The Raid

Queen Maeve has declared war upon the province of Ulster in an effort to take possession of the Brown Bull of Cooley. Ultimately, this is an attempt to match the wealth of her husband, King Ailill of Connacht, who owns a magnificent white bull. Only Cuchulainn, a boy warrior, stands between Ulster and certain annihilation. Supported by the Morrigan, the goddess of war, he begins a reign of terror upon the Connacht warriors. In his heroic stand, the reader discovers the genesis of the determination of the Irish people, their will to stand alone against oppression.

Kirkus Reviews

The American author of a thriller set in Ireland (The Gombeen Man, 1992) retells the greatest Irish tale of them all, the mythical Tain—the greatest tale in the sense that, as with the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek literature, all Irish literature descends from it. Also known as the Tain Bo Cualigne, and, in English, as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the epic concerns the rise of a hero, Cuchulainn, whose forebears were gods, and who even as a child was a mighty warrior. The story opens with a comic argument between the king and queen of Connacht, a powerful province in ancient Ireland. As the two lie in bed after making love, they take an elaborate inventory of their holdings, which are absolutely equal except that King Ailill owns a massive bull with mythic procreative powers. Queen Maeve, jealous, learns of another such bull in the weak neighboring province of Ulster and musters her armies to capture him. Adventures galore take place on the march, and, in epic style, soldiers declaim on their prowess in battle and in bed (The Raid is remarkably graphic in its depictions both of killing and of lust). Although Eickhoff renders some passages in verse, for the most part he tries to give the great epic the form of a modern novel. It's episodic all the same, rather like one of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories. The chief barbarian here, of course, is mighty Cuchulainn, who with strength, valor, and magic almost single-handedly defends Ulster from the invading Connachtmen, saving the mythic bull and securing his own immortality. As Eickhoff points out in his fine introduction, "Sinn Fein" means "ourselves alone." Against the invading British, that is.

A seamless blend of scholarship and storytelling, though perhaps too specialized for a wide American audience.

Randy Lee Eickhoff holds several graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in Classics. He lives in El Paso, Texas where he works on translations in several languages, poetry, plays, and novels of which two have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His translation of Ireland's national epic is now a text in not only schools in the United States, but countries overseas as well. His nonfiction work on the Tigua Indians, Exiled, won the Southwest History Award. He has been inducted into the Paso Del Norte Writers Hall of Fame, the local chapter of the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters. He spends his time in El Paso, Ireland, and Italy, lecturing on Dante and The Ulster Cycle.