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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $16.50

Format:
Paperback
304 pp.
maps, 129 mm x 196 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199549856

Publication date:
November 2008

Imprint: OUP UK


Tales of the Elders of Ireland

Edited and translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe

Series : Oxford World's Classics

"'Dear holy cleric,' they said, 'these old warriors tell you no more than a third of their stories, because their memories are faulty. Have these stories written down on poets' tablets in refined language, so that the hearing of them will provide entertainment for the lords and commons of later times.' The angels then left them."

Tales of the Elders of Ireland is the first complete translation of the late Middle Irish Acallam na Senórach, the largest literary text surviving from twelfth-century Ireland. It contains the earliest and most comprehensive collection of Fenian stories and poetry, intermingling the contemporary Christian world of Saint Patrick, with his scribes, clerics, occasional angels and souls rescued from Hell, the earlier pagan world of the ancient, giant Fenians and Irish kings, and the parallel, timeless Otherworld, peopled by ever-young, shape-shifting fairies. It also provides the most extensive account available of the inhabitants of the Irish Otherworld - their music and magic, their internecine wars and their malice toward, and infatuation with, humankind - themes still featured in the story-telling of present-day Ireland.

This readable and flowing new translation is based on existing manuscript sources and is richly annotated, complete with an Introduction discussing the place of the Acallam in Irish tradition and the impact of the Fenian or Ossianic tradition on English and European literature.

Readership : Undergraduate or graduate courses in Celtic Studies, Irish Studies, Medieval Studies, Religious and Mythological Studies, Comparative Literature, Folklore. Will be of interest to all those studying Yeats.

Reviews

  • `" an eminently readable translation . . . . Dooley and Roe include an excellent introduction . . . . They also include a very helpful guide to the pronunciation of Irish names, . . . . This work will be of considerable value to those working in medieval Celtic studies, as well as in folklore and mythology or comparative literature"'
    James E. Doan, Irish Studies Review, Vol.8 No.3 2000

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Ann Dooley is Director of the Celtic Studies Programme at the University of Toronto and teacher at the Centre for Medieval Studies. Harry Roe is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Centre for Religious Studies, University of Toronto.

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Special Features

  • No competition
  • The first complete translation of the late Middle Irish Acallam na Senórach
  • Complements Thomas Kinsella's translation of the Taín, OUP,1970
  • Relevant to all Celtic and Irish Studies courses