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O’Connor, R.: The destruction of Da Derga’s hostel. Kingship and narrative artistry in a mediaeval Irish saga

Togail Bruidne Da Derga is one of the better known medieval Irish narratives, and different aspects of this tale have attracted the attention of scholars: it has, for example, served as a source for medieval Irish ideas on kingship; it has been considered as a means of accessing pre-Christian mythology; and its structure has been seen as bearing the hallmarks of (somewhat unskilled) compilation. O’Connor’s monograph on the tale provides the first book-length discussion of this important text, and it makes a strong and well-considered argument for viewing the Togail as a deliberately and carefully structured narrative that highlights questions relating to kingship and the exercise of power. O’Connor takes into account previous research on the tale while presenting his own arguments, based on a thorough and convincing analysis of the text’s structure, in a clear manner accessible to both specialists and non-specialists with an interest in the subject. From a purely practical perspective, the book’s bibliography as well as O’Connor’s references to previous work on the tale provide a convenient and useful resource.1 The monograph thus represents a very important contribution to the study of the Togail and, more generally, to medieval Irish tales on kingship while also offering ideas and methods of use to the study of other medieval Irish texts. The book can be divided into two parts, the first (chapters 1–7) dealing with textual questions and the structure of the Togail and the second (chapters 8–10) dealing with the literary and historical context of the tale. O’Connor’s introduction places his treatment of the Togail within scholarly approaches to medieval Irish literature in general and to the Togail more specifically. This useful overview emphasises O’Connor’s view that form and content are related, but he distances himself from the idea that a single author also implies a single fixed meaning, a matter to which he returns in the Afterword at the end of the book. The specific problem of analysing a text as the product of a single author when that author drew on a variety of sources is addressed in the Introduction,