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YEATS, FERGUS(ON), O’GRADY, AND DEIRDRE by Sarah Del Collo

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ne of the most welcome modifications to the canon in the recently published Longman Anthology of British Literature1 is the inclusion of several key episodes from the Táin Bó Cuailgne, the epic tale of the cattle raid of Cooley. This story is the centerpiece of a body of legends describing the reign of Conchubar Mac Nessa, an ancient king of Ulster, and recording, as well, the exploits of the best known of Ireland’s heroes, Cuchulain. The tales certainly deserve their place by the more traditional Beowulf; they provide a similar vitality of style and simple, forceful impression of ancient life, and at times surpass Beowulf in beauty and boisterous humor. The legends are also of considerable value to the study of later figures in Irish literature, particularly the Irish Literary Renaissance, and they are invaluable to the serious consideration of the works of W. B. Yeats. Although he was eventually to depart almost entirely from the stories as recorded in the most direct translations of manuscript sources, and indeed to produce tales which were distinctly foreign to even the most heavily modified adaptations available in modern written and oral sources, Yeats continued to include elements of the legends in his work until the end of his life, concluding his drama with The Death of Cuchulain and mentioning the hero again in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The group of legends containing the Táin and innumerable other stories about Conchubar Mac Nessa and his band of champions is most properly called the Ulster cycle. However, at and before the turn of the nineteenth century, and to some extent today, these legends were more frequently called the “Red Branch” cycle, a name probably resulting from an early misinterpretation of the word “Rudhraighe.”2 I have chosen to use the term “Red Branch” throughout the following, as it was commonly used in popular editions of the stories, and it is the dominant term both in Yeats’s own writing and in his sources. The tale of Deirdre, or the deaths of the sons of Usna, bears certain similarities to the accidentally constructed “Red Branch.” Like the Red Branch, it is commonly known; the “Deirdre story” is the most famous of all of the Red Branch stories, and the fact that the original is neither strongly focused upon Deirdre nor even, historically speaking, an original part of the Ulster Cycle is a fact lost on her admirers. Deirdre, like the Red Branch, is a sturdy indefensible; in terms of the study of Yeats, at least, the modern interpretation of the character eventually comes to dominate and re-create the Red Branch legends themselves, forcing them to yield to the power of Deirdre’s popularity. The legend, perhaps because of this popularity, has undergone some of the most extensive modifications of any of the Red Branch legends. However, there are some stable core elements. The essentials of the story run thus: Deirdre is born to a retainer of Conchubar Mac Nessa while the king and his men are present at the home. Conchubar’s druid Cathbad predicts

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that the child will bring destruction on the Red Branch through her fatal beauty. The child is imprisoned in a remote location, and in most versions is to marry Conchubar when she is of age. Deirdre sees and falls in love with Naoise, son of Usna, and the lovers, together with Naoise’s brothers, elope. After many trials they are discovered in Scotland by Fergus, who comes to them bearing a pardon from Conchubar. Fergus convinces them to return under his protection. When the exiles arrive in Ireland, Fergus is detained by Conchubar’s minion Barach. Fergus sends his son (or sons) with the captives to Emain Macha, the central fort of the Red Branch, where they are betrayed by Conchubar. The male characters are slain and Deirdre is captured and dies or commits suicide. This legend of the deaths of the sons of Usna was to have a profound impact upon Yeats’s perception of the Red Branch cycle. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Deirdre’s story was an immensely popular legend; Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Russell, John Millington Synge, Dr. John Todhunter, William Sharp (Fiona Macleod), and Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville all produced translations or adaptations of the story between 1896 and 1906, when Yeats’s Deirdre was first enacted. Many of these versions of the story were based on earlier and equally prolific Victorian adaptations of the legend. From the early 1800’s, and indeed before (see, for example, the 1769 Carthon, the Death of Cuchulain, and Darthula, miserably adapted by John Wodrow),3 the legend had been gathering momentum. Eugene O’Curry, writing in Atlantis in 1862, observes that “… there have been two versions of this tale published by the ‘Gaelic Society,’ [although] neither version is a true representation of the original, either in text or in translation.”4 O’Curry’s attempt to create a definitive version of the legend indicates the existence of multiple published redactions at a point forty years before the turn-of-the-century barrage. Yeats, like many of his contemporaries, relied heavily upon these earlier adaptations both for Deirdre’s story and for the Red Branch cycle as a whole. The fact that Yeats spoke and read only English cut him off not only from the manuscript records but also to a great extent from the scholarly translations and criticism available in French and German in the work of scholars like Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville, Ernst Windisch, and Heinrich Zimmer. The offerings in English were limited, and while scholars like Eugene O’Curry did strive for clarity and directness of translation, far more characteristic of Yeats’s typical reading are works like those of Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady.5 Ferguson, whose verse adaptations of the Red Branch legends form the topic of Yeats’s earliest published prose,6 treats the tales with considerable latitude; in the case of the deaths of the sons of Usna, he completed three contradictory accounts of the story. What remains constant is Deirdre’s role as a romantic heroine and Ferguson’s evident fascination with the story, a fascination that seems to have been communicated to the young Yeats. His praise for Ferguson’s work is never more extravagant than when he describes his “desolate and queenly Deirdre” (UP1 90-1); he calls Deirdre “the noblest woman in Irish romance” (UP1 86) and considers Ferguson’s blank verse play, Deirdre, “the greatest of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s poems” (UP1 92). “In Deirdre,” Yeats claims, “he has restored to us a fragment of the buried Odyssey of Ireland” (UP1 92). Standish O’Grady is more consistent than Ferguson in his treatment of the legends, but also more biased. Kelly and Domville, in the first volume of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats,7 describe O’Grady in these terms: Politically, O’Grady was a Conservative and an Imperialist, and borrowed much from Lord Randolph Churchill’s platform of Democratic Toryism.

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Some of his most impassioned prose was directed towards urging an absentee or irresponsible Anglo-Irish Ascendancy to recognize its duties and opportunities. “An active working ruling and controlling aristocracy is all I care about,” he wrote to [John O’Leary]. His writings never lose sight of these ideals. (CL1 502) This preference for a powerful aristocracy is evident throughout O’Grady’s Red Branch works, in which he consistently revises and re-interprets events in order to present a more congenial image of Conchubar, the king. He adds to and even reverses events from manuscript records of the legends into order to bolster the credibility of the monarch, a policy which frequently sets his texts at odds with those of Ferguson, Yeats’s other most commonly mentioned early source for Red Branch material. While Yeats later consulted other translations and adaptations of the Red Branch legends, most notably Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, his earliest works on the topic were published well before Lady Gregory’s books and show a distinct debt to his early sources, and particularly to Ferguson. His earliest impression of the Red Branch came not from Lady Gregory and her contemporaries, but from the immediately previous generation of Irish authors, and to these works we must turn in order to discover the genesis of Yeats’s unique Deirdre. Yeats’s Deirdre, like his Victorian sources, is the result of the complex evolution of Deirdre’s story through oral, manuscript, and modern adapted forms. Somewhat ironically given its popularity, the deaths of the sons of Usna was probably not part of the “original” body of the Red Branch legends. Ó hÓgáin suggests that it was created to resolve confusion about the story of the abdication of Fergus Mac Roich, a legend both chronologically and sequentially earlier. Fergus Mac Roich was the king of Ulster whose reign preceded that of Conchubar Mac Nessa. According to legend, Fergus became enamored of Conchubar’s mother, Nessa, while Conchubar was yet a young child, and proposed marriage to her. Nessa agreed on the condition that Fergus would yield the throne to her son for a year. During the year of his rule, Conchubar solidified his hold on the throne to such a degree that Fergus abdicated in Conchubar’s favor. The tone of this story varies considerably; in some texts, Conchubar and his mother bribe, cheat, and steal their way into favor with the most powerful of the ruling nobles, while in others Fergus simply realizes that Conchubar is a more effective and enthusiastic ruler and yields the throne to him by choice. Ó hÓgáin suggests that this story is an attempt to explain a more complex situation. He believes that Fergus was an embodiment of what he calls “a cultic attribute of kingship, entailing equine imagery … [Fergus had] become a cult name for the monarchs of the Ulaidh people” (MLR 195). With this in mind, the story of the abdication would have been invented to explain Fergus’s patronage of the kingship as opposed to his assumption of the throne, and would have done so by placing Fergus in the post-abdication position of the king’s chief champion. This solved the issue of Fergus’s apparent desertion of the throne, but introduced a broader theme of abandonment which was heightened by his eventual defection to the court of Connacht and his role, in the Táin Bó Cuailgne, as the guide and chief general of Maeve’s forces when they invade Ulster. In order to explain this behavior, a further motivation for Fergus’s actions was needed. This, according to Ó hÓgáin, was the point at which the Deirdre legend was introduced, “adopted from floating lore external to the Ulster cycle” (MLR 196). Fergus’s

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desertion of Ulster was knit into the theme common to Tristan and Isolde and Helen of Troy – the universal story of cursed, over-bounteous beauty and the disputed possession of a woman. Whether or not they were aware of this possible genesis of the legend, the works of Ferguson and O’Grady bear out the interconnection of the abdication of Fergus Mac Roich and the deaths of the sons of Usna. The most notable features of Ferguson’s and O’Grady’s texts are their deep-rooted opposition on the matter of Fergus and Conchubar’s relationship and their attempts to resolve the moral ambiguities of the characters through these two legends. Ferguson presents Fergus as an archetype of the noble warrior, while O’Grady mounts a spirited and unusual defense of Conchubar’s actions. Not surprisingly, they present opposite versions of the abdication; in O’Grady’s History of Ireland, Fergus is an amiable oaf who gladly relinquishes his duties to the generous and intelligent Conchubar, while Ferguson’s introduction to Lays of the Western Gael depicts Conchubar in a more sinister light: He owed his first accession to the monarchy to the arts of his mother Nessa, on whom Fergus, his predecessor in the kingly office and step-father, doated so fondly that she had been enabled to stipulate, as a condition of bestowing her hand, that Fergus should abdicate for a year in favor of her youthful son. The year had been indefinitely prolonged through the fascinations of Nessa, aided by the ability of Conor, who, although he concealed a treacherous and cruel disposition under attractive graces of manners and person, ultimately became too popular to be displaced....8 Their opposing viewpoints are most evident in their treatments of the deaths of the sons of Usna; this legend, in which one or the other of the characters must assume the responsibility for the deaths of Deirdre and the sons of Usna, becomes the moral force of the cycle. In Ferguson’s works, this legend marks the point at which Conchubar becomes undeniably and irrevocably a villain; in O’Grady’s, it becomes a mark of enduring shame for Fergus. In their modifications to the deaths of the sons of Usna, the authors focus upon three central elements: Deirdre’s narrow escape from execution at her birth, Fergus’s role in the elopement and return of the exiles, and the nature and timing of Deirdre’s death. The story of Deirdre’s birth leads to some curiously inverted morality in both cases; these unusual interpretations of Conchubar’s behavior spring from the druid Cathbad’s prophecy that Deirdre will bring doom and suffering on the Red Branch. In Lays of the Western Gael, Ferguson writes, “When Cathbad ceased, the nobles present with one voice cried out that the child should not live; but Conor would not permit them to slay the child, for he believed not the words of Cathbad, and he already longed to have the infant to himself” (LWG 15). On the contrary, in O’Grady’s The History of Ireland, “[Conchubar] convene[s] his council, and he himself desire[s] that the child, when born, should be slain.”9 The morality of the suggested infanticide is inverted; in Ferguson’s text, Conchubar’s mercy springs from his lust for the infant, and in O’Grady’s the pragmatic decision to kill the child is a sign of the king’s selfless concern for his people. Once Deirdre has matured and eloped, Fergus’s role becomes another central element in determining the story’s moral tone. He is chosen by Conchubar to bring news of his

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treacherous pardon to Deirdre – or so claims Ferguson. In the prose introduction to Lays of the Western Gael, Ferguson claims that Conchubar, “contemplating the treachery he afterwards practised, acquiesced ... that the sons of Usnach should be pardoned and restored to the service of their country” (LWG 10). He lures them back to Ulster and destroys them when they are once more in his power. In all of Ferguson’s renditions of the legend, Fergus is an innocent accessory to the betrayal of the exiles; he believes in the validity of the pardon he brings, but his loyalty and good faith are betrayed by his king. In The History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, O’Grady, unsurprisingly, offers a significantly different version of Fergus’s role in the tragedy, and of the original elopement as well. Conchubar’s angry reaction to Deirdre’s escape is explained by the fact that the young lovers do not “flee” or “elope”; rather, O’Grady uses the damning phrase “thus the Clan Usna deserted Concobar Mac Nessa” (HIHP1 117). Later, the exiles are given a subversive character: Then there was great lamentation over all Ulla … and the noblest of the youth of Ulla, and of the rest of Eiré, passed into Alba, to see Deirdre, and many of them took service under them, and the Clan Usna grew mightier every day. (HIHP1 117) As Conchubar is portrayed more favorably, Fergus is denigrated and characterized as rebellious and willful. When Naoise is banished, Fergus “[is] wroth with Concobar Mac Nessa, and utter[s] bitter gibes and scoffs against the High King and his star-gazers” (HIHP1 117). He brings Naoise and his brothers back to Ulster without encouragement from the king, and in The Coming of Cuculain O’Grady goes so far as to reverse the promise of pardon and blame Fergus for the tragedy: [Fergus] debated and considered for a long time, but at last, so great was his affection for the Clan Usna, that he went over the Moyle … and brought home the sons of Usna, and they were slain by Concobar Mac Nessa, according as he had promised by the word of his mouth.10 In The History of Ireland: the Heroic Period, O’Grady also implies that no formal pardon was given and that the approach of the clan Usna is a menace to the king: “[Conchubar] gave no heed to the protection of Fergus, for he saw that his authority and sovereignty were set aside, and that now the wars predicted by Cathvah were about to burst, and that Fergus and the children of Usna were confederate against him” (HIHP1 119). O’Grady implies an attempted coup rather than a romantic tragedy, and endorses Conchubar’s actions as legal, justifiable, and impersonal.11 This revision of the king’s actions is maintained to the last in O’Grady’s evasive treatment of Deirdre’s fate. He states only that after the deaths of the sons of Usna, Deirdre is “seized.” Ferguson is more explicit, albeit in a quaintly tactful fashion; while in his blank verse Deirdre the heroine poisons herself, in his poem “The Tain Quest” he is more traditional and more damning. Fergus arrives on the battlefield to find “Deidra ravish’d, Illan [his son] slain” (LWG 20), while the heroine dies when she “headlong dash’[s] her mid the corses” (LWG 24), or throws herself from a chariot, the traditional method of her death in the manuscript materials.

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Even Ferguson, however, omits some details from manuscript sources of Deirdre’s death. More explicit are the translations produced by Eugene O’Curry in Atlantis and by Theophilus O’Flanagan, whose 1808 text published in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society was no doubt one of the versions O’Curry sought to supersede.12 After her recapture, O’Flanagan states, “Deirdri was for a year indeed in the bed of Conor” (O’Flanagan 167). O’Curry records her miserable death; after Conchubar asks Deirdre to smile and to look pleasant, her only response is a lament for Naoise and his brothers, and the monarch decides to punish her: “What is it thou hatest most that thou seest?” said Conchobhar. “Thee, indeed,” said she, “and Eoghan son of Durthact.” “Thou shalt be a year with Eoghan, then”; said Conchobhar. He gave her into the hands of Eoghan. They went the following day to the fair at Muirtheimhné. She was behind Eoghan in a chariot. She had prophesied that she should not see her two husbands on earth. “Well, O Deirdriu!” said Conchobhar. “It is a sheep’s eye between two rams, that you cast between me and Eoghan.” There was a rock of a stone before her. She dashed her head against the stone, so that her head was shattered in pieces, and that she was dead. (Atlantis 417) While in this case it is O’Curry and O’Flanagan rather than Ferguson who supply the most damning redactions of the tale, the division between versions favoring Conchubar and those favoring Fergus continues, heightening through their modern textual conflict the tension already existing between the two characters in the earliest manuscript versions of the tale. The polarized depictions of king and champion serve to emphasize and deepen the existing antithesis between the older, physically powerful, tribally loyal champion and new, intellectual, manipulative politician. The effect of this opposition upon Yeats’s perception of the Red Branch legends and his work with them is considerable. Yeats encountered the legend of the deaths of the sons of Usna in an atmosphere of intense conflict between king and champion, a conflict he recognized and translated into his own work. “Fergus and the Druid,” his earliest work devoted solely to any Red Branch story,13 deals with the abdication of Fergus Mac Roich, the original source of the conflict which was to blossom through the deaths of the sons of Usna. Later works extend the conflict between king and champion to new characters and new situations, a process that is clearest in On Baile’s Strand, particularly in the revisions first published in the 1906 Poems, 1899-1905. While in the original version Conchubar travels to Cuchulain’s home at Dundealgan to plan the re-building of Emain Macha, the revisions shift the focus of the play, making his mission the binding of Cuchulain by an oath of fealty. King and champion are brought into immediate conflict; both this and Conchubar’s direct involvement in Cuchulain’s death depart drastically from traditional versions of the story. The Cuchulain of legend does not harbor the lingering feelings of resentment shown by Yeats’s hero; he is a steady supporter of Conchubar, even when Fergus, Cuchulain’s tutor and foster-father, defects to Maeve’s army and faces Cuchulain in battle. While Cuchulain shows restraint and respect towards Fergus, he remains loyal to Conchubar and never enters into the outright struggle of wills depicted in On Baile’s Strand.

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Yeats’s substantial modifications to On Baile’s Strand have one obvious source: his Deirdre. The initial Dun Emer edition of On Baile’s Strand was published in August 1903; active work on Deirdre, or as it was initially called, The House of Usnach, began in 1904.14 By December 29th of that year, Yeats was confident enough to announce to an interviewer that Deirdre “m[ight] be ready for production in the early spring” (CL3 691); on the same day he wrote to Lady Gregory, “I want to rewrite ‘Bailes Strand’. I can make a great play out of it by rewriting a good deal up to the young man’s entrance—from that to the end I cannot better it” (CL3 691). Yeats’s changes were to alter the character of Conchubar significantly, moving the focus of the play to the conflict between king and champion and emphasizing Conchubar’s determination to control Cuchulain. The revisions retroactively prepare the character for his final villainy in Deirdre. Throughout Deirdre, Yeats rejects O’Grady’s defense of Conchubar’s actions and presents a Deirdre whose passionate, heroic spirit is opposed by the king’s calculation and cruelty. His debt to Ferguson’s adaptations of the legends is doubled here; he presents not only a thoroughly evil Conchubar, but also a heroic Deirdre whose fiery opposition to Conchubar echoes Fergus’s own clash of wills with the king. Yeats does not deal with the topic of Deirdre’s birth; the tight compression of his play eliminates all but the final scene of the tragedy. But like his predecessors, Yeats makes his most significant alterations to the remaining story through two key elements: Fergus’s role, and the nature and timing of Deirdre’s death. In each of these elements he departs widely both from the manuscript renditions of the legends and from his more immediate Victorian sources, but in his departures his reflects their influence and magnifies the conflict which they embody. The most unusual of all of Yeats’s modifications is the presence of Fergus. In all other versions of the tale, both modern and ancient, Fergus is separated from his charges once they have reached Ireland. This is traditionally one of the ways in which the villainy of Conchubar is shown, for it is by his deliberate stratagem that Fergus is detained. Yet Yeats opens his Deirdre with Fergus, Naoise, and Deirdre already together in the Red Branch guesthouse. The presence of the character cannot be explained by mere mechanics; while critics frequently remark upon Fergus’s role as the “friendly” voice of societal restraint as opposed to Conchubar’s tyrannical control, this does not address the question of Yeats’s purpose in including this specific character. “Levercam,” Deirdre’s nurse, plays this part in the early drafts of Deirdre/The House of Usnach, and is a more intuitive choice for the role. Cathbad, Conchubar’s druid, would have been similarly well suited for the part, or indeed Fergus’s own son, or one of Naoise’s brothers, who appear in Yeats’s early drafts of the play but are expunged in revision. Any one of these characters might have been molded into the smiling face of tradition and order; instead, Yeats chose Fergus, the one character who is specifically and significantly absent from this part of the story in all of Yeats’s sources. This seems clear evidence that Yeats’s perception of the Red Branch cycle had become bound up in his perception of the conflict between Conchubar and Fergus. Yeats is not alone in this perception; Eleanor Hull, in her 1898 The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature,15 breaks the Red Branch myths into segments which include not only the deeds of Cuchulain and the Táin Bó Cuailgne, but also “The War of Conchubar and Fergus.” Yeats’s need to bring Fergus into what would be his last true Red Branch tragedy for thirty years, combined with his earlier decision to begin his Red Branch works by dealing with Fergus’s abdication in “Fergus and the Druid,” reinforces the theme of the binary conflict between king and champion, old and new, heroic and anti-heroic.

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This perception carries over into Yeats’s treatment of Deirdre, and the boundaries between this story and the other Red Branch legends, already fluid (as seen in the revisions to the king/champion relationship On Baile’s Strand), almost completely disintegrate. Yeats’s changing perception of the abdication at the time of the creation of Deirdre shows the way in which the story of the death of the sons of Usna both influenced and was influenced by his perception of the other Red Branch legends. In his notes to the 1892 The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, Yeats had described Fergus thus: Fergus. Fergus, poet of the Conorian age, had been king of all Ireland, but gave up his throne that he might live at peace hunting in the forest. 16 In Yeats’s notes to Deirdre, published in The Arrow on 24 November 1906, his reinterpretation of the events in light of the deaths of the sons of Usna and the legend’s condemnation of Conchubar becomes apparent: Fergus, who in the old poems is a mixture of chivalry and folly, had been High King before Concobar, but had been tricked into abdicating in his favor. (VPl 389) Yeats’s re-interpretation of Fergus’s abdication, coming directly after his work with Deirdre and his introduction of Fergus into the play, demonstrates both the legend’s power as the moral arbiter of the cycle and the significance of the conflict between king and champion, which Yeats preserved throughout his early Red Branch work both through Fergus and, in On Baile’s Strand, through a transference of the opposition between Fergus and Conchubar to Cuchulain’s relationship with the king. The opposition of heroic and anti-heroic personalities begun in the opposition of Fergus and Conchubar and carried through to Yeats’s other Red Branch works culminates in Yeats’s treatment of Deirdre’s death. Once more, Yeats departs widely from his source materials. Only Lady Gregory’s version of Deirdre’s death has the heroine stab herself,17 and even Gregory’s text avoids placing Deirdre in direct confrontation with Conchubar. All of Yeats’s Victorian and contemporary sources had avoided bringing Conchubar and Deirdre together; George Russell’s Deirdre expires on her lover’s bosom before Conchubar can make his brief appearance at the play’s end, and in Ferguson’s earlier Deirdre Conchubar never appears on the stage at all. In bringing Deirdre face to face with Conchubar, Yeats in some ways recalls the earlier, grittier work of O’Curry and O’Flanagan. Yet even these translations do not present us with a vibrant, powerful Deirdre like Yeats’s protagonist; they depict a beaten woman who lingers on, abused by her captor, until she commits suicide in humiliation and despair. Yeats’s Deirdre faces death with spirit and stamina, and when she can no longer “strike a blow for Naoise,” she earns a hard-won but triumphant death. By facing Conchubar directly and wresting her life from his control, Yeats’s Deirdre becomes the embodiment of the heroic facing the banal; she takes over the role Fergus had earlier played; and, while the older hero presents to the audience the image of the hero who has lived too long, Deirdre becomes the hero whose death is an expression of the power of passionate life. This Deirdre could not have developed solely from the manuscript renditions of the tale. Her vibrant, intense emotion and her steely determination mark her as a Yeatsian tragic

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hero, a role which in the context of the Red Branch works had increasingly come to be defined through opposition to the anti-heroic king. Just as Deirdre’s story changed Yeats’s perception of the abdication of Fergus and the character of Conchubar, in its closure Yeats’s Deirdre reflects the powerful influence of the conflict between king and champion that had begun with Fergus and Conchubar and, through Yeats’s work, had extended through Cuchulain and finally through Deirdre. In transmuting the legend vastly beyond the earliest originals, Yeats in fact returns it to its roots by re-connecting it with the central conflict of the Red Branch cycle.

NOTES 1. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, v. 1, ed. David Damrosch (Longman: New York, 1999). 2. Eugene O’Curry renders the name “the Royal Branch” in his Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995 [photographic reprint of 1861 text], p. 270). This interpretation is supported by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin in Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopædia of the Irish Folk Tradition (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991), abbreviated MLR: The Ulaidh inhabited the eastern part of the province .… [t]hey called themselves Rudhraighe (which probably meant “rightful occupiers”), and hence the literary sources often refer to them as Clann Rudhraighe.… This tribal designation was early misinterpreted as having the element “ruadh” (i.e. red), and hence the palace of the legendary king of the Ulaidh, Conchobhar mac Neasa, was called by mediaeval writers “an Chraobhruadh” which means the red-branched or red-poled edifice. This (earlier, “in chraebruad”) might well have been a misunderstanding for an original term such as “craeb ruda”, which would have designated the Ulaidh as “the rightfully occupying sept”… [f]rom a loose rendering by translators of the texts into English, the Ulster Cycle itself is now often referred to as “stories of the Red Branch knights.”(MLR 413) 3. John Woodrow, Carthon, the Death of Cuchulain, and Darthula, (Edinburgh: J. Dickson; London: T. Caddel; 1769). 4. Eugene O’Curry, “The ‘Trí Thruaighe na Scéalaigheacta,’ (i.e., the ‘Three Most Sorrowful Tales’) of Erinn,” Atlantis v. III, no. VI (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts; Dublin: John F. Fowler, 1862), hereafter called Atlantis. 5. The texts most directly concerned with the Red Branch cycle are Ferguson’s 1865 Lays of the Western Gael (republished in 1888), his 1887 Hibernian Nights’ Entertainments, and his 1880 Poems, and O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, volumes 1 (1878) and 2 (1880), and his 1894 The Coming of Cuculain. 6. Yeats published reviews of Ferguson’s work in the Irish Fireside of October 9, 1886, and the Dublin University Review of November, 1886. They may be found in Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 81-103, hereafter abbreviated UP1. 7. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1 : 1865-1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Abbreviated CL1. 8. Sir Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael, (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers, and Walker; London: George Bell and Sons,1888), p. 9. Hereafter abbreviated LWG. 9. Standish O’Grady The History of Ireland: The Heroic Period, v. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Searle, Marston, and Rivington, 1878), p. 115. Abbreviated HIHP1. 10. Standish O’Grady The Coming of Cuculain (London: Methuen, 1894), p. 97. 11. It is fair to observe that O’Grady is possibly the only author ever to interpret the legends in this fashion. While manuscript sources are often ambiguous about the roles of king and champion in the abdication (see, for example, Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History, note 2 above, p. 274 and 636, for two versions of the abdication which present substantially different views of the ethicality of the king’s actions), Conchubar is the traditional villain of the deaths of the sons of Usna. While direct transcriptions from the older manuscripts reveal a story that focuses more on his willingness to break his solemn oath than on his treatment of Deirdre, Conchubar’s actions remain inexcusable. 12. Theophilus O’Flanagan, “Deirdri, or The Lamentable Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Dublin v. 1 (Dublin: John Barlow, 1808). 13. Yeats does allude briefly to the Red Branch heroes in The Wanderings of Oisin; see W.B. Yeats, The Variorum

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Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 52: But in dreams, mild man of the crosiers, driving the dust with their throngs, Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales; Came by me the kings of the Red Branch with roaring of laughter and songs, Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with sails. Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, Cuchulin; came Fergus who feastward sad slunk, Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry, Came car-borne Balor, as old as a forest, his vast face sunk Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-pouring eye. 14. Yeats first mentions Deirdre obliquely to George Roberts in a letter of 18 May 1904: “In addition to these plays I have a play to suggest but cannot speak of it for two or three weeks.” The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 3: 1901-1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 599. Source hereafter abbreviated CL3. On the twenty-second of June he tells Cornelius Weygandt that he “hope[s] to begin another play in verse,” and to John Quinn he writes, “I go to Lady Gregory’s on Monday, and am going to start a play on Dierdre [sic]” (CL3 612, 616). 15. W.B. Yeats, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature, Eleanor Hull, ed. (London: David Nutt, 1898). 16. W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach assisted by Catherine Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 1285. Abbreviated VPl 17. Lady Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, (London: John Murray, 1902), p. 139.