A Perfect Construction

This fore-tale to the Táin Bó Cualnge is a 9th century representation of an event in the 7th century when the poets of Ireland set about reconstituting a book whose original contents are imagined to have happened around the time of Christ. In this paper, I will examine, in light of Christian Fierens’ work on L’Étourdit, how its basic assumptions about what constitutes truth in its entirety do not stand up to scrutiny.…