this translation, I
have endeavoured to keep as close to the sense and the literary form of the
original as possible, but when there is conflict between the two
desiderata, I have not hesitated to give the first the preference. I have
also made use of a deliberately archaic English as, in my opinion,
harmonizing better with the subject. It means much to the reader of the
translation of an Old Irish text to have the atmosphere of the original
transferred as perfectly as may be, and this end is attained by preserving
its archaisms and quaintness of phrase, its repetitions and inherent
crudities and even, without suppression or attenuation, the grossness of
speech of our less prudish ancestors, which is also a mark of certain
primitive habits of life but which an over-fastidious translator through
delicacy of feeling might wish to omit. These side-lights on the
semi-barbaric setting of the Old Irish sagas are of scarcely less interest
and value than the literature itself.

The Tain Bo Cualnge, like most of the Irish saga-tales as they have come
down to us in their Middle Irish dress, is chiefly in prose, but
interspersed with verse. The verse-structure is very intricate and is
mostly in strophic form composed of verses of fixed syllabic length, rhymed
and richly furnished with alliteration. There is a third form of speech
which is neither prose nor verse, but partakes of the character of both, a
sort of irregular, rhymeless verse, without strophic division and
exceedingly rich in alliteration, internal rhyme and assonance. This kind
of speech, resembling in a way the dithyrambic passages in the Old
Testament, was known to the native Irish scholars as _rosc_ and it is
usually marked in the manuscripts by the abbreviation _R_. It was used in
short, impetuous outbursts on occasions of triumph or mourning.

While, on the whole, I believe the student will feel himself safer with a
prose translation of a poem than with one in verse, it has seemed to me
that a uniform translation of the Tain Bo Cualnge in prose would destroy
one of its special characteristics, which is that in it both prose and
verse are mingled. It was not in my power, however, to reproduce at once
closely and clearly the metrical schemes and the rich musical quality of
the Irish and at the same time compress within the compass of the Irish
measure such an analytic language as English, which has to express by means
of auxiliaries what is accomplished in Early I