In the following essay, Conrad-O'Briain looks at the Táin Bó Cúailnge as an elaborate literary creation, with particular emphasis on the author's use of place.
Students of the Táin Bó Cúailnge in particular and the early Irish literature in general have often neglected treating it as literature. Patricia Kelly at the beginning of "The Táin as Literature" saw as the main obstacles to literary analysis the scholarly preoccupation with mythology, history, and prehistory, and a "primitive" quality that Murphy in Saga and Myth in Early Ireland attributed to their origin in "the youth of the world, before the heart had been trained to bow before the head or the imagination to be troubled by logic." Research is making this explanation of the peculiar quality of the Táin Bó Cúailnge more and more difficult.....
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