The fourth cycle, and the one nobody has heard of: legends about kings who mostly existed, shading from the entirely fictional to Brian Boru — plus the mad king who turned into a bird, and gave Seamus Heaney a book.
Also called the Historical Cycle, this is the body of tales about Ireland's kings: origin legends for dynasties and peoples, accounts of battles, and anecdotes explaining a rite or a custom. The kings run from Labraid Loingsech, supposedly high king in the fourth century BC and almost entirely fictional, through Conn of the Hundred Battles, Cormac mac Airt and Niall of the Nine Hostages, to Brian Boru, who is as historical as anyone in this file gets.
It exists because of a job. Medieval Irish bards were court poets with a duty to record the history and genealogy of the family they served, and they did it in verse that blended the mythological and the historical in whatever proportion the patron required. Read that way the cycle is not a failed history but a working one: it shows what a dynasty needed to be true about itself.
Its most famous tale is Buile Shuibhne, the Madness of Suibhne — a twelfth-century work in verse and prose. Suibhne, king of Dál nAraidi, insults St Ronan Finn and is cursed into something between a man and a bird, condemned to live in the treetops fleeing human company, composing poetry about the places he flies over. Modern Irish poets have not been able to leave it alone: Trevor Joyce translated it, and Seamus Heaney's version, Sweeney Astray, is one of his major books.
The fourth grouping of early Irish literature, also called the Historical Cycle: legends about Ireland's kings, origin stories for dynasties and peoples, battle accounts and tales explaining customs. They range from the wholly legendary Labraid Loingsech to the entirely historical Brian Boru.
Partly, and unreliably. It was the bards' job to record the genealogy and history of their patrons, and they blended fact and myth as the patron required. It is best read as evidence of what dynasties wanted to be true rather than as a record of what was.
The Madness of Suibhne: a twelfth-century tale of a king cursed by St Ronan into a half-bird existence in the treetops, where he composes poetry. Seamus Heaney's translation, Sweeney Astray, brought it to a wide modern audience.
Christian monks, from about the eighth century onward — the only literate class in early medieval Ireland. They were recording an oral tradition that was already old and pagan, and they revised it to fit Christian learning, which is why the gods appear as an ancient people rather than as gods.
Is there a version your family tells? Half of this survived because somebody kept saying it out loud. If the story is different where you are from — a different ending, a different hill — we would like to hear it.
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