A host caught between powers
Mac Dathó possesses a famous hound, Ailbe, whose reputation reaches both Connacht and Ulster. Ailill and Medb send an offer for the animal, while Conchobar's messengers arrive with a competing request. Refusing either ruler seems likely to bring an invasion. Mac Dathó stops eating and sleeping until his wife draws the problem from him.
Her solution is to promise the hound to both parties. He separately invites their armies to collect it and arranges their arrivals for the same day. The strategy redirects danger away from the host by bringing his powerful claimants into direct competition. His seemingly generous welcome therefore conceals a deliberately manufactured crisis.
Source: Mac Datho’s Boar — Leahy translation · Mac Datho’s Boar: rival embassies, wife’s advice, and simultaneous invitations
Dividing a meal by remembered wounds
An enormous boar is slaughtered, with other cattle serving as additional food. Bricriu proposes that its division should depend on the warriors' achievements. Cet of Connacht challenges the Ulstermen one after another, recalling defeats and injuries he has inflicted on them or their relatives. Their bodies and bereavements become evidence in a competitive public hearing.
Conall Cernach finally arrives and forces Cet to yield. When Cet names an absent warrior as a possible equal, Conall produces that man's severed head. He then takes control of the feast and gives Connacht an insulting share. The accumulated stories of earlier violence immediately produce new violence: the guests fight inside the house and spill out into its court.
Source: Mac Datho’s Boar — Leahy translation · Mac Datho’s Boar: Bricriu’s proposal, Cet’s challenges, Conall’s arrival and division of the boar
No simple victory for the winners
Mac Dathó releases Ailbe to discover which army he will join. The hound attacks the fleeing Connacht party but is killed at Ailill and Medb's chariot. The much-contested possession is thus destroyed in the struggle to obtain it. Place-names along the rout commemorate stages of the animal's dismembered journey.
The ending also undercuts Ulster's triumph. Ferloga, the opposing charioteer, captures Conchobar and demands that Ulster's women praise him publicly in return for the king's life. Their coerced performance makes the victorious province bear a humiliating obligation. Leahy's edition combines a Book of Leinster base with stated additions from a later manuscript; its comic reversals should not conceal the casualties and unequal burdens that sustain the joke.
Source: Mac Datho’s Boar — Leahy translation · Mac Datho’s Boar: release and death of Ailbe, rout, Ferloga’s capture of Conchobar and imposed song; version heading
- Period / witness
- Medieval Irish prose and verse preserved in medieval and early modern manuscript witnesses; Leahy translation 1905–1906.
- Recording context
- This entry concerns the literary version named in its passages, transmitted by Christian-era Irish manuscript culture and translated by A. H. Leahy. Legendary settings are not dates of composition or evidence for a single pre-Christian canon.
A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.
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Mac Datho’s Boar — Leahy translation ↗
Anonymous Irish literary narratives; translated and arranged by Arthur Herbert Leahy (1857–1928) · Volume I, 1905; Project Gutenberg eBook released May 2004 and updated 29 June 2026
Edition & rights note