could not mistake, and he bore her away in triumph to Tara, and there
she abode with the king.]




MAC DATHO'S BOAR



INTRODUCTION


The tale of "Mac Datho's Boar" seems to deal with events that precede
the principal events of the Heroic Period; most of the characters named
in it appear as the chief actors in other romances; Conor and Ailill
are as usual the leaders of Ulster and Connaught, but the king of
Leinster is Mesroda Mac Datho, not his brother Mesgegra, who appears in
the "Siege of Howth" (see Hull, Cuchullin Saga, p. 87), and the Ulster
champion is not Cuchulain, but his elder comrade, Conall Cernach.

The text followed is that of the Book of Leinster as printed by
Windisch in Irische Texte, vol. i.; the later Harleian manuscript's
readings given by Windisch have been taken in a few cases where the
Leinster text seems untranslatable. There is a slightly different
version, given by Kuno Meyer in the Anecdota Oxoniensia, taken from
Rawlinson, B. 512, a fifteenth-century manuscript, but the text is
substantially that of the Leinster version, and does not give, as in
the case of the tale of Etain, a different view of the story. The
verse passages differ in the two versions; two verse passages on pages