The Tain. Translated by Thomas Kinsella from the Irish. With Brush Drawings by Louis Le Brocquy.  Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1969. Pp, 295. Large 8vo. Black buckram, title in white along spine, in publisher’s original pictorial dust jacket. Light age-toning to jacket otherwise a fine bright copy. Housed in publisher’s cardboard slipcase.  Published in a Limited Edition of 1750 copies.

Signed by Louis Le Brocquy on half-title page. 

The Táin Bó Cúailnge, or ‘Cattle Raid of Cooley’, is 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.