The Oldest Irish Tradition of the title is the Ulster Cycle of ancient tales centred on the warrior hero Cu Chullain and culminating in the epic Tain B6 Cualnge ("The Cattle-Raid ofCooley'). While the oldest surviving manuscript containing the Ulster Cycle was set down around the year 1100, Professor Jackson shows how its text preserves an oral tradition flourishing in Ireland at least six hundred years before that date and offering a vivid reflection of the Celtic Irish 'Heroic Age' of the third and fourth centuries AD. Comparing the Ulster Cycle's evocation of the Celtic La Tene culture with that of the Greek Bronze Age found in The Iliad, he reveals it as 'a window on the Iron Age' in pre-Christian Ireland and also in Britain and Gaul during the first centuries of the first millenium AD. Since its first appearance in 1964, this remarkable study has attained the stature of a miniature modern classic of Celtic scholarship and bears its own concise testimony to the outstanding achievement of the late Professor K. H. Jackson.
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