"I will beat thee from me," said he, "with the spear, till thy left or
thy right eye bursts from thy head, and thou shalt never have healing
from me, if thou leavest me not." "I shall in truth," she said, "be
for thee as a white heifer with red ears, and I will go into a lake
near to the ford in which thou art in combat against a man who is thine
equal in feats, and one hundred white, red-eared cows shall be behind
me and 'truth of men' shall on that day be tested; and they shall take
thy head from thee." "I will cast at thee with a cast of my sling,"
said Cuchulain, "so as to break either thy left or thy right leg from
under thee; and thou shalt have no help from me if thou leavest me not."
They[FN#129] separated, and Cuchulain went back again to Dun Imrid, and
the Morrigan with her cow to the fairy mound of Cruachan; so that this
tale is a prelude to the Tain bo Cualnge.
[FN#129] All this sentence up to "so that this tale" is from the
Egerton version. The Yellow Book of Lecan gives "The Badb thereon went
from him, and Cuchulain went to his own house, so that," &c.
TEXT OF LEABHAR NA H-UIDHRI
GIVING THE CONCLUSION OF THE "COURTSHIP OF ETAIN"
INTRODUCTION
The following pages give, with an interlinear word for word[FN#130]
translation, the text of Leabhar na h-Uidhri, page 130 b. line 19 to
the end of page 132 a. of the facsimile. The text corresponds to the
end of the tale of the Court ship of Etain in vol. i., from page 27,
line 21, to the end of the story; it also contains the poem which is in
that volume placed on page 26, but occurs in the manuscript at the
place where the first line of it is quoted on page 30 of vol. i.
[FN#130] The Irish idiom of putting the adjective after the noun is
not always followed in the translation.
It is hoped that the text may be found to be convenient by scholars:
special care has been taken to make it accurate, and it has not, with
the exception of the poem just referred to, been published before
except in the facsimile; the remainder of the text of the L.U. version
of the Courtship of Etain, together with the poem, has been given by
Windisch in the first volume of the Irische Texte.
The immediate object of the publication of this text, with its
interlinear translation, is however somewhat different; it was desired
to give any who may have become interested in the subject, from the
romances contained in the two volumes of this collection, some idea of
their exact form in the original, and of the Irish constructions and
metres, as no Irish scholarship is needed to follow the text, when
supplemented by the interlinear translation. The translation may be
relied on, except for a few words indicated by a mark of interrogation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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