Ireland was never invaded by the Romans: perhaps for that reason, its mythology remained intact in the native language (Irish or Gaelic) until the 12th century period when the Anglo-Normans, having successfully conquered England a hundred years earlier, began their military exploits on the neighbouring island under the leadership of Richard de Clare (also known as “Strongbow”).

From that date - 1169 - the gradual erosion of the Irish language and the culture that it sustained began, though several factors operated to slow the process down and, to some degree, even to reverse it at various times. In the first place, the Normans perennially married into aristocratic Gaelic families, thus becoming - in the words of an early English historian - more Irish than the Irish themselves (hiberniores ipses hibernis).

In the second, the victory of the Protestant monarch William III over the Catholic lineage of King James of England at the battle of the Boyne in 1690 had the effect of preserving much of Irish-language culture in the form of popular oral traditions among the Catholic peasants - especially in the West of Ireland - who were excluded from the dominant political order, denied formal education and generally treated as an under-class and even an inferior race in their own land.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth century a number of Anglo-Irish “antiquarians” - i.e., men and women with a growing interest in the so-called “relics” of pre-Norman and even pre-historical Ireland - set about the task of translating the ancient myths and legends of their adopted country. This tendency was largely inspired by the famous Ossianic poems of James Macpherson, a Scot who claimed the saga of Finn MacCool and his son Oisin for his own country, Scotland.

Protestants such as Charlotte Brooke and Catholics such as Charles O’Conor were at one in objecting to this cultural theft, and hence was started the movement known as Celtic revivalism which ebbed and flowed among the Irish intelligentsia for many decades after 1760, recruiting supporters from each “party” at different times - their numbers and proportion fluctuating in keeping with the passions aroused by such events as the United Irishmen’s Rebellion of 1798, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and finally the Repeal of the Union - a long-term nationalist project never actually attained (or, rather, finally attained under the form of the Irish Free State of 1922 and the Irish Republic of 1949).

When, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, a group of Anglo-Irish writers including Standish James O’Grady, Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory sought to construct a modern, yet deeply romantic, national literature in Ireland, it was to the myths and legends of ancient Irish literature that they instinctively turned. And, while they often relied on scholarly translations of Old and Middle Irish manuscripts in which the ancient written versions of the stories had been recorded by the monks and “filí” (or poets) of Gaelic Ireland, they also explored the memories of living Irishmen in order to recuperate the oral versions of those famous stories.

The Irishmen who knew them, having received them from their parents and their parents parents, were peasants and tenant farmers and in some instances itinerant storytellers - the famous seanachie of Irish tradition. All of these, but especially the latter, had kept alive through the operations of the oral literature a tradition or craft of narrative and adornment which had its origins and reached its highest prefection among the bardic poets of Gaelic Ireland.

The bards of ancient Ireland were typically members of families (with names such as O hUiginn/Higgins and Mac an Bard/Ward, and Mac Suibhne/Sweeney) who worked for aristocratic Gaelic families (such as the O’Neills or O’Donnells of Ulster) and sometimes for Anglo-Irish families or Irish families who had become largely if not completely anglicised. Highly trained in schools established over generations by their families, the bards were also the librarians of Gaelic Ireland, its classical scholars, and the keepers of the genealogies of the families they served.

All of that had been swept away in the Cromwellian Settlement and the Williamite War - or nearly so, since the Irish-speaking peasantry of Ireland retained an memorial imprint of it in their own oral traditions of fireside songs and tales. Douglas Hyde and Lady Gregory were among the foremost of those who went to simple Irish homes to transcribe the songs and stories that they heard. Others, among the revivalists, worked from the ancient Gaelic manuscripts held in the Royal Irish Academy or the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Eoin MacNeill, later the founder of the Irish Volunteers in 1913, was one of these, and Lady Gregory - by an astonishing feat of language-learning (for she knew no Irish until she began) was another.

In 1902 Lady Gregory published Cuchulain of Muirthemne, her translation of the Ulster Cycle and in particular the story of the Táin Bo Cuailgne - that is, the Cattle Raid of Cooley which incorporates the death of Cuchulain as its tragic climax. In 1904 she went on to produceGods and Fighting Men, a collection made up of tales and legends in the Mythological Cycle, the Fenian Cycle and the historical cycle. The two together have been published as The Complete Irish Mythology by the Slaney Press in 1995. Yeats called her Cuchulain the ’best that has come out of Ireland in my time’ - a sentence amusingly mocked in Joyce’s Ulysses (itself a very different kind of Irish epic written in conscious rivalry with the revivalist project of Lady Gregory and Yeats).

In truth, her book was a very great book in the sense that it provided, for the first time, the whole scope of Irish myth under single covers and did so in an entirely readable form. Lady Gregory wrote her in a style which she derived from the English dialect of Kiltarnan, the townland where her family estate was located in South Galway. That literary dialect (or, more exactly, invented literary language) involved among its chief ingredients a keen admiration for the imaginative oddity of Irish-English but also, inevitably, an element of cultural condescension which renders it ultimately unstable and decidedly old-fashioned to the modern Irish ear.

Lady Gregory was not, however, the first to publish translations of ancient Irish legends. W. B. Yeats himself had been obliged to read the story of Oisin and St. Patrick - given in the so-called “Colloquy of the Ancients” - a 12th century manuscript based on a much older story from the Fionn cycle - in a translation by Michael Comyn entitled "The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth" which appeared in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1854-63). It was because ancient materials for the revival (as he understood it) had been so hard to get at that Yeats praised Lady Gregory’s work so highly since her translation-work in Irish mythology and legend made the ancient stories available to a popular Irish readership in a uniform version for the first time.

Yet Lady Gregory’s version was, in the last analysis, nothing more than, a translation and to that extent it necessarily fell shortl of a genuine revival. As such it was marked by both her chosen literary dialectic and more generalised issues of taste and sensibility that marked the translator, as well as those differences which simply belong to the generation in which she lived as distinct from our own time.

Several translations have intervened between Lady Gregory and our own time - notably the Heroic Romances of Ireland produced by Arthur Leahy in 1905 while in 1936 two American scholars, Tom Peete Cross & Clark Harris Slover, issued a 600-page volume entitled Ancient Irish Tales which contains substantially the same conspectus as Lady Gregory’s volumes of 1902 and 1904. and In 1946 a new translation of the Cycle of the Kings was made by Myles Dillon, who also produced versions of the other cycles which alternate between summary and direct translation according as the digressive format of the original suits the taste of the modern reader.

Quite recently, Maria Heaney has produced a compact collection of Irish legends entitled Over the Nine Waves (1994). This is the most accessible version of the Irish myths and legends, both on account of its brevity and approachability, and for that reason the one adopted on this module.

In each of these, however, the issue of translation calls for some attention. Cross and Slover, by contrast, use an archaic style that owes much to Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur and Tennyson’s version of the same.

Only the translation of the Táin Bó Cuailgne by the poet Thomas Kinsella has the ring of authenticity - an effect greatly enhanced by the remarkable illustrations of the Irish painter Louis le Brocquy, paintings which have become iconic of the “barbaric” splendour of ancient Irish culture and the vividness of the mythological imagination of the oldest extant tradition of story-telling on the island.