Carson - The Tain

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This translation first published 2007
Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2008
1

Translation and editorial material copyright Ciaran Carson, 2007
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

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978-0-14-190009-4

In memory of the storyteller John Campbell
of Mullaghbawn, Co. Armagh,
born 1933, died 2006

I am first of all most grateful to Marcella Edwards of Penguin Classics, whose idea it was to commission this translation. It would never have occurred to me otherwise. Thanks are due to Liam Breatnach, Greg Toner and Michael Cronin, who provided me with useful reading lists of background and critical material. Conversations with Bob Welch, Aodn Mac Pilin and Brian Mullen helped me to clarify some aspects of the translation. My wife Deirdre read the work in progress, as she has done with all my work since we met some thirty years ago; as always, her response and her suggestions were invaluable.

Tin B Cailnge is the longest and most important tale in the Ulster Cycle, a group of some eighty interrelated stories which recount the exploits of the Ulaid, a prehistoric people of the north of Ireland, from whom the name of Ulster derives. The authors of these stories are anonymous. Briefly, the Tin tells of how Queen Medb of Connacht, envious that her husband Ailill owns a prize bull, Finnbennach the White-horned, the superior of any that she possesses, decides to go on an expedition to steal the Donn Cailnge, the Brown Bull of Cooley, in the province of Ulster. At this time the Ulstermen are laid low by an ancient, periodic cursemore complicated matter, and have been the subject of much scholarly debate.

There are several legends, or versions of the same legend, concerning the transmission of the Tin. A typical example is that given by Maghnus Domhnaill, a lord of Donegal, in his account of the life of St Colm Cille, written under O Domhnaills direction at his castle in Lifford in 1532. The story, referring to events of some 900 years earlier, can be summarized as follows:

Senchan the High Bard of Erin comes to stay with Gaire, a prince of Connacht, together with his entourage of three fifties of master poets and three fifties of apprentices, each and every one of them with two women and a servant and a dog. They eat him out of house and home, since Gaire is forced to gratify their every whim for fear of satire. When Gaires brother, the hermit Marbn, hears of this he curses them, taking away their gift of poetry until such times as they can recite the whole of the Tin. For a year and a day they scour Ireland interviewing bards and storytellers in search of the Tin, with no success, for only fragments of that long story survive. At last Senchan goes to Colm Cille, who takes him to the grave of Fergus Mac Rich, one of the chief protagonists of the Tin. Fergus, summoned from the grave by Colm Cille, proceeds to narrate the whole story, which is written down by St Ciaran of Cluain on the hide of his pet dun cow: hence Lebor na hUidre, The Book of the Dun Cow.

This story is an allusion to another famous legend concerning Colm Cille himself: admiring a certain book belonging to St Finnen, Colm Cille asks him if he can copy it; the book deserves a wider audience. Finnen refuses. Colm Cille secretly copies the book anyway. According to Domhnaill, the room in which Colm Cille works is illuminated by the five fingers of his hand, which blaze like five candles. Colm Cille is spied on by a youth, who, attracted by the preternatural light, peers through a hole in the church door, whereupon his eye is plucked out by Colm Cilles pet crane. The youth goes to Finnen, who restores the eye. (I note in passing that a plausible etymology for Finnen is fair bird.) Finnen disputes Colm Cilles right to the copy, and the two clerics ask Diarmaid, the High King, to resolve the issue, whereupon he makes what has been called the first copyright judgment: To every cow her calf; to every book its copy. For books then were, quite literally, made from calves, as borne out by the English word vellum, from Old French vel, a calf.

As it happens, the book known to us as Lebor na hUidre or The Book of the Dun Cow now in the keeping of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin does indeed contain a partial version of the Tin, as well as an account of the life of Colm Cille; but this text (of which only 67 vellum leaves survive from a total of some 130) was written in the year 1100 or so, and not in the sixth century when Colm Cille lived. However, it is thought that much of The Book of the Dun Cow is derived from texts of the ninth century, now no longer extant, which might in turn have been based on texts of two or three centuries earlier. But we cannot know to what extent these putative antecedents were based on oral accounts which would themselves have been transmitted in several versions, changed, improved or corrupted as they were recounted by different storytellers with different historical, cultural and artistic agendas.