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these tales are associated with animals or with natural features. The name Bóand, for example, means ‘white cow’; but Bóand is also the Irish name of the river Boyne. At the outset of ‘The Wooing of Étaín’, Bóand sleeps with the Dagdae, whose other name, Echu, means ‘horse’; Frank O’Connor saw this ‘love affair’ between a horse god and a cow goddess as a reconciliation between Bronze Age invaders and the indigenous Neolithic civilization, which gives some idea of how old these stories might be.10 Like Rhiannon in ‘Pwyll Lord of Dyved’, Macha of ‘The Labour Pains of the Ulaid’ is a euhemerized horse goddess; and the same may be conjectured of Étaín, whose epithet Echrade means ‘horse troop’. A number of the Síde appear as birds: Mider and Étaín leave Temuir as swans, and Óengus (Mider’s foster-son) and Cáer Ibormeith return to Bruig na Bóinde as swans; Conare Már’s unnamed father discloses himself to Mess Búachalla in the form of a bird; and Fand and Lí Ban first present themselves to Cú Chulaind as birds.

Strabo’s testimony, the evidence of lavish grave goods buried with the wealthy, and the identification of the Boyne burial mounds as the dwelling place of the Síde all suggest that the Irish did believe in a life after death. But the Irish otherworld was not simply an anticipated joyful afterlife; it was also – even primarily – an alternative to reality, a world that the hero might enter upon the invitation of a king or a beautiful woman. Inasmuch as this otherworld, no matter how beautiful, is not quite human (there is, for example, no winter), the hero never stays; but the alternative – and thus the tension – is always present.

Finally, there is the language, as beautiful and elusive as any aspect of Irish culture. Just as the Celts were a distinct Indo-European entity, so their languages formed an independent branch of the Indo-European language tree; nonetheless, Celtic is more like Italic (that is, the Romance languages) than it is like any of the other Indo-European language groups, and many place and personal names in Gaulish are very similar to those in Latin. For example, the Gaulish suffix -rix (as in Vercingetorix) is the counterpart of the Latin word rex, both meaning ‘king’.

In the British Isles, the Celtic languages divided into two groups, one spoken primarily in Britain (and comprising Welsh and, eventually, Cornish and Breton), the other spoken primarily in Ireland (and comprising Irish Gaelic and, eventually, Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic). The most obvious (though not necessarily the most important or fundamental) difference between the two groups is that Indo-European qu became p in the British languages (the word for ‘four’ was petwar) and c in the Irish group (‘four’ was cethair).

At the time our stories are purported to have taken place – which is to say any time before the fourth century – the Irish language probably looked a good deal like Gaulish and not so very different from Latin. By the time these stories were being written down, however – and this could have begun as early as the seventh century – drastic changes had taken place: many final syllables had dropped away, many medial vowels had disappeared and many medial consonants had been simplified or lightened. Thus, the word for ‘horse’, equus in Latin, had become ech in Ireland at this time. The language of the tales, then, is quite different from that of the time they describe; and this makes the correlation of the stories’ proper names with those in earlier sources (such as Ptolemy’s geography) even more difficult. Although the syntax of the new language was straightforward, the morphology was not: regular verb conjugations often looked wildly irregular, and word roots occasionally disappeared altogether. The principles of phonetic change were aesthetic rather than semantic; the resultant language was soft and subtle, verb poor but noun-and-adjective rich, static and yet vital.

Irish Storytelling

Irish literature – meaning whatever was written down in Irish – of this time encompassed a broad area, including history, genealogy