’s national epic. It deserves all these accolades, and then some. This is a furious, bloody, grand heroic saga, a celebration of the Ulaid people, one of them in particular, the pinnacle of the Ulster cycle, and an all around intensely inspired legend that floored me with its inventiveness and imagination.
It is a myth that was carried through the ages orally and then written down in a few different recensions, starting in the eighth century, until its final written form sometime in the 12th. It has all the ancient charm and style and mystical otherworldly beauty of the medieval Irish sagas. In the form it appears in here it is breathtaking. The saga is told in a blend of prose, verse, and vivid, grand motifs that I have seen nowhere else, except in the other old Irish tales.
Because this is a story that is part of a larger tradition of myths, many of the canonical rulers and warriors and people from the Ulster cycle are here, including Fergus Mac Roich, former king of the Ulaid, now in exile at the court of the rulers of Connacht in the west, king Ailill and queen Medb. The story that explains how he ended up in their army is found elsewhere in the Ulster cycle, in a story called “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu.” Also here are various legendary warriors who appear in other sagas, too numerous to mention by name, and Conchobar Mac Nessa, current king of the Ulaid, and then the seemingly invincible Cu Chulainn. There is quite a bit of necessary backstory to the Tain, and most of it is told in other Irish sagas and tales. The translator’s notes do a great job summarizing the relevant ones, but many of the most important ones can be found in Early Irish Myths and Sagas.
After Ailill and Medb get into a competition about who has the better collection of treasures, and Medb’s is found comparatively lacking because of Ailill’s prize bull, they decide to go raiding for a massive and magnificent mystical bull in Cuailnge, in the Ulaid region.
The Ulaid men are, at this time, cursed with labor pains, as detailed in the myth “The Labor Pains of the Ulaid”. In this story, Macha, the euhemerized Irish horse goddess, outraged after no one steps forward to help her when she is made to race a chariot on foot and goes into labor at the finish line, curses the men of Ulster for nine generations to experience labor pains and to become as weak as a woman in labor. So the Ulaid are helpless to defend against the armies of Connacht, and eventually the armies of the rest of Ireland. The only Ulaid man unaffected by this curse is the indomitable, peerless hero Cu Chulainn.
Thus begins Cu Chulainn’s brilliant one-man counterstrike against all the armies of Ireland, holding them off from pushing deeper into Ulaid territory, avenging against their murder and rape of the Ulaid people, and the theft of their cattle.
For pages and pages the story is an evocative symphony of guerrilla warfare and brute strength and immaculate fighting and weapon mastery and graceful yet vicious Celtic combat in all its gory, extraordinary, poetic glory. Cu Chulainn is an endearing but formidable hero, a youth whose beardless face and age make veteran warriors underestimate him, to their own misfortune. There is much more to the story than these battles and warfare, but the continuous thread of combat and the theme of a single heroic warrior against thousands is prevalent.
The adventures and exploits of Cu Chulainn’s childhood are related by storytellers among the Connacht army, warning Ailill and Medb of who they are up against. Through these small tales we see a natural born vanquisher, inclined toward heroism and daring deeds from the beginning, taking on numerous foes far beyond his size and performing feats thought impossible. Despite this, the armies go hard against Cu Chulainn. He is only one man, and they are legion.
The body count of those he slays is incalculable. Despite his fearless warrior ethic, despite his sureness of his capabilities and his power, he is a modest, fair, and balanced man. A motif that appeared in other Irish sagas is repeated here. Each time Cu Chulainn’s camp is approached by a warrior to who seeks to face him in single combat, his charioteer Laeg describes, in illustrious detail and heroic fashion the man approaching, and Cu Chulainn explains who it is, also in a manner befitting the wild spirit of warriors, what each is known for. And they face each other. And Cu Chulainn always destroys his opponent.
This same motif appears toward the end, after the curse has left the Ulaid and the kings and heroes of the Ulaid come together in a united front against all the armies of Ireland. Medb sends a scout out to see what is going on, and the scout reports back what he sees, often surreal and poetic visions, or beautifully decorated powerful kings and warriors and armies, and Fergus explains who or what he is seeing.
Also in keeping with tradition from Irish myth is the place-name lore, known formally as Dindsenchas. Every few pages it seems there is a brief aside or tiny vignette to explain how some ancient place in Ireland got its name, whether town or region or river or geographical feature, often from someone being killed there or some (pseudo)historically significant event of legendary proportions occurring nearby.
Cu Chulainn is visited, aided, and impaired by Tuatha de Danan in his struggle for supremacy over the Irish armies. Eventually he is helped by his fellow Ulaidmen as they begin to recover from the curse, some proving to be nearly as formidable as Cu Chulainn himself. So too does his father appear, the god Lugh, who heals his son over many days so that he may fight again. While is recovering, some of his fellow Ulaidmen attempt to fight off Medb’s army, and are crushed. Cu Chulainn’s vengeance is one of the most Herculean feats I’ve seen in an epic. But then again, many of the things he does here stand toward the top of the tower of heroic exploits I’ve witnessed in epics and sagas.
He is eventually laid low by grueling four day combat with his foster brother, Fer Diad, his final adversary in single-combat, a battle that is moving and timeless.
The fight starts enthusiastically and they recite poetry at one another, reminisce about their days together, and every night sees them retreat wounded, first close and friendly, but each night growing further apart, more injured, less friendly, until their final tragic conflict.
There’s a point in the story where Ailill discovers Fergus is sleeping with Medb. In a strange confrontation, Ailill asks Fergus to play fidchell with him, an ancient game thought to be sort of like chess, and they begin speaking to each other in a somewhat metaphorical, verse-like style, called roscada.
According to the translator, these parts are written in a distinct way in the original manuscripts, but they are hard to make sense of. This method of speaking recurs throughout the Tain when things reach a fevered pitch and the tone becomes dramatic, vibrant, almost musical. And although they resemble poetry, they are distinct from the parts in which the characters clearly speak in verse, with more traditional and understandable poetic structure. I don’t know if anyone has the answers to why these parts were written as they were, but they appear to be an ancient element of the language or literature whose purpose and understanding has been somewhat lost over the ages.
What’s most interesting to me about these roscada, aside from the engrossing aspect they present to the storytelling and how they heighten the sense of art and drama, is something the translator points out in the notes.
The Ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote about early encounters with the Gauls (early Celts), and he described their manner of speaking to one another in exactly this way — taking on the form of riddle or metaphor, where the words might have multiple meanings, and those meanings would only be clear to those speaking, all but indecipherable to an outside listener. That this characteristic of the Celts is corroborated by historical evidence and mythological literature is satisfying in a way I can’t quite give words to. It lends an extra dimension to the myths, as though they have life in them that is distant and far removed from our experience, but very true to the world from which they come.
The Tain is full of stuff like this, captivating, magical power, rich layers of meaning and imagery and activity bleeding through history and through morphing shapes of language that contort our interpretations for better or worse. Its excellence as a story of monumental and legendary events and figures is unquestionable. It’s the kind of epic that demands many rereads and long pauses to take in all its wonders. Many times I reread entire passages or pages of the Tain because of their immense beauty or power or oddness or because the way with words was so dominating it demanded repeated visits.
It is a myth that was carried through the ages orally and then written down in a few different recensions, starting in the eighth century, until its final written form sometime in the 12th. It has all the ancient charm and style and mystical otherworldly beauty of the medieval Irish sagas. In the form it appears in here it is breathtaking. The saga is told in a blend of prose, verse, and vivid, grand motifs that I have seen nowhere else, except in the other old Irish tales.
Because this is a story that is part of a larger tradition of myths, many of the canonical rulers and warriors and people from the Ulster cycle are here, including Fergus Mac Roich, former king of the Ulaid, now in exile at the court of the rulers of Connacht in the west, king Ailill and queen Medb. The story that explains how he ended up in their army is found elsewhere in the Ulster cycle, in a story called “The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu.” Also here are various legendary warriors who appear in other sagas, too numerous to mention by name, and Conchobar Mac Nessa, current king of the Ulaid, and then the seemingly invincible Cu Chulainn. There is quite a bit of necessary backstory to the Tain, and most of it is told in other Irish sagas and tales. The translator’s notes do a great job summarizing the relevant ones, but many of the most important ones can be found in Early Irish Myths and Sagas.
After Ailill and Medb get into a competition about who has the better collection of treasures, and Medb’s is found comparatively lacking because of Ailill’s prize bull, they decide to go raiding for a massive and magnificent mystical bull in Cuailnge, in the Ulaid region.
The Ulaid men are, at this time, cursed with labor pains, as detailed in the myth “The Labor Pains of the Ulaid”. In this story, Macha, the euhemerized Irish horse goddess, outraged after no one steps forward to help her when she is made to race a chariot on foot and goes into labor at the finish line, curses the men of Ulster for nine generations to experience labor pains and to become as weak as a woman in labor. So the Ulaid are helpless to defend against the armies of Connacht, and eventually the armies of the rest of Ireland. The only Ulaid man unaffected by this curse is the indomitable, peerless hero Cu Chulainn.
Thus begins Cu Chulainn’s brilliant one-man counterstrike against all the armies of Ireland, holding them off from pushing deeper into Ulaid territory, avenging against their murder and rape of the Ulaid people, and the theft of their cattle.
For pages and pages the story is an evocative symphony of guerrilla warfare and brute strength and immaculate fighting and weapon mastery and graceful yet vicious Celtic combat in all its gory, extraordinary, poetic glory. Cu Chulainn is an endearing but formidable hero, a youth whose beardless face and age make veteran warriors underestimate him, to their own misfortune. There is much more to the story than these battles and warfare, but the continuous thread of combat and the theme of a single heroic warrior against thousands is prevalent.
The adventures and exploits of Cu Chulainn’s childhood are related by storytellers among the Connacht army, warning Ailill and Medb of who they are up against. Through these small tales we see a natural born vanquisher, inclined toward heroism and daring deeds from the beginning, taking on numerous foes far beyond his size and performing feats thought impossible. Despite this, the armies go hard against Cu Chulainn. He is only one man, and they are legion.
The body count of those he slays is incalculable. Despite his fearless warrior ethic, despite his sureness of his capabilities and his power, he is a modest, fair, and balanced man. A motif that appeared in other Irish sagas is repeated here. Each time Cu Chulainn’s camp is approached by a warrior to who seeks to face him in single combat, his charioteer Laeg describes, in illustrious detail and heroic fashion the man approaching, and Cu Chulainn explains who it is, also in a manner befitting the wild spirit of warriors, what each is known for. And they face each other. And Cu Chulainn always destroys his opponent.
This same motif appears toward the end, after the curse has left the Ulaid and the kings and heroes of the Ulaid come together in a united front against all the armies of Ireland. Medb sends a scout out to see what is going on, and the scout reports back what he sees, often surreal and poetic visions, or beautifully decorated powerful kings and warriors and armies, and Fergus explains who or what he is seeing.
Also in keeping with tradition from Irish myth is the place-name lore, known formally as Dindsenchas. Every few pages it seems there is a brief aside or tiny vignette to explain how some ancient place in Ireland got its name, whether town or region or river or geographical feature, often from someone being killed there or some (pseudo)historically significant event of legendary proportions occurring nearby.
Cu Chulainn is visited, aided, and impaired by Tuatha de Danan in his struggle for supremacy over the Irish armies. Eventually he is helped by his fellow Ulaidmen as they begin to recover from the curse, some proving to be nearly as formidable as Cu Chulainn himself. So too does his father appear, the god Lugh, who heals his son over many days so that he may fight again. While is recovering, some of his fellow Ulaidmen attempt to fight off Medb’s army, and are crushed. Cu Chulainn’s vengeance is one of the most Herculean feats I’ve seen in an epic. But then again, many of the things he does here stand toward the top of the tower of heroic exploits I’ve witnessed in epics and sagas.
He is eventually laid low by grueling four day combat with his foster brother, Fer Diad, his final adversary in single-combat, a battle that is moving and timeless.
The fight starts enthusiastically and they recite poetry at one another, reminisce about their days together, and every night sees them retreat wounded, first close and friendly, but each night growing further apart, more injured, less friendly, until their final tragic conflict.
There’s a point in the story where Ailill discovers Fergus is sleeping with Medb. In a strange confrontation, Ailill asks Fergus to play fidchell with him, an ancient game thought to be sort of like chess, and they begin speaking to each other in a somewhat metaphorical, verse-like style, called roscada.
According to the translator, these parts are written in a distinct way in the original manuscripts, but they are hard to make sense of. This method of speaking recurs throughout the Tain when things reach a fevered pitch and the tone becomes dramatic, vibrant, almost musical. And although they resemble poetry, they are distinct from the parts in which the characters clearly speak in verse, with more traditional and understandable poetic structure. I don’t know if anyone has the answers to why these parts were written as they were, but they appear to be an ancient element of the language or literature whose purpose and understanding has been somewhat lost over the ages.
What’s most interesting to me about these roscada, aside from the engrossing aspect they present to the storytelling and how they heighten the sense of art and drama, is something the translator points out in the notes.
The Ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote about early encounters with the Gauls (early Celts), and he described their manner of speaking to one another in exactly this way — taking on the form of riddle or metaphor, where the words might have multiple meanings, and those meanings would only be clear to those speaking, all but indecipherable to an outside listener. That this characteristic of the Celts is corroborated by historical evidence and mythological literature is satisfying in a way I can’t quite give words to. It lends an extra dimension to the myths, as though they have life in them that is distant and far removed from our experience, but very true to the world from which they come.
The Tain is full of stuff like this, captivating, magical power, rich layers of meaning and imagery and activity bleeding through history and through morphing shapes of language that contort our interpretations for better or worse. Its excellence as a story of monumental and legendary events and figures is unquestionable. It’s the kind of epic that demands many rereads and long pauses to take in all its wonders. Many times I reread entire passages or pages of the Tain because of their immense beauty or power or oddness or because the way with words was so dominating it demanded repeated visits.
Read
May 6, 2025well, that was a wild ride. or rodeo, yk, because of the whole cow thing.
man, these medieval monks must have had the time of their life writing this down.
i did not read this exact version. in fact, my lecturer provided us with his own translation from the old irish to german. (all hail gisbert, we love you, man!)
the conventions of early medieval irish narratives make this at times utterly unreadable (you may think you have encountered the worst kind of repetitiveness before. let me tell you: it gets worse)
but this does do surprisingly interesting things with character.
medb [slay, queen (in the truest sense of the words)] is my favourite, and one if the main reasons i read this whole thing.
there's also an entire "former brothers-in-arms must now fight one another"-plotline that was actually much more moving than i would've expected. the resulting laments were almost poetic, in a way.
man, these medieval monks must have had the time of their life writing this down.
i did not read this exact version. in fact, my lecturer provided us with his own translation from the old irish to german. (all hail gisbert, we love you, man!)
the conventions of early medieval irish narratives make this at times utterly unreadable (you may think you have encountered the worst kind of repetitiveness before. let me tell you: it gets worse)
but this does do surprisingly interesting things with character.
medb [slay, queen (in the truest sense of the words)] is my favourite, and one if the main reasons i read this whole thing.
there's also an entire "former brothers-in-arms must now fight one another"-plotline that was actually much more moving than i would've expected. the resulting laments were almost poetic, in a way.
January 30, 2024
SCOOOTTTTLANNNND FOREVERRRR
February 17, 2023
hi my name is cú chulainn mac súaldaim the hound of ulster and i have loose-flowing gold hair with red and brown streaks that hangs in shining splendour over my shoulders and bright eyes with seven pupils that look like gleaming jewels
this winning tale contains:
- the cow equivalent to helen of troy
- a woman girlbossing her way into a civil war. hundreds dead thousands injured
- men unable to go to battle due to being laid up in bed with period cramps
- a protagonist who doesn't kill women* or chariot drivers**
- a teenager serial killing his way across Ireland and naming the crime scenes after his victims
- shapeshifting
- body horror
- shapeshifting that is also body horror
- the Morrigan doing obscure fuckery
- the symbolic potency of river fords
- a homoerotic rap battle between childhood foster brothers turned enemies
- an eleventh hour rallying the troops montage where everyone's cool outfit is lavishly described
- that awkward moment when you need to pee so bad you lose a war over it
- a climactic final bullfight with a double KO
* "usually"
** except for "when they deserve it"
in short 10/10 i could not have had a better time
this winning tale contains:
- the cow equivalent to helen of troy
- a woman girlbossing her way into a civil war. hundreds dead thousands injured
- men unable to go to battle due to being laid up in bed with period cramps
- a protagonist who doesn't kill women* or chariot drivers**
- a teenager serial killing his way across Ireland and naming the crime scenes after his victims
- shapeshifting
- body horror
- shapeshifting that is also body horror
- the Morrigan doing obscure fuckery
- the symbolic potency of river fords
- a homoerotic rap battle between childhood foster brothers turned enemies
- an eleventh hour rallying the troops montage where everyone's cool outfit is lavishly described
- that awkward moment when you need to pee so bad you lose a war over it
- a climactic final bullfight with a double KO
* "usually"
** except for "when they deserve it"
in short 10/10 i could not have had a better time
July 1, 2011
I didn't really care for this even though I wanted to. I had heard it was the Irish legend to read. The part I didn't like was pages and pages of names and places over and over again, it got to where I just skipped over the names and places. I found it monotonous and boring. The core of the story, (the war on Ulster by Queen Maeb, the magic bulls and my favorite champion, Cuchulainn) was good but could have been written better. I'm sure, at the time when this was an oral tradition, it was fantastic hearing your own family name in the story often but these are different times. I could have done without the repetitive names and places and just enjoyed an awesome story.
April 16, 2023
This book was an incredibly tough read which, in my opinion, is a great shame. It is a translation of an epic poem, it should have been an exciting, quick read, but it was bogged down with so many random characters that would only be mentioned once, naming of random places and repetitive narration that it was a chore to get through. And all of those references serve absolutely no purpose without an expert on Celtic mythology/history to guide you through them. I would have really appreciated if the author has done some work adapting this so that it can be read as a standalone story, but perhaps I need to look to another version for that.
December 13, 2008
To keep it short and sweet this is a must read for anyone interested in Irish history and culture, Celtic Heathenry, Odinism, mythology or general Celtic studies. One of the most essential texts for learning about any of these things but besides that the saga of Cuchulainn is a great entertaining story too.
March 17, 2025
Loved it - very repetitive but that’s nice when it’s on the syllabus haha. I love Medb (glorious queen). In my heart I wanted Medb to win. (Cú Chullain is also a sexist pig so I will not respect him). I respect women’s rights and women’s wrongs
February 27, 2010
Note: I compared this translation to Ciaran Carson's here. Tl;dr Kinsella wins.
March 13, 2024
At times I had little clue as to what was going on but this has some of the most wonderful passages I’ve read.
August 31, 2023
This was a highly enjoyable epic to read. It's not terribly long, but it's incredibly funny. Just about every aspect of it is so wildly impossible that the reader cannot help but be amused. A queen launching a war because a king wouldn't give her a bull to rival her husband's? A mere boy gaining acclaim in war feats? All of Ulster's men struck down with illness similar to birth-pangs save this same youth? This is a funny book, which gains it a great deal of points.
Cú Chulainn, the 17-year old warrior (and the only male to escape the Ulster curse), is an entertaining character. He's almost unstoppable, and he has his own sense of humour and crafty ways to prevent the advance of the Irish army. They deplete their own forces by keeping to the ancient battle tradition of honour (accompanied by threats) to get past these deliberate obstacles. Men with about twenty feats in their title come against Cú Chulainn to kill him, but he bests them all. He has an almost supernatural strength at times, and his character is even more funny for that.
My only major fault has to do with the translation of this book. An epic, in my opinion, ought to read like one, and this does not. Ciaran Carson tries to make his book 'readable', but the result is like reading the NIV Bible. The writing is occasionally childish, not a rousing war anthem that would inspire Irishmen to war. Carson's decision to depart from the literal words to retain the 'spirit of the thing' and rhyme is a poor one, and results in some fairly pathetic poetry. Reading any other national epics, one gets the gravity of the situation, but the book ends up fairly light-hearted for all the atrocities it contains. Nevertheless, the tale itself is fantastic, and on that merit, I would recommend (but maybe don't get Carson's translation).
Cú Chulainn, the 17-year old warrior (and the only male to escape the Ulster curse), is an entertaining character. He's almost unstoppable, and he has his own sense of humour and crafty ways to prevent the advance of the Irish army. They deplete their own forces by keeping to the ancient battle tradition of honour (accompanied by threats) to get past these deliberate obstacles. Men with about twenty feats in their title come against Cú Chulainn to kill him, but he bests them all. He has an almost supernatural strength at times, and his character is even more funny for that.
My only major fault has to do with the translation of this book. An epic, in my opinion, ought to read like one, and this does not. Ciaran Carson tries to make his book 'readable', but the result is like reading the NIV Bible. The writing is occasionally childish, not a rousing war anthem that would inspire Irishmen to war. Carson's decision to depart from the literal words to retain the 'spirit of the thing' and rhyme is a poor one, and results in some fairly pathetic poetry. Reading any other national epics, one gets the gravity of the situation, but the book ends up fairly light-hearted for all the atrocities it contains. Nevertheless, the tale itself is fantastic, and on that merit, I would recommend (but maybe don't get Carson's translation).
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