From Setanta to Cú Chulainn


The Origins and Evolution of an Irish Hero

He was born of a god and raised among kings. He took up arms on the day a druid foretold that those who did so would be remembered forever and die young. He chose glory.


This is the story of Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, the greatest hero of Irish mythology: a boy who killed a fearsome hound and took its place as guardian; a warrior whose body could twist itself inside out in the heat of battle; a man capable of profound tenderness and catastrophic violence in equal measure. Alone on the ford, in the grip of his terrible warp-spasm, he held back the armies of Connacht while his countrymen lay helpless under a goddess's curse.


Drawing on the oldest manuscripts of the Ulster Cycle and the full sweep of Gaelic tradition, this book traces Cú Chulainn's story from his miraculous birth through his training in the shadow realm of Scáthach, his doomed marriage to the brilliant Emer, the tragedy of his combat with his beloved foster-brother Ferdiad, and his death, bound to a standing stone, still upright, still facing his enemies.


It is also the story of what happens to a hero after he dies: how he was mourned, reinvented, and eventually claimed as the symbol of a nation's struggle for independence and why, after more than a thousand years, he refuses to fall.


"A masterwork of mythological scholarship, erudite yet gripping, as alive to the poetry of the original texts as it is to their historical significance."

"No figure in Celtic tradition is more compelling or more complex. This book gives him the full reckoning he deserves."