DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

The Ulster Cycle

The Ulster Cycle, formerly the Red Branch Cycle, deals with swaggering pagan heroes of the century before Christ. The finest of all the Ulster stories is Longes Mac Nusnig [exile of the sons of Usnech], the tragedy of Deirdre. The cycle centers around the reign of Conchobar mac Nessa, who is said to have been king of Ulster around the time of Christ. He ruled from Emain Macha (now Navan Fort near Armagh), and had a fierce rivalry with queen Medb and king Ailill of Connacht and their ally, Fergus mac Róich, former king of Ulster. The foremost hero of the cycle is Conchobar’s nephew Cúchulainn, hero of its longest story, Tain Bó Cúalnge [the Cattle Raid of Cooley].

It was once unquestioned that medieval Irish literature preserved truly ancient traditions in a form virtually unchanged through centuries of oral tradition back to the ancient Celts of Europe. Kenneth Jackson famously described the Ulster Cycle as a “window on the Iron Age”, and Garret Olmsted has attempted to draw parallels between Tain Bó Cúalnge, the Ulster Cycle epic, and the iconography of the Gundestrup Cauldron. However, this “nativist” position has been challenged by “revisionist” scholars who believe that much of it was created in Christian times in deliberate imitation of the epics of classical literature that came with Latin learning. The revisionists would point to passages apparently influenced by The Iliad in Tain Bó Cúalnge, and the existence of Togail Troi, a very early Irish adaptation of The Aeneid found in the Book of Leinster, and note that the material culture of the stories is generally closer to the time of the stories’ composition than to the distant past. A consensus has emerged which encourages a critical reading of the material.

The Ulster Cycle is set around the beginning of the Christian era and most of the action takes place in the provinces of Ulster and Connacht. It consists of a group of heroic stories dealing with the lives of Conchobar Mac Nessa, king of Ulster, the great hero Cúchulainn, the son of Lugh, and of their friends, lovers, and enemies. These are the Ulaid, or people of the North-Eastern corner of Ireland and the action of the stories centers round the royal court at Emain Macha, close to the modern city of Armagh. The Ulaid had close links with the Irish colony in Scotland, and part of Cúchulainn’s training takes place in that colony.

The cycle consists of about eighty stories of the births, early lives and training, wooings, battles, feastings and deaths of the heroes and reflects a warrior society in which warfare consists mainly of single combats and wealth is measured mainly in cattle. These stories are written mainly in prose. The centerpiece of the Ulster Cycle is the Tain Bó Cúalnge. Other important Ulster Cycle tales include The Tragic Death of Aife’s only Son, Bricriu’s Feast, and The Destruction of Ua Derga’s Hostel. The Exile of the Sons of Usnech, better known as the Tragedy of Deirdre and the source of plays by John Millington Synge and William Butler Yeats, is also part of this cycle.

This cycle is, in some respects, close to the Mythological Cycle. Some of the characters from the latter reappear, and the same sort of shape-shifting magic is much in evidence, side by side with a grim, almost callous realism. While we may suspect a few characters, such as Medb or Cú Roí, of once being deities, and Cúchulainn in particular displays superhuman prowess, the characters are firmly mortal and rooted in a specific time and place. If the Mythological Cycle represents a Golden Age, the Ulster Cycle is Ireland’s Heroic Age.

Elements of the Ulster Cycle, such as Cu Chulainn’s magic spear and the motif of the Champion’s Ordeal in Bricriu’s Feast, have been shown to be the sources of parts of the Matter of Britain.

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