Cycle. The most celebrated single work, from the Ulster Cycle, is the Táin bó
Cúailnge or Cattle-raid of Cooley (sometimes referred to simply as ‘theTáin’,
though there are also other Cattle-raids). According to Thurneysen it was
already known in the first half of the eighth century, but it is preserved in later
recensions of the ninth and eleventh.^43 Other works to be mentioned by
name, all from the twelfth century, are the Dindshenchas, which are prose and
verse texts concerned with the lore and legend attached to place names, the
Acallam na Senórach (Conversation of the Ancients), a collection of numerous
stories and poems with a narrative frame, and the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book
of the Invasions of Ireland), an antiquarian mythical history.
From Britain we have a poetic and prose literature in Early and Middle
Welsh –– we call it Welsh, but until the Saxons confined it to Wales it was
the language of large areas of England and southern Scotland too. The
earliest poems are associated with the late sixth-century bards Taliesin and
Aneirin. Taliesin was the court poet of Urien, king of Rheged (Cumbria
with Dumfries and Kirkcudbright), a champion of the British against the
English. Aneirin was a younger contemporary of Taliesin and court poet in
Strathclyde. He is credited with Y Gododdin, sometimes misdescribed as a
heroic poem, in fact a collection of short praise poems mostly relating to the
historic Battle of Catraeth (Catterick).^44 The most important prose source is
theMabinogion, a collection of eleven mythical narratives from the tenth and
eleventh centuries. Mention will also be made of the Triads of the Isle of
Britain, a twelfth-century collection of miscellaneous lore expressed in the
form of lists of three.
Finally there is a Gaelic oral tradition represented by songs collected from
the Western Isles in the nineteenth century by Alexander Carmichael (Car-
mina Gadelica, 6 vols., Edinburgh 1928–59). They contain some remarkable
survivals of pagan piety.
The earliest evidence relating to the Germanic world comes from Classical
authors, most notably from Tacitus’Germania, which drew on a lost work
of Pliny the Elder on the German wars. Tacitus mentions the existence
of traditional poetry as the Germans’ only form of record of the past, and
in another work he refers to songs in which the national hero Arminius
was commemorated.^45 Later, after Christianity brought literacy, we find
four separate branches of Germanic poetic tradition: Old High German
(^43) For surveys of this literature see Thurneysen (1921; on its chronology, 666–70); Dillon
(1946), (1948); Koch–Carey (2000).
(^44) I cite Y Gododdin by the line-numbering of Sir Ifor Williams, Canu Aneirin (1938), which
is followed by Koch–Carey (2000), 307–41. The transmitted text is thought to be a mixture of
recensions of the seventh and ninth centuries, see Koch–Carey (2000), 304–6.
(^45) Tac. Germ. 2. 2, Ann. 2. 88; passages from other authors in Clemen (1928).
Introduction 17