SOURCE: "Cú Chulainn—An Ill-Made Hero?" in Text und Zeittiefe, edited by Hildegard L. C. Tristram, Gunter Narr, 1994, pp. 185-215.

In the following essay, Bruford argues that the Tain was originally set down in writing by a cleric who intended it for secular aristocrats. According to Bruford, the popular interpretation of Cú Chulainn reveals the tension arising from the poem's exposure to a wider public.

Táin Bó Cuailnge (hereinafter "the Táin") is sometimes described as the national epic of ancient Ireland. In fact it is a prose epic (with a very poor epic structure) from a country which had hardly begun to think of itself as one nation. The obvious comparison with artificial national epics, such as Virgil's Aeneid, Macpherson's Ossian, or Lönnrot's Kalevala, may not be so inappropriate as Celtic scholars of the last generation might have thought. Indeed Ossian was composed using very...