This version of the "Combat at the Ford," the best-known episode of the
Irish romance or romantic epic, the "War of Cualnge," will hardly be,
by Irish scholars, considered to want a reference. It is given in the
Book of Leinster, which cannot have been written later than 1150 A.D.,
and differs in many respects from the version in the fourteenth-century
Book of Lecan, which is, for the purposes of this text, at least equal
in authority to the Leabbar na h-Uidhri, which must have been written
before 1100 A.D. Mr. Alfred Nutt has kindly contributed a note on the
comparison of the two versions, which has been placed as a special note
at the end of the translation of the "Combat." To this note may be
added the remark that the whole of the Leabhar na h-Uidhri version of
the "War of Cualnge" seems, to be subject to the same criticisms that
have to be passed on the "Sickbed" and the "Courtship of Etain" in the
same volume, viz. that it is a compilation from two or three different
versions of the same story, and is not a connected and consistent
romance, which the version in the Book of Leinster appears to be. As
an illustration of this, the appearance of Conall Cernach as on the
side of Connaught in the early part of the L.U. version may be
mentioned; he is never so represented in other versions of the "War."
In the description of the array of Ulster at the end of L.U., he is
noted as being expected to be with the Ulster army but as absent
(following in this the Book of Leinster, but not a later manuscript
which agrees with the Book of Leinster in the main); then at the end of
the L.U. version Conall again appears in the Connaught army and saves
Conor from Fergus, taking the place of Cormac in the Book of Leinster
version. Miss Faraday, in her version of the "War" as given in L.U.,
notes the change of style at page 82 of her book. Several difficulties
similar to that of the position of Conall could be mentioned; and on
the whole it seems as if the compiler of the manuscript from which both
the Leabhar na h-Uidhri and the Yellow Book of Lecan were copied,
combined into one several different descriptions of the "War," one of
which is represented by the Book of Leinster version.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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