Cuchulain of Muirthemne

Over the battlefield, a woman who comes as a crow.

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About this edition

This is the book that gave the Irish Revival its hero. In 1902 Lady Gregory gathered the scattered manuscripts of the Ulster cycle and set them down as one continuous story, in the plain speech of the country people around her at Coole in Galway, and Cuchulain walked out of the Irish manuscripts into modern literature. W. B. Yeats, who wrote the preface, called it the best book to come out of Ireland in his time.

Here is the boy who kills the great hound of Culain and takes its place at the door until a new one is reared. The champion who holds the ford against the men of Ireland, one at a time, through a winter, while Maeve's army waits for the men of Ulster to wake from their sickness. The friend who must fight Ferdiad for three days and carries his body across the water afterwards. The husband of Emer, who won her by answering her riddles. And at the end, a man who ties himself upright to a pillar-stone with his own belt, so that no one can say he fell.

Through all of it moves the Morrigan, the crow of battle. She comes to him as a young queen offering herself, and he refuses her. She comes as an eel about his feet at the ford, as a grey wolf, as a heifer at the head of a herd. She comes as an old woman milking, and he blesses her without knowing. And she comes last of all as a bird that settles on his shoulder, so that his enemies will know he is dead and dare to come near.

Complete in Lady Gregory's own wording: the Birth of Cuchulain, the Boy Deeds, the Courting of Emer, Bricriu's Feast, the Fate of the Sons of Usnach, the War for the Bull of Cuailgne, the Only Son of Aoife, and the Death of Cuchulain.

Details

• Lady Gregory
• Solocosmo Press
• The Lightbound Library
• Hardcover, 6 × 9, 316 pages
• Cover painting: Crow, Jessica von Braun