The Ulster Cycle

Key takeaways: the Ulster Cycle is the heroic centre of medieval Irish literature; its oldest copies sit in Lebor na hUidre (c. 1106) and the Book of Leinster, preserving language centuries older; its axis is the war between Conchobar’s Ulster and Medb’s Connacht; and despite the name, the west of Ireland, from Rathcroghan to Erris, holds much of its ground.

What is the Ulster Cycle?

The Ulster Cycle is the heroic literature of medieval Ireland: a connected body of saga, tragedy and grim comedy set in a remembered Iron Age, around the court of Conchobar mac Nessa at Emain Macha and the rival court of Medb and Ailill at Cruachan. Its world is one of cattle wealth, chariot warfare, poets whose satire can raise blisters, and honour pursued past all sense. Its presiding figure is Cú Chulainn, the boy who takes arms at seven on the promise that his name will outlive him, and its presiding shadow is the Morrígan, the goddess who decides the fates of heroes rather than fighting them.

When were the tales written down, and in what manuscripts?

The two indispensable books are Lebor na hUidre, the Book of the Dun Cow, written at Clonmacnoise around 1106 and the oldest surviving manuscript wholly in Irish, and the Book of Leinster, compiled in the twelfth century. Between them they carry the two main recensions of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, along with Fled Bricrenn, the death-tales and much else; the fourteenth-century Yellow Book of Lecan supplies further copies. The manuscripts are medieval but the prose is older: the language of the earliest stratum is dated to the eighth and ninth centuries, with some verse passages possibly older again. One western tale, the Táin Bó Flidhais, also survives in a greatly expanded late version in the fifteenth-century Glenmasan manuscript in Scotland.

What is the Táin Bó Cúailnge?

The Cattle Raid of Cooley is the cycle’s epic. Medb of Connacht, determined that her wealth will not fall short of her husband’s by a single bull, marches the combined armies of Ireland into Ulster to take the Brown Bull of Cooley. The Ulstermen lie helpless under Macha’s curse, struck down by labour pains at the province’s hour of need, and the defence falls to one seventeen-year-old. Cú Chulainn fights the invasion to a standstill in single combats at the fords, killing his own foster-brother Fer Diad in the most famous of them. The raid succeeds and fails at once: the two bulls fight, and both kingdoms are left holding the wreckage.

Who are the cycle’s major figures, and what are its themes?

Around Cú Chulainn stand Conchobar, the king whose judgement curdles; Fergus mac Róich, the former Ulster king exiled into Medb’s camp and Medb’s bed; Deirdre, whose beauty is prophesied to ruin the province and does; Conall Cernach, the avenger; Emer, who out-riddles her suitor; and Medb herself, the most formidable woman in early Irish literature. The themes are honour and its price, sovereignty and female kingship, the geis or sacred prohibition that always comes due, and the ford as the threshold where heroes meet their opposites, their lovers and their deaths.

Where should you start?

• Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the epic of the cycle and of early Ireland.
• Táin Bó Flidhais, the Mayo Táin: Fergus, Flidais and a cattle raid into Erris.
• Longes mac nUislenn, the exile of the sons of Uisliu and the tragedy of Deirdre.
• Cú Chulainn, the hound of Ulster from boyhood deeds to the standing stone.
• Medb of Connacht, the queen who would not be out-owned.
• Macha, whose curse on Ulster’s men makes the whole Táin possible.
• Cruachan / Rathcroghan, Connacht’s royal site and the cave called Ireland’s gate to Hell.
• Knocknarea, the Sligo summit where tradition buries Medb upright, facing her enemies.

How does the Ulster Cycle connect to the other cycles?

The gods of the Mythological Cycle walk through it: Lugh stands over the wounded Cú Chulainn as his father, and the Morrígan meets him at the ford as eel, wolf and heifer. The Cycle of the Kings overlaps it at Cruachan, where Echtra Nerai opens the síd on Samhain night, and through Medb, as much sovereignty figure as queen. And the cycle outlived its manuscripts: the badb of the battlefield survived in the banshee traditions of the west, and Deirdre’s story fed centuries of later Irish writing.