[The Irish poets] certainly believed in the historical reality of even their wildest imaginations. And so soon as Christianity made their hearers desire a chronology that would run side by side with that of the Bible, they delighted in arranging their Kings and Queens, the shadows of forgotten mythologies, in long lines that ascended to Adam and his Garden. Those who listened to them must have felt as if the living were like rabbits digging their burrows under walls that had been built by Gods or Giants, or like swallows building their nests in the stone mouths of immense images, carved by nobody knows who.
William Butler Yeats, Preface to Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902)
And the name Cú Chulainn
Was sung out loud that night
In a tale of rage and ruin and of might
And the name Cú Chulainn
So furious and wild
To remain in myth and memory
A legend of the isle
Was sung out loud that night
In a tale of rage and ruin and of might
And the name Cú Chulainn
So furious and wild
To remain in myth and memory
A legend of the isle
