What the Táin is

The name

Táin means "Cattle Raid". The full title is Táin Bó Cuailnge, "The Cattle-Raid of Cuailnge". Kinsella's note says Cuailnge, anglicised Cooley, is the district south of Carlingford Lough in County Louth. The story is a Connacht invasion of Ulster. Much of the action is the movement of the Connacht armies across Ireland and back and forth over the country that makes up part of present-day County Louth.

What Kinsella says it is

Kinsella calls the Táin the prose epic that is the centre-piece of the Ulster cycle, and the oldest vernacular epic in Western literature. He calls it the nearest approach to a great epic that Ireland has produced. He says that achievement at the highest level of saga literature may fairly be claimed for parts of the narrative and for some of the stories around it. The claim is his own and he makes it in his Translator's Note.

He made the translation because the translations he found were scarce and generally dull. There were "retellings" in the bookshops, and he describes the existing versions as romanticised, fairy tale, versified, dramatised and bowdlerised. Actual translations were scarce and generally dull. Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne gave him the best idea of the Ulster stories, but it was a paraphrase that refined away the coarse elements and rationalised the monstrous. He did not intend a scholarly work. He wanted a living version of the story, leaving as few obstacles as possible between the original and the reader.

When it is set

The Ulster cycle was traditionally believed to refer to the time of Christ. Kinsella notes that the barbaric world of the stories, untouched by Greece or Rome, resembles the La Tène Iron Age civilisation of Gaul and Britain. He adds that Ireland's isolated position may have kept this culture going until Christianity arrived in the fifth century. The world of the story has its own article, and so does the cycle.

No single tone

Kinsella warns that the Táin has no unifying narrative tone. It is told in places with a neutral realism and in places with an air of folk tale or fantasy. In his Introduction he says the verbal or conventional quality of the telling counts occasionally for more than consistency, and he gives examples.

• Finnabair dies of shame in chapter XII, then is brought back to life and "stays with" Cúchulainn for the sake of a storyteller's flourish at the end.
• Lists of heroes are very likely to include some who, taken realistically, are dead or absent. The seven Maine remain seven however many are killed.
• Hero after hero is reluctant to meet Cúchulainn because he is a beardless boy, despite the mounting evidence of his prowess.
• Cúchulainn vows to kill Medb whenever he sees her, then passes up his chance at the end, "not being a killer of women". He has just killed the two lamenting women Medb sent to deceive him. He has also killed Lochu, in mistake for Medb, and Eis Enchenn.

Kinsella says these things are familiar in epic literature. To see them as mistakes is to misapply modern conventions and ignore the real nature, and perhaps the oral origin, of the stories.

Bodily matters

Kinsella says the sagas are direct in bodily matters. They refer easily to seduction, copulation, urination, the picking of vermin, and the suggestion of incest in "How Cúchulainn was Begotten". Lady Gregory left out a good deal of this. Kinsella finds it very mild to a modern reader, because the story treats killing and mutilation with the same directness.

He gives special comment to one relationship, that of Fergus and Medb, because it is of central importance in the Táin. It runs from the clash over the Galeóin at the beginning of the expedition to the curtain-line Fergus speaks at the end of the great battle. Their encounter in the wood is where Fergus, clearly not up to Medb's demands, loses his sword. That is the source of continual phallic joking until the sword is restored before the battle and Fergus goes out to pour his released fury on Conchobor, the old usurper.

The women

Kinsella calls the series of women, some drawn full scale and some in miniature, on whose strong and diverse personalities the action continually turns, probably the greatest achievement of the Táin and the Ulster cycle. They are Medb, Derdriu, Macha, Nes and Aife. He says it may be as goddess-figures, ultimately, that they have their power. He is sure of one thing, which is that under all the violence it is the women who remain most real in the memory.

Where it starts

The war starts with the Pillow Talk of chapter I, which gives the motive for the invasion. Before it the book puts a group of pre-tales, the remscéla, that supply three of the four things the Táin itself lacks. The motive for the invasion comes from chapter I. The pre-tales have an article of their own.