The sons of Usnach, who like shields their friends protected well,
By might of hosts on battle-field to death were borne, and fell;
And each was white of skin, and each his friends in love would hold,
Now naught remains for song to teach, the Third of Griefs is told.

THE COMBAT AT THE FORD

INTRODUCTION

This version of the “Combat at the Ford,” the best-known episode of the Irish romance or romantic epic, the “War of Cualnge,” will hardly be, by Irish scholars, considered to want a reference.  It is given in the Book of Leinster, which cannot have been written later than 1150 A.D., and differs in many respects from the version in the fourteenth-century Book of Lecan, which is, for the purposes of this text, at least equal in authority to the Leabbar na h-Uidhri, which must have been written before 1100 A.D.  Mr. Alfred Nutt has kindly contributed a note on the comparison of the two versions, which has been placed as a special note at the end of the translation of the “Combat.”  To this note may be added the remark that the whole of the Leabhar na h-Uidhri version of the “War of Cualnge” seems, to be subject to the same criticisms that have to be passed on the “Sickbed” and the “Courtship of Etain” in the same volume, viz. that it is a compilation from two or three different versions of the same story, and is not a connected and consistent romance, which the version in the Book of Leinster appears to be.  As an illustration of this, the appearance of Conall Cernach as on the side of Connaught in the early part of the L.U. version may be mentioned; he is never so represented in other versions of the “War.”  In the description of the array of Ulster at the end of L.U., he is noted as being expected to be with the Ulster army but as absent (following in this the Book of Leinster, but not a later manuscript which agrees with the Book of Leinster in the main); then at the end of the L.U. version Conall again appears in the Connaught army and saves Conor from Fergus, taking the place of Cormac in the Book of Leinster version.  Miss Faraday, in her version of the “War” as given in L.U., notes the change of style at page 82 of her book.  Several difficulties similar to that of the position of Conall could be mentioned; and on the whole it seems as if the compiler of the manuscript from which both the Leabhar na h-Uidhri and the Yellow Book of Lecan were copied, combined into one several different descriptions of the “War,” one of which is represented by the Book of Leinster version.