[FN#128] This word is left doubtful in Windisch’s translation.  The word is breth in Y.B.L. and breit in Egerton.  Breit may be a strip of woollen material, or a strip of land; so the meaning of a strip of flesh seems possible.

“I will beat thee from me,” said he, “with the spear, till thy left or thy right eye bursts from thy head, and thou shalt never have healing from me, if thou leavest me not.”  “I shall in truth,” she said, “be for thee as a white heifer with red ears, and I will go into a lake near to the ford in which thou art in combat against a man who is thine equal in feats, and one hundred white, red-eared cows shall be behind me and ‘truth of men’ shall on that day be tested; and they shall take thy head from thee.”  “I will cast at thee with a cast of my sling,” said Cuchulain, “so as to break either thy left or thy right leg from under thee; and thou shalt have no help from me if thou leavest me not.”

They[FN#129] separated, and Cuchulain went back again to Dun Imrid, and the Morrigan with her cow to the fairy mound of Cruachan; so that this tale is a prelude to the Tain bo Cualnge.

[FN#129] All this sentence up to “so that this tale” is from the Egerton version.  The Yellow Book of Lecan gives “The Badb thereon went from him, and Cuchulain went to his own house, so that,” &c.

TEXT OF LEABHAR NA H-UIDHRI

GIVING THE CONCLUSION OF THE “COURTSHIP OF ETAIN”

INTRODUCTION

The following pages give, with an interlinear word for word[FN#130] translation, the text of Leabhar na h-Uidhri, page 130 b. line 19 to the end of page 132 a. of the facsimile.  The text corresponds to the end of the tale of the Court ship of Etain in vol. i., from page 27, line 21, to the end of the story; it also contains the poem which is in that volume placed on page 26, but occurs in the manuscript at the place where the first line of it is quoted on page 30 of vol. i.

[FN#130] The Irish idiom of putting the adjective after the noun is not always followed in the translation.

It is hoped that the text may be found to be convenient by scholars:  special care has been taken to make it accurate, and it has not, with the exception of the poem just referred to, been published before except in the facsimile; the remainder of the text of the L.U. version of the Courtship of Etain, together with the poem, has been given by Windisch in the first volume of the Irische Texte.

The immediate object of the publication of this text, with its interlinear translation, is however somewhat different; it was desired to give any who may have become interested in the subject, from the romances contained in the two volumes of this collection, some idea of their exact form in the original, and of the Irish constructions and metres, as no Irish scholarship is needed to follow the text, when supplemented by the interlinear translation.  The translation may be relied on, except for a few words indicated by a mark of interrogation.