Saga and Myth in Ancient Ireland
Gerard Murphy
Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland
Irish storytelling has always specially attracted the student of antiquity. In it he finds something unique in European tradition, a rich mass of tales depicting a West-European barbaric civilisation as yet uninfluenced by the mighty sisters civilisation of Graeco-Roman lands. Likewise, the lover of literature, having exhausted the possibilities of the maturer literatures of other countries, finds in Irish storytelling something to delight him from the youth of the world, before the heart had been trained to bow before the head or the imagination to be troubled by logic and reality: Cú Chulainn, abandoning his watch over the frontiers of Ulster to keep a pledged tryst with the King of Tara’s wife, need fear no implied rebuke from the narrator of his deeds, and the strange impact on the human world of the spirit folk who dwell unseen by men in the hills beside them is accepted as part of an order which men as yet have neither sought to understand nor rebelled against by reason of its injustice.