The stories these tradition bearers told were not so much memorized as creatively recomposed upon each performance. This was certainly true of their highly prized Tain—some of whose early characters and episodes would live on in the manuscript, as well as in the oral tradition of succeeding centuries. Embodied in The Tain, for example, are traces of a longstanding Celtic myth having to do with the creation of the world out of supernatural bulls, and with a primeval struggle between semidivine men and women.
Reconstructing early Irish history. Literacy and the motivation to produce a literature came to Ireland with Christianity, beginning in the fifth century. The Irish of the “prehistoric” period (that is, before Christianity) left no literary record. According to the chronology of the past that was developed by medieval Irish writers, the cattle raid of Cooley took place in the early first century, C.E. (A separate tale, having to do with the death of Conchobar, the king of Ulster province at the time in which the story of the cattle raid is set, claims that it was brought about after he heard of the sad death of Jesus Christ, his contemporary.)
Arguably, The Tain, in at least some of its details, reflects a world even earlier than that: perhaps Ireland of the late first millennium, B.C.E., of which we know very little from classical (ancient Greek and Roman) sources.
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