I’m looking to read the Ulster Cycle in English. Any recs for translations/editions?
so, i should preface this by saying that the “ulster cycle” is an incredibly nebulous (and modern) concept; it’s not a unified body of texts that fit together chronologically and can be read one after the other like a series of books. it’s just a whole mishmash of dozens and dozens of texts that have some of the same characters and appear to take place against the same pseudohistorical backdrop, so have been grouped as “ulster cycle” by modern scholars because it’s the easiest way of classifying them. we don’t know to what extent medieval authors thought of them that way, and we don’t know what texts they would’ve included under that header, either
(also, like, there are a lot of texts that are considered to be ‘ulster cycle’. if we go to CODECS, which is one of the most useful online resources for celticists, there are 194 texts tagged as belonging to the ‘ulster cycle’ in some way, shape, or form. so reading the whole lot would be ambitious! and probably impossible given that several of those are likely lost, or exist only in unedited manuscripts, or have been edited but not translated, or are fragmentary, and so on and so forth)
i’m saying this not bc i expect you to know that or whatever, just that i’ve seen a lot of people referring to ‘the ulster cycle’ as if it’s a unified thing that you can just read and it’s … not. and i think this idea’s quite misleading and limiting, especially because it means people expect like… internal consistency between texts that were never really intended to be read in that way. i need someone to do a blog post or video or something about where the cyclical classification comes from and why it’s limited, because i know there are academic articles on it but i don’t have any to hand and those aren’t super accessible, so it would be useful to be able to direct people somewhere
(basically, these first three paragraphs are not just @ you, they are a more general PSA to others interested in medieval irish material)
ANYWAY
what you probably want to read is táin bó cúailnge and the various remscéla or ‘foretales’ that go with it. (which is something medieval audiences seem to have understood as being a group of texts. not necessarily a cohesive, consistent, and chronological group of texts, but a group nonetheless)
lucky for you, there are translations of this that are easy to find, reasonably accessible, and not expensive. yay!
i personally like ciarán carson’s translation of the táin, but i know others who don’t; it’s the most colloquial and modern, as well as the cheapest (especially on kindle)
thomas kinsella’s translation is probably the most popular more widely, and he also includes quite a lot of the foretales / prequels / background info, such as the exile of the sons of uisliu, which is a useful story to know if you want to understand why certain characters are doing the thing in the táin
you may also find gantz’s early irish myths and sagas useful – this is a collection of stories, some of which are ‘ulster cycle’ (some are ‘mythological cycle’, such as tochmarc étaíne) – if you end up going for carson’s translation but still want the foretales, most of them are in here too, though gantz’s translations aren’t massively stylish
once you’ve read those it starts to get trickier because i don’t think any of the other stories have really been published in like… mainstream translations? most of them got published in academic journals in the 19th century which means they’re now out of copyright and can often be found online, but this also means the translations are… not always great lol. sometimes there are more recent translations but they’re in journals or someone’s thesis or whatever so can be hard to find
anyway, here are some places to find translations online:
CELT (the corpus of electronic texts) – solid translations, though usually on the older side, with bibliographic info, also has some of the original irish which is great when you want to look for a specific quote
the celtic literature collective – a LOT of texts, like, more texts than CELT, but with less info about who did the translations or when, which means i tend not to rely on it so much (because it could be any old randomer or it could be whitley stokes and you just don’t know!)
but yeah, would definitely advise going for one of the books above as a first port of call
hope this helps!
