transl. Thomas Kinsella, Oxford, 1970.
This is the core of the Ulster cycle. As usual with epics, there is a whole corpus of material filling in details, such as how come Cu Chulainn fights so long without the Ulster warriors arriving. They are in their pangs because of the way Macha was treated. (p. 6ff) This edition contains several of these pre-tails, remscela, including the Derdriu story ("The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu"), the birth accounts of Conchobor and Cu Chulainn, the story of how Cu Chulainn fought his seven year old son and how the two bulls came to be from two pig-keepers.
The introduction to this volume includes four pages of maps, a bibliography and an advisement that the story is susceptible to some quite varied extrapolations. Two things which struck me in this regard are the apparent similarity of Cu Chulainn's salmon leap to the jump of the Taoist Master (for example, see the description by Deng Ming-Dao in his biography of Kwan Saihung, THE WANDERING TAOIST, Harper and Row, 1986 p 97ff) and the metaphorical understandings of THE BHAGAVAD GITA, in which Arjuna, the royal charioteer, being encouraged to participate in the battle has been seen as the spirit being urged to use willpower to combat the inclinations of the flesh.
The essential nature of all such deductions is that they are subjective and that the epic can well be enjoyed as an exciting story apart from analyses of the numerous origins of names provided, thoughts that monastic skittishness may be discerned in some tellings of adulterous or incestuous relationships and theories of Classical descriptions of Gaul influencing later Irish authors, etc.
The story describes the rivalry between Ulster and Connacht, the incitement of King Conchobor by his extra-ordinary wife to attempt the seizing of the prize bull of Ulster and on the incapacitation of the warriors of Ulster, the single handed opposition to the invaders by Cu Chulainn, the sentry or watchdog, whose remarkable accomplishments as a youth are recounted and whose repeated and devastating repulse of the invaders forms a large portion of the story. One climactic event is the one on one combat between Cu Chulainn and his foster brother, Ferdia. The quantity of verse in this section heightens its impact.
Among the many fascinating points in the tale is how the Morrigan, often portrayed as a frightening destroyer in battle, heals a wounded Cu Chulainn by providing him milk from the teats of a cow (pp 136-137), how Cu Chulainn was able to delay the invaders by carving an ogam challenge (p. 68ff) and Cethern's killing of the healers who pronounced his wounds incurable (p. 207).
The story contains inconsistencies, for example, Cu Chulain's living happily ever after with Medb's daughter, Finnabair, who was described as dying on page 215. And, as mentioned above it may be read according to a vast variety of mythological and symbolic impressions, including such impressions of the great contest at the end between the two champion bulls. While such a spectrum of deductions may hold fascinating subjective validity, as normal with such interpretations of poetic and sacred text, determination of a single objective reality is likely both highly contentious and incorrect.