Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch
of Ulster
Arranged and put into English by Lady Isabella August Gregory
Dedication of the Irish Edition to the people of Kiltartan
When I began to gather these stories together, it is of you I was
thinking, that you would like to have them and to be reading them.
For although you have not to go far to get stories of Finn and Goll
and Oisin from any old person in the place, there is very little
of the history of Cuchulain and his friends left in the memory of
the people, but only that they were brave men and good fighters,
and that Deirdre was beautiful.
When I went looking for the stories in the old writings, I found
that the Irish in them is too hard for any person to read that has
not made a long study of it. Some scholars have worked well at them,
Irishmen and Germans and Frenchmen, but they have printed them in
the old cramped Irish, with translations into German or French or
English, and these are not easy for you to get, or to understand,
and the stories themselves are confused, every one giving a different
account from the others in some small thing, the way there is not
much pleasure in reading them. It is what I have tried to do, to
take the best of the stories, or whatever parts of each will fit
best to one another, and in that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain's
life and death. I left out a good deal I though you would not care
about for one reason or another, but I put in nothing of my own
that could be helped, only a sentence or so now and again to link
the different parts together. I have told the whole story in plain
and simple words, in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used
to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at
Roxborough.
And indeed if there was more respect for Irish things among the
learned men that live in the college at Dublin, where so many of
these old writings are stored, this work would not have been left
to a woman of the house, that has to be minding the place, and listening
to complaints, and dividing her share of food.
My friend and your friend the Craoibhin Aoibhin has put Irish of
to-day on some of these stories that I have set in order, for I
am sure you will like to have the history of the heroes of Ireland
told in the language of Ireland. And I am very glad to have something
that is worth offering you, for you have been very kind to me ever
since I came over to you from Kilchriest, two-and-twenty years ago.
AUGUSTA GREGORY
March 1902
Cruachan
Cuchulain
Cuchulain's
fight with the sea Poem by William Butler Yeats
Dream of Angus
I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my
time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever
come out of Ireland, for the stories which it tells are a chief
part of Ireland's gift to the imagination of the world - and it
tells them perfectly for the first time. So wrote William Butler
Yeats in praise of Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne
|
