TÁIN BÓ CUAILNGE (The cattle raid of Cuailnge) is the longest and the most famous of the early Irish heroic tales. It exists in three recensions. The first of them is preserved in Lebhor na hUidhre (The book of the dun cow), dated circa 1100 CE, and in the Yellow Book of Lecan, a late fourteenth-century manuscript. The second is preserved in the Book of Leinster, written in the mid-twelfth century, and the third in two manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, as with many other early Irish tales, the date of the earliest extant manuscript provides only a terminus ante quem for the first recording as well as for the composition of the text, and even in the first recension of Táin Bó Cuailnge there are several linguistic strata which...