Books

The Táin
Translated by Ciaran Carson, Viking, 2008, 256 pp.

The Táin, written sometime during the eighth century, is not only Ireland's greatest epic but among the greatest in the Western tradition. Yet it is routinely overshadowed by that other great epic that emerged from the same period: Beowulf.

The reason might be that Beowulf, unlike The Táin, is an extraordinarily tidy work; it satisfies the modern reader's most exacting formal expectations. Beowulf, however, marked by that typically medieval contempt for human endeavor, is relentlessly grim.

Greed, pride, vengeance, lust for power: men, including Beowulf himself, try to overcome these vices and nearly always fail. And the women in Beowulf are never more than dim figures moving in the shadows.

How different from Beowulf is The Táin. Here, man's enemies are not symbolic monsters, such as Grendel or his misty mother, or the shapeless dragon. Rather, they are other men, and women, one in particular: Queen Medb (pronounced "mayv").

Medb is jealous of her husband, the King of Connacht, who owns a bull more powerful than any other, except for the great Brown Bull that belongs to the men of Ulster. This bull can mount "fifty heifers every day," and Medb's desire to have it brings on The Táin's long, sometimes confusing series of battles, all of which appeal aggressively to our senses.

Cú Chulainn, for example, the Ulstermen's heroic warrior, drives his chariot around his throng of enemies, "encircling them with great ramparts of their own corpses piled sole to sole and headless neck to headless neck."

Here he is in single combat against a doomed Connacht charioteer: "Cú Chulainn slung a stone at him and opened his head for him so that his brain came out around his ears."

And Cú Chulainn has a sense of humor. Once he squeezes an enemy until he becomes incontinent, "polluting the ford and stinking up the air all around."

Nor is Queen Medb some abstract medieval beauty. We see her "passing water on the floor of her tent" or offering one warrior "the friendship of my own thighs."

Such are the pleasures of this ancient epic, and Ciaran Carson's brilliant new translation, the first since Thomas Kinsella's of 1969, captures them in an idiom that is always alive and never untrue.

The Táin is also intensely topographical. When Cú Chulainn, for example, kills a warrior named Mand by throwing him "against a nearby standing stone," that place becomes "Mag Mandachta," or "the Plain of Mand's Death."

This pattern — conflict followed by an act of naming — recurs over and over again, reminding us that the Irish landscape is endlessly rich in human history.

Carmine DiBiase is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.