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The enigmatic fráoch and his eponymous tale - network analysis of an early Irish heroic romance
Date
2022
Abstract
Táin Bó Cúailnge or the "Cattle Raid of Cooley" (TBC) is the most famous epic narrative in early Irish literature, having been brought to prominence in modern times by Thomas Kinsella's iconic translation (1969). The origins of TBC were described by Kinsella as "far more ancient" than the medieval manuscripts that relate it and associated prequels to the tale, called remscéla. One of these, not included in Kinsella's translation, is Táin Bó Fraích-"The raid of Fráoch's cattle" (TBF). TBF comes in two discontinuous parts which differ in subject matter and style. We examine the structural relationships between TBF as presented by Leahy [Heroic Romances in Ireland (David Nutt, London, 1906)] and TBC from a social networks point of view and compare them with the seven smaller tales presented in Kinsella's text. We find that network structures in Kinsella's text - both TBC itself and the remscéla he selected - are similar to those in TBF, and somewhat moreso the first part than the second.
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Description
Publisher
World Scientific
Citation
Advances in Complex Systems, 25 (5), 224006
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Funding Information
The project is part supported by Coventry University's allocation of UKRI Participatory Research funding and funding for PMC from Science Foundation Ireland, Grant Number 16/IA/4470. This paper is part of a project with Tata Steel whom we also gratefully thank for support. The network data gathered for this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/pmaccarron/data.