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Cuchulain of Muirtheme Lady Gregory Cuchulain of Muirtheme Table of Contents Cuchulain of Muirtheme..........................................................................................................................................1 Lady Gregory.................................................................................................................................................1 Dedication of the Irish Edition to the People of Kiltartan.............................................................................1 Note by W.B. Yeats.......................................................................................................................................2 Notes by Lady Gregory..................................................................................................................................3 Preface by W. B. Yeats...........................................................................................................................................12 I. Birth of Cuchulain....................................................................................................................................15 II. Boy Deeds of Cuchulain..........................................................................................................................18 III. Courting of Emer...................................................................................................................................23 IV. Bricrius Feast.........................................................................................................................................34 V. The Championship of Ulster...................................................................................................................40 VI. The High King of Ireland.......................................................................................................................49 VII. Fate of the Sons of Usnach...................................................................................................................58 VIII. Dream of Angus Og............................................................................................................................75 IX. Cruachan................................................................................................................................................77 X. The Wedding of Maine Morgor..............................................................................................................82 XI. The War for the Bull of Cuilagne..........................................................................................................89 XII. Awakening of Ulster...........................................................................................................................118 XIII. The Two Bulls...................................................................................................................................128 XIV. The Only Jealously of Emer.............................................................................................................131 XV. Advice to a Prince..............................................................................................................................140 XVI. Sons of Doel Dermait........................................................................................................................141 XVII. Battle of Rosnaree...........................................................................................................................143 XVIII. The Only Son of Aoife...................................................................................................................148 XIX. The Great Gathering at Muirthemne.................................................................................................151 XX. Death of Cuchulain.............................................................................................................................157 i Cuchulain of Muirtheme Lady Gregory This page copyright © 2002 Blackmask Online. http://www.blackmask.com • Dedication of the Irish Edition to the People of Kiltartan • Note by W.B. Yeats • Notes by Lady Gregory Preface by W. B. Yeats • I. Birth of Cuchulain • II. Boy Deeds of Cuchulain • III. Courting of Emer • IV. Bricrius Feast • V. The Championship of Ulster • VI. The High King of Ireland • VII. Fate of the Sons of Usnach • VIII. Dream of Angus Og • IX. Cruachan • X. The Wedding of Maine Morgor • XI. The War for the Bull of Cuilagne • XII. Awakening of Ulster • XIII. The Two Bulls • XIV. The Only Jealously of Emer • XV. Advice to a Prince • XVI. Sons of Doel Dermait • XVII. Battle of Rosnaree • XVIII. The Only Son of Aoife • XIX. The Great Gathering at Muirthemne • XX. Death of Cuchulain Dedication of the Irish Edition to the People of Kiltartan My Dear Friends, When I began to gather these stories together, it is of you I was thinking, that you would like to have them and to be reading them. For although you have not to go far to get stories of Finn and Goll and Oisin from any old person in the place, there is very little of the history of Cuchulain and his friends left in the memory of the people, but only that they were brave men and good fighters, and that Deirdre was beautiful. When I went looking for the stories in the old writings, I found that the Irish in them is too hard for any person to read that has not made a long study of it. Some scholars have worked well at them, Irishmen and Germans and Frenchmen, but they have printed them in the old cramped Irish, with translations into German or French or Cuchulain of Muirtheme 1 Cuchulain of Muirtheme English, and these are not easy for you to get, or to understand, and the stories themselves are confused, every one giving a different account from the others in some small thing, the way there is not much pleasure in reading them. It is what I have tried to do, to take the best of the stories, or whatever parts of each will fit best to one another, and in that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain’s life and death. I left out a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or another, but I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together. I have told the whole story in plain and simple words, in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough. And indeed if there was more respect for Irish things among the learned men that live in the college at Dublin, where so many of these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints, and dividing her share of food. My friend and your friend the Craoibhin Aoibhin has put Irish of to−day on some of these stories that I have set in order, for I am sure you will like to have the history of the heroes of Ireland told in the language of Ireland. And I am very glad to have something that is worth offering you, for you have been very kind to me ever since I came over to you from Kilchriest, two−and−twenty years ago. AUGUSTA GREGORY. March 1902. Note by W.B. Yeats THIS conversation, so full of strange mythological information, is an example of the poet speech of ancient Ireland. One comes upon this speech here and there in other stories and poems. One finds it in the poem attributed to Ailbhe, daughter of Cormac Mac Art, and quoted by O’Curry in "MS. Materials," of which one verse is an allusion to a story given in Lady Gregory’s book: "The apple tree of high Aillinn, The yew of Baile of little land, Though they are put into lays, Rough people do not understand them." One finds it too in the poems which Brian, Son of Tuireann, chanted when he did not wish to be wholly understood. "That is a good poem, but I do not understand a word of its meaning," said the kings before whom he chanted; but his obscurity was more in a roundabout way of speaking than in mythological allusions. There is a description of a banquet, quoted by Professor Kuno Meyer, where hens’ eggs are spoken of as "gravel of Glenn Ai," and leek, as "a tear of a fair woman," and some eatable seaweed, dulse, perhaps, as a "net of the plains of Rein" that is to say, of the sea and so on. He quotes also a poem that calls the sallow, "the strength of bees," and the hawthorn "the barking hounds," and the gooseberry bush "the sweetest of trees," and the yew, "the oldest of trees." This poet speech somewhat resembles the Icelandic court poetry, as it is called, which certainly required alike for the writing and understanding of it a great traditional culture. Its descriptions of shields and tapestry, and its praises of Kings, that were first written, it seems, about the tenth century, depended for their effects on just this heaping up of mythological allusions, and the "Eddas" were written to be a granary for the makers of such poems. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they have come to be as irritating to the new Christian poets and Note by W.B. Yeats 2 Cuchulain of Muirtheme writers who stood outside their tradition, as are the more esoteric kinds of modern verse to unlettered readers. They were called "obscure," and "speaking in riddles," and the like. It has sometimes been thought that the Irish poet speech was indeed but a copy of this court poetry, but Professor York Powell contradicts this, and thinks it is not unlikely that the Irish poems influenced the Icelandic, and
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