Two Irish Arthurian Romances

Long before Malory wrote of Arthur in English, Irish scribes were retelling the matter of Britain in their own tongue, with their own monsters and their own register. The two stories in this volume are late descendants of that tradition, copied in 1748 by Maurice McGorman from manuscripts older still.

In The Story of the Crop-eared Dog, King Arthur convenes a great hunt on the Plain of Wonders, only for a sorcerer-knight, the Knight of the Lantern, to bind the king and his household with a single mist of druidry. Sir Galahad rides out alone, and finds an unlikely ally in a strange ear-cropped dog who turns out to be a transformed prince of India. Together they pursue the Knight of the Lantern through islands, kingdoms, and otherworlds.

In The Story of Eagle-Boy, the longer and more ambitious of the two, the young hero is a son of the King of Sorcha who is carried away in infancy by a great eagle. Reared in another country, learned in every tongue, he must return at his appointed hour to claim the kingdom that is his by right against the Knight of Prowess.

R. A. Stewart Macalister translated both stories from a single 1748 manuscript in the British Museum, in 1908, for the Irish Texts Society. He aimed, as he wrote, at the "flavour" of the Irish without slavish literalism. We have reprinted his English translation here in a fresh typeset edition, with a glossary of Irish proper names and terms drawn from his own glosses and from the larger reservoir of Irish romance.

Part of the Irish Culture Project from Rosmerta Publishing.