The Cycles of Irish Myth

Historical Cycle

It was part of the duty of the medieval Irish bards, or court poets, to record the history of the family and the genealogy of the king they served. This they did in poems that blended the mythological and the historical to a greater or lesser degree. The resulting stories form what has come to be known as the Historical Cycle, or Cycle of the Kings, as there are a number of independent groupings. Although over one hundred of these stories survive from the late seventh through the seventeenth centuries, few are known outside academic circles. This cycle is sometimes referred to as the Ossianic Cycle, because most of the poetry in this group of tales is attributed to Finn’s son Oisí­n (also called Ossian).

The kings that are covered range from the almost entirely mythological Labraid Loingsech, who became High King of Ireland around 431 BCE to the entirely historical Brian Boru. However, the greatest glory of the Historical Cycle is the Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Suibhne), a 12th century tale told in verse and prose.

Suibhne, king of Dal nAraide, was cursed by St Ronan and became a kind of half man, half bird, condemned to live out his life in the woods, fleeing from his human companions. The story has captured the imaginations of contemporary Irish poets. Buile Shuibne was first translated into English by J. G. O’Keeffe in 1913; a modern translation, Sweeney Astray, by Irish poet Seamus Heaney appeared in 1983.

Few Irish manuscripts remain from before the year 1000. The scarcity of early manuscripts is the result of Viking raids against Ireland that began at the end of the 8th century and destroyed most of the monasteries and their contents. Some manuscripts were preserved on the European continent by Irish missionary scholars who fled the invaders, but most knowledge of early Irish texts comes from fragments of works that were passed along orally and written down later. The stories of the Ulster and Fenian cycles are preserved in manuscripts dating from 1100 to the late 1300s, but their language and their references to earlier events demonstrate that the stories are remnants of a much older oral tradition.