Before Deirdre is born, a druid tells the men of Ulster what she will grow up to be. Her beauty will bring ruin on the Red Branch and split the kingdom. The warriors in the hall want her killed at once, that night, before she can draw a second breath.
King Conchobar mac Nessa refuses. He will not have the child put to death. He will instead have her taken away, raised in seclusion where no man can see her, and when she has come of age he will marry her himself.
That is the whole tragedy, and it is set in the first few pages. Everything after it is a man discovering that a prophecy he tried to outmanoeuvre was describing him all along. James Stephens told it as a novel in 1923, and it is one of the foretales that feed into the Táin. We have put it back into print as part of the Irish Culture Project.
What is the story of Deirdre?
The medieval source is Longes mac nUislenn, the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu, and it is one of the oldest pieces of narrative in Irish. It belongs to the Ulster Cycle, which we mapped alongside the other three in a reader’s guide to the four cycles.
Deirdre is reared apart, in the keeping of Lavarcham, a conversation-woman. She grows up seeing almost nobody. Then she sees Naoise, son of Uisneac, and decides for herself. With Naoise and his brothers Ainnle and Ardan she escapes across the sea to Alba, which is Scotland, and they live there in hiding for seven years.
Conchobar waits. Then he sends Fergus mac Roy to bring them home, under Fergus’s own sworn honour as safe-conduct. They come. The safe-conduct is worthless, because the king has arranged it that way, and the sons of Uisneac are killed.
Fergus, who gave his word and had it made a lie, burns Emain Macha and goes over to Connacht. That is why he is fighting on Medb’s side when the Táin begins. This story is the reason the great epic has the shape it has.
What Stephens did with it
He slowed it down.
The medieval tale is severe and fast. Stephens, writing in 1923 at the height of his fame for The Crock of Gold, gives you the long childhood instead. Lavarcham keeping a bright, bored girl entertained in a house nobody visits. The domestic ordinariness of the sons of Uisneac. And, most of all, the slow reasoning by which Conchobar talks himself toward a murder he has been preparing for two decades without admitting it.
The register is conversational and almost homely. The dialogue is unhurried. There is nothing archaic about the prose and nothing modernised about the story, which is a difficult balance and the reason this retelling has lasted.
It is worth knowing that Stephens meant this as the first of five. He set out to retell the whole Táin as a novel sequence and finished two. Whatever he intended the arc to be, it stopped here.
Deirdre is not a victim in this version
The medieval text can be read as a story about a woman things happen to. Stephens does not read it that way, and neither should you.
She is the only person in the book who acts on her own judgement rather than on fear or calculation. Everyone else is managing a prophecy. She simply decides what she wants and takes the consequences, which arrive in full.
What we restored
Our source was the 1923 Macmillan first edition, by way of the Project Gutenberg text.
One technical note worth recording, because it changed the build. We normally prefer an EPUB source. The Gutenberg EPUB put its manifest in a location our extraction tool did not check, and the tool fell back to sorting files alphabetically rather than by reading order. That produced a book with Book II appearing inside Book I, the licence page in the middle of the text, and a duplicate of Book I at the end. It looked plausible enough at a glance to be dangerous.
We switched to the HTML source, which is the second-preference format in our own acceptance criteria, and rebuilt. The underlying tool bug was written up and referred for a fix rather than patched mid-build, because patching a pipeline while a book is running through it is how you get two books that were not made the same way. This is the kind of thing our editorial standards exist to catch.
Beyond that the work was typesetting. Every chapter now opens on a new page, and Book I and Book II each get their own divider, which brought the interior to an even 208 pages. We added a glossary of Ulster Cycle names, terms and places, an Editor’s Foreword, a Note on the Text, and a short piece placing Stephens among the other prose responses to the Táin.
The edition carries four public-domain plates by John Duncan, John D. Batten and Stephen Reid. The names in this story run through the whole tradition, and the manuscripts that carry them are the ones we wrote about in the four books that saved Irish mythology.
Read a sample
The first thirty pages are readable in full, free, in Rosmerta’s Library. No account and no email. Stephens’s text is public domain and free to read elsewhere, and we link it. What you pay for is the edition.
Watch the trailer
Where to buy
Deirdre: A Retelling of the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu by James Stephens. Paperback, 6×9, 208 pages. ISBN 9798240812927.
- Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshops.
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