Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Book of the Taking of Ireland, is the closest thing Irish literature has to a national epic. Compiled by medieval scholars from verse, oral tradition, and Latin chronicles, it tells the story of Ireland from the Creation of the world to the historical kings of the twelfth century.
It is not history. It is mythology dressed in the language of history. The scholars who assembled it were doing something more ambitious than recording facts. They were constructing an identity. Every invasion, every genealogy, every battle serves the same purpose: to explain who the Irish are, where they came from, and why they hold the land.
R. A. Stewart Macalister spent two decades editing and translating the complete work from the primary sources. His five-volume edition, published by the Irish Texts Society between 1938 and 1956, remains the definitive English translation.
This Rosmerta Publishing edition presents his translations in a single readable volume, organised into five Parts.
