PREFACE

When I first stumbled across the ancient Irish sagas of Cuchulainn and his wife Emer, I fell instantly in love. Never had I read a traditional tale so full of emotional resonance, or peopled with such wonderful characters. And presumptuous though I knew it was to attempt an interpretation of another culture’s myth, Cuchulainn and Emer preyed on my mind until it was useless to resist. Bolstering my nerve with the thought of my Irish great-grandparents, I plunged in.

These stories, dating from about the time of Christ, were first written down in Medieval Irish script in various versions and fragments starting from about the eighth century AD. Without the scholarship and dedication of the people who pieced them together and translated them into a coherent English narrative, they would have been forever beyond my reach. My heartfelt thanks, then, go to the two translators I relied on most heavily: Lady Augusta Gregory, who wrote her Cuchulain of Muirthemne in 1902, and Thomas Kinsella, who published The Táin in 1969.

Although Lady Gregory omitted some passages she thought her squeamish Victorian audience “would not be interested in,” and has been accused of being over-flowery, her translation has a charming idiomatic voice that brought the characters of the Tain alive to me. I have borrowed her words for the dialogue in several places, and I hope she would take this as I intend it: as a tribute to the beauty of her speech and a way of bringing some feel of the “original” to the modern reader. Kinsella’s more spare and muscular narrative has a classic epic tone and was a constant reminder to me that the Iron Age Celts (1000 BC–43 AD) did not inhabit the dreamy landscape of medieval chivalry that is familiar to most readers, but a tougher and lustier place altogether.

The characters in the Cattle Raid of Cooley—the Táin Bó Cuailnge—hurl themselves through life at a kind of fever pitch: no challenge unmet, no love denied, no risk too daunting, no oath refused. And then, having embraced their lives with such blazing passion, they give them up with the same reckless abandon, to the spear or the sword, to broken hearts or unbearable shame, even to the humiliation of a satirist’s caustic tongue. They must have been short enough, those lives, and perhaps the final blaze of glory was after all a better way to end than the slow, painful onslaught of disease that was the likely alternative.

I loved these people, with their pride and their courage, their determination to burn bright rather than burn long. I hope you like them too.