Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel: Kingship and Narrative Artistry in a Mediaeval Irish Saga

This book explores the strange world of Irish sagas. It offers a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish saga and presents an analysis of the finest of the sagas, ’The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’. The reader is invited to not only understand this and other Irish sagas, but also to enjoy them as literature.

Ralph O’Connor, Professor of the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland, and Iceland, University of Aberdeen

Ralph O’Connor studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic and English Literature at the University of Cambridge before becoming a Junior Research Fellow in Irish and Icelandic Literature at St John’s College, Cambridge. He is currently Professor of the Literature and Culture of Britain, Ireland, and Iceland at the University of Aberdeen, where he teaches in the departments of Celtic, History, and English. He has published widely on mediaeval Irish and Icelandic and modern British literature. His previous books are Icelandic Histories and Romances (Tempus, 2002), The Earth on Show: Fossils andthe Poetics of Popular Science (Chicago, 2007), which won two international book prizes in 2008, and Science as Romance (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).