SOURCE: "'Fury Destroys the World': Historical Strategy in Ireland's Ulster Epic," The Mankind Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Fall, 1982, pp. 41-60.

In this essay, Radner explores why the Táin was so popular during the eighth century, a time when Ireland's political situation differed so markedly from that of the Táin's audience. She concludes that the epic represents "a complex and strategic gesture of farewell to that [pagan era" that both glorifies the past and recognizes that its political environment was doomed to failure.]

Like other heroic literature which has been long maintained in oral tradition before its written redaction, the Ulster sagas of early Ireland present a highly archaic picture of life, and this fact has attracted much commentary.' The earliest of these sagas were probably committed to writing during the eighth century A.D., at least three hundred years after Christianity came to Ireland, and...