The Táin Bó Cúailnge (Táin Bó Cúailnge)

The nearest thing Ireland has to an epic: a cattle raid, a curse, and one boy holding a ford all winter.

It starts in bed. Medb of Connacht and her husband Ailill compare what each of them brought to the marriage, item for item, and come out level on everything until they reach the bulls. Ailill has Finnbhennach, the white-horned. Medb has no equal to him. The only beast in Ireland that matches is the Donn Cúailnge, the brown bull of Cooley, in Ulster. She tries to borrow it, the deal collapses, and she raises an army to take it.

Ulster cannot answer, because of Macha's curse. She had been forced to race the king's horses while heavily pregnant, won, gave birth to twins at the finish and died cursing the men of Ulster to suffer the pains of a woman in labour whenever their need was greatest. The curse does not touch Cú Chulainn, who is seventeen and not of their blood in the ordinary way.

So he holds the gap alone through the winter, by invoking the right of single combat at the ford and killing whoever Medb sends, one a day. The army waits because the custom obliges it to. Medb keeps sending men, including, in the end, Ferdiad, who was Cú Chulainn's foster brother and trained beside him. They fight three days, tend each other's wounds at night, and on the third day Cú Chulainn kills him and is destroyed by it.

Medb gets the bull. It fights Finnbhennach the length of Ireland, tears him apart, scatters pieces of him across the country as place-names, and then dies of it. Everyone has lost.