SOURCE: "The Irish Epic," "The Epic Hero," and "Tragedy in the Epic" in The "Táin Bó Cuailnge" and the Epic Tradition, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Dallas, 1979, pp. 14-157.

In the following excerpt, Gray enumerates the different narrative and structural elements, as well as character types, present in the Táin and compares the poem with other epic poems, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and the Mabinogion.

The Irish Epic

The Táin Bó Cuailnge suffers from obscurity outside the country in which it originated. If it is known at all, it is generally perceived only as a source for some of W. B. Yeats's works, a notion which intensifies the suspicion with which it is regarded. For although Yeats may be, as T. S. Eliot proclaimed him, the greatest modern lyric poet to write in English, he was known to dabble...