Deirdre

In 1923 James Stephens, then at the height of his fame as the author of The Crock of Gold and The Demi-Gods, set out to retell the whole of the Tain Bo Cuailnge as a five-book novel sequence. He completed only two of the planned five. Deirdre was the first.

The story is one of the foretales of the Tain, the older Longes mac nUislenn, the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu. Before her birth Deirdre is prophesied to bring ruin on the Red Branch and on the kingdom of Ulster. Conchobar mac Nessa, king at Emain Macha, refuses to put her to death. He sets her instead under the care of Lavarcham the conversation-woman and rears her in secret, intending that when she has come of age she will be his wife. Deirdre meets Naoise, son of Uisneac, and chooses him instead. With his brothers Ainnle and Ardan she escapes to Alba, where they live in hiding for seven years. Then Conchobar sends Fergus mac Roy under his honour to bring them home, and the long-set trap closes.

Stephens writes in a quiet, conversational, almost domestic register. He gives more weight than the medieval source to the long childhood of Deirdre, to Lavarcham's keeping, to the household of the sons of Uisneac, and to the slow logic by which Conchobar reasons himself toward the murder he has spent a lifetime preparing. The voice is novelistic without being modernised, and the dialogue is unhurried.

This edition reproduces the first edition published by Macmillan and Co. in London in 1923, presented in a fresh typeset edition. A glossary of Ulster Cycle terms, names, and places is appended. An introduction by the Editors, Rosmerta Publishing places Stephens's retelling in the larger arc of Irish prose responses to the Tain. This illustrated MythALLogy companion edition adds four public-domain plates by John Duncan, John D. Batten, and Stephen Reid, all pre-1929.