THE PRELUDES TO THE RAID OF CUALGNE

TAIN BO FRAICH — Page 1

The raid for Dartaid’s cattle — Page 69

The raid for the cattle of Regamon — Page 83

The driving of the cattle of Flidais — Page 101

The apparition of the great queen to Cuchulain — Page 127

APPENDIX

Irish text and literal translation of part of the courtship of etain —
Page 143

TAIN BO FRAICH

INTRODUCTION

The Tain bo Fraich, the Driving of the Cattle of Fraech, has apparently only one version; the different manuscripts which contain it differing in very small points; most of which seem to be due to scribal errors.

Practically the tale consists of two quite separate parts.  The first, the longer portion, gives the adventures of Fraech at the court of Ailill and Maev of Connaught, his courtship of their daughter, Finnabar, and closes with a promised betrothal.  The second part is an account of an expedition undertaken by Fraech to the Alps “in the north of the land of the Long Beards,” to recover stolen cattle, as well as his wife,” who is stated by O’Beirne Crowe, on the authority of the “Courtship of Trebland” in the Book of Fermoy, to have been Trebland, a semi-deity, like Fraech himself.  Except that Fraech is the chief actor in both parts, and that there is one short reference at the end of the second part to the fact that Fraech did, as he had promised in the first part, join Ailill and Maev upon the War of Cualnge, there is no connection between the two stories.  But the difference between the two parts is not only in the subject-matter; the difference in the style is even yet more apparent.  The first part has, I think, the most complicated plot of any Irish romance, it abounds in brilliant descriptions, and, although the original is in prose, it is, in feeling, highly poetic.  The second part resembles in its simplicity and rapid action the other “fore tales” or preludes to the War of Cualnge contained in this volume, and is of a style represented in English by the narrative ballad.

In spite of the various characters of the two parts, the story seems to have been regarded as one in all the manuscripts which contain it; and the question how these two romances came to be regarded as one story becomes interesting.  The natural hypothesis would be that the last part was the original version, which was in its earlier part re-written by a man of genius, possibly drawing his plot from some brief statement