The Tain. Translated by Thomas Kinsella From The Irish. With Brush Drawings by Louis Le Brocquy. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1969. First Edition, Limited Issue. Large 8vo. Black buckram, title in white along spine with original pictorial dust jacket. Jacket frayed along edges & spine, book in bright condition. Housed in publisher’s cardboard slipcase.

One of 1750 Copies Printed. 

This spectacular edition of The Táin Bó Cúailnge, or ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’, was launched in Hodges & Figgis bookshop, Dawson St. Dublin, on the 4th of September 1969. The most famous tale in Irish mythology, it is at the centre of the Ulster Cycle of mythological sagas, known as the Rúraíocht in Irish. The tales in the Ulster Cycle are the most heroic of all the Irish myths that have been recorded in writing, and also the most renowned.

The images that Le Brocquy created for Kinsella’s rich text have a powerful, primal effect on the reader, and from their making Le Brocquy – Ireland’s most renowned artist after Jack Yeats – derived both the impulse and motifs of his later tapestries and paintings.