The second or Literary form is as different from the other as it is
possible for two compositions on the same theme to be. The first few
words strike the human note in Cuchulain's message to his wife: "Tell
her that it goeth better with me from hour to hour;" the poems are
many, long, and of high quality; the rhetoric shows a strophic
correspondence; the Greek principle of letting the messenger tell the
story instead of relating the facts, in a narrative of events (the
method followed in the Antiquarian version) is made full use of; the
modest account given by Cuchulain of his own deeds contrasts well with
the prose account of the same deeds; and the final relation of the
voluntary action of the fairy lady who gives up her lover to her rival,
and her motives, is a piece of literary work centuries in advance of
any other literature of modern Europe.

Some modern accounts of this romance have combined the two forms, and
have omitted the irrelevant incidents in the Antiquarian version; there
are literary advantages in this course, for the disconnected character
of the Antiquarian opening, which must stand first, as it alone gives
the beginning of the story, affords little indication of the high
quality of the better work of the Literary form that follows; but, in
order to heighten the contrast, the two forms are given just as they
occur in the manuscripts, the only omissions being the account of the
election of Lugaid, and the exhortation of Cuchulain to the new king.

Thurneysen, in his Sagen aus dem Alten Irland, places the second
description of Fairyland by Laeg with the Antiquarian form, and this
may be justified not only by the allusion to Ethne, who does not appear
elsewhere in the Literary form, but from the fact that there is a touch
of rough humour in this poem, which appears in the Antiquarian form,
but not elsewhere in the Literary one, where the manuscripts place this