No less than eleven copies are mentioned in the Essai d'un catalogue de la littérature épique de l'Irlande, pp. 140, 141; two are in the British Museum, nine in the library of the Royal Irish Academy, and there is, or was lately, a twelfth in the Phillips Library at Cheltenham, no. 10, 840. They all were written in the eighteenth century, and the copy now for the first time edited is taken from the oldest, namely, Egerton 106, a paper manuscript in the Museum library, written in the year 1715.
The story, though obviously defective in many places, is of some importance as making Tochmarc Emire more intelligible, as and tending to prove that the current belief that Cúchulainn received his training in the Isle of Skye merely rests on the similarity of the Gaelic names for that island and for Scythia. See Mrs. Hutton's The Táin, Dublin, 1907, p. 492. Of interest as bearing on the great epic tale so admirably edited by Windisch (Leipzig, 1905), are the convenant which the amazon Scáthach causes Cúchulainn, and his fellow-pupils to enter into ([sect ] 58): the jealous hatred aroused in Ferdiad ([sect ] 70), which may have influenced him in accepting his fatal duel with Cúchulainn, Windisch, op. cit., pp. 437 et seq.; and the non-existence of sexual morality in the case of the hero and his female teachers.
The rarer words found in the tale are collected in the Glossarial Index. Special attention may be called to the homonyms alt 'leap' and alt 'breadth', to car 'the whole', and to imh-aes 'of like age'.
London,