THE RED BRANCH TALES

New translations by veteran Celtic scholar Eickhoff (The Destruction of the Inn, 2001, etc.) of more than 30 early Irish tales and fragments.

Ancient Irish literature is an acquired taste, even for the Irish, and readers dipping into Eickhoff’s meticulously organized and annotated anthology may find themselves reminded on occasion of Frank McCourt’s recollections (in Angela’s Ashes) of little boys in Limerick combing through the folklore for descriptions of Cúchulainn winning his wife in a peeing contest. All of these tales date from well before the arrival of the English in the 12th century, and they portray a world of clans that is almost pre-agrarian and given heavily to the heroic arts of war and conquest. As the author puts it in his introduction, “Ancient Irish stories are categorized as Destructions, Cattle-raids, Courtships, Battles, Cave Stories, Voyages, Tragedies, Adventures, Banquets, Sieges, Plunderings, Elopements, Eruptions, Visions, Love Stories, Hastings, and Invasions.” Most of the selections here, in fact, are written renditions of much older bardic odes, and their content is usually aptly summarized by their titles (“The Battle of Etair,” “The Wooing of Luaine,” etc.). Like all heroic tales, they use a highly formal and ornate rhetoric (“A wrathful brown hero is there and a fair, splendid hero, and a valiant champion who could rival a king with thick, yellow-red hair that is like a honeycomb at the end of harvest”), but they also rely on comic antics and ribaldry (in “The Intoxication of the Ulster Men,” a tribe defends itself by having its women strip naked before the bashful Cúchulainn, knowing that he will turn his back on them) to a much greater degree than the Norse sagas. The “Fragments” collected at the end are a mixture of incomplete tales and miscellaneous proverbs (“Sufficiency is better than a multitude”).

Eickhoff’s translations are fluid and easy, but this is a rarefied work that will appeal almost solely to scholars and serious Celtophiles.