The Irish have long pursued a national identity, their quest historically complicated by Ireland's relationship with England. Irish nationalists throughout the ages—such as the writers who fueled the Irish literary Renaissance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—have often called upon folklore and legend to help establish an Irish identity. During the late 1960s the religious, economic, and political strife in Northern Ireland finally erupted into open and prolonged violence. An author whose work typically focuses on British settings and themes, Sutcliff offers in The High Deeds of Finn Mac Cool—as she had in her earlier volume, The Hound of Ulster—a sympathetic tribute to Irish heritage.

A book that may be judged, on one hand, to be a gesture on the part of a sensitive Englishwoman toward building the spirit of community in Ireland is, on the...