This paper examines animal motifs related to Cuchulain in Ulster Cycle, especially Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Celtic culture. In the preface of the text Yeats said that she will have given Ireland its Mabinogion, its Morte d’Arthur, its Nibelungenlied. The Ulster sagas are documents surviving from a Celtic culture unaffected by the Latin civilization of the rest of Europe. Set a century before the time of Christ, the Ulster stories posit an older world than any known in other European vernaculars. The narrative materials were transcribed as early as 8th century continued to be part of living literature until 18th. Esteem for the Ulster Cycle passed into English during the 19th century, when nationalists searched ancient literature for heroes to replace those imposed on Irish children by English-run schools. During the generation of Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge the Red Branch Cycle fostered widespread adaptation in English. Lady Gregory expected to let Irish students know that the Cuchulain stories were put into permanent literary form at about the same date as Beowulf, some 100 to 250 years before the Scandinavian mythology, at least 200 years before the oldest Charlemagne romance, and probably 300 years before the earliest draft of Nibelungenlied. In Cuchulain of Muirthemne there are twenty stories in English. Lady Grogery have exchanged for the grotesque accounts of Cuchulain’s distortion into the appearance of a god. In the Cuchulain’s stories still remains the ancient heart of Ireland and Celtic culture. In the Celtic supernatural world animals can talk, move about like humans, jest, warn and shapeshift. The Celts not only relied on animals for their survival but they respect them, learned them, and honoured them. The legendary Irish warrior and solar hero, Cuchulain, son of the god Lugh, exhibited the ‘hero light,’ a flaming aura, around his head when he entered the state of battle frenzy. As a lineage of Angus the hero fell in love with a swan goddess Fand. And was unsuccessfully wooed by the Morrigan in her raven aspect. Cuchulain, whose name means “Culan’s Hound,” was a Gaelic hero likened in his exploits to both the Greek Hercules and Achilles. He is said to have been able to perform a ‘salmon’s leap.’ In the War for the Bull of Cuailgne the hero single- handedly defends Ulster against the depredations of Connacht, as led by Medb and Ailill. The young Cuchulain, a superhuman, semi-divine hero has two chariot- horses, the Black of Saingliu and the Grey of Macha. The clairvoyante Grey cries tears of blood at the foreknowledge of his death. when the Ulster hero Cuchulain is finally killed, he has such a fearsome reputation that it is not until one of the raven-goddesses alights on his shoulder that his enemies believe he is dead and dare to approach and behead him. To the Celts, animals were special and central to all aspects of their world

This study examines Celtic fairy tales relating to the sociocultural background of Ireland in Victorian Age. W. B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888 and Irish Fairy Tales, 1892, The Celtic Twilight, 1893, and Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales, 1892 and More Celtic Fairy Tales, 1894 are correlated with the Irish celtic history, religion and culture. They are best known as collectors of fairy tales at that time. Jacobs thought that the fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans, "they went forth to battle, but they always fell, yet the captive Celt has enslaved his captor in the realm of imagination." And he insisted that nowhere else was there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels, and especially concerned that the Irish tales and ballads had this peculiarity. The aim of Jacobs's volumes is to present to English children the vision and color, the magic and charm, of the Celtic folk-imagination. While Yeats's volumes show his interest in spiritual beings and his nationalism. Yeats who believes that faith to perpetuate in the three early Cycles of Irish folktales taught by the Druid sees in Tir-na-n'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Plato's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend whither they return. The Celtic beliefs in rebirth and in the otherworld are connected with beliefs surrounding the burial mounds of the Megalithic people. Among the Celts these tombs were connected with religious usages, chiefly with a cult of gods and fairy-like beings. Beginning with the Ulster Cycle, the sidhe and the Tuatha de Danann merge and become one, and renamed "fairy." A tale entitled "Connla and the Fairy Maiden" chosen by Jacobs is the earliest fairy tale of modern Europe and contains an early account of one of the most characteristic Celtic conceptions, that of the earthly paradise, the isle of Youth, Tir-na-n'Og. And in Fairy Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry there are also new characters like changlings, merrow, leprechauns, banshee, pookas. Samain, the first of November is the beginning of Celtic Year and the biggest festival of Ireland. On the November Eve the sidhe dance with the ghosts and witches make their spells. When the soul has left the body, it is drawn away, sometimes, by fairies. The souls of the dead sometimes take the shapes of animals. And there are 'ghosts' in fairy tales. Yeats chose Lady Wilde's "The Black Lamb" in his volume. And there are 'witches' and 'fairy doctors' in Irish fairy tales. "The Horned Women" of Lady Wilde chosen by the two collectors is the famous tale of witches. Witches and fairy doctors receive their power from opposite dynasties; the witch from evil spirits and her own malignant will; the fairy doctor from the fairies. Samain was adopted by the Christian missionaries to serve their own purposes and renamed "All Souls Day." When the Christian missionaries came to Ireland in the fifth century AD they were able to infiltrate the oral traditions of the Celtic people and infuse Christian beliefs through process of recording the Celtic tales in written form. And the Christian missionaries create the biographies of Christian saints known as "The Legend of the Saint." So there are 'Saints' and 'Priests' in Irish fairy tales. When the pagan gods of Ireland, Tuatha de Danann, robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies, the pagan heroes grew bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants. So there are 'giants' in Irish fairy tales like "A Legend of Knockmany." In three major Irish tales cycles (the Mythological cycle, the Ulster Cycle, and the Fenian Cycle) there are so many kings and queens and princesses. Beliefs in the fairy faith, the remnants of an earlier faith than Christianity, have influenced the more modern motifs and characters of Irish Celtic fairy tales.

After the publication of his book, The Wanderings of Oisin and the Other Poems in 1899 Yeats was keenly interested in the non-English cultures of the British Isles. It was known as the Celtic Twilight. In 1898 he published a volume of essays called “The Celtic Twilight” containing a number of folk stories. In 1891 he founded the Irish Literary Society and worked on a three-volume edition of the poetry of Blake, which was published in 1893. Because of this involvement he pursued the study of symbolism, which is so important for his poetry. The evidence of this is to be found in his two volumes of the decade, The Rose(1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds(1899), with their many uses of the rose and other symbols. Lady Gregory encouraged Yeats’s interest in folk-lores, visiting with him the homes of her tenants and listening to their stories. She also encouraged him to work for the theatre, which led him to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902. In this way Yeats attempted to solve the two problems that were central to him as a public poet: the general problem of symbols in literature in an age lacking a common tradition and the particular problems presented by the confusions of the Irish situation. He was impelled to find a way of putting Ireland into some mental order, so that cultural symbols of dependable significance would be at the disposal of the artist. In this context I read the two poems, “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” as the manifestations of the Celtic, symbolic tradition of the Irish elite and the tradition of the Irish people respectively. But in the 1890s and the early 1900s, for all his identification with the Gaelic ethos, a wistful hope remained for leadership from a regenerated landlord class. The Ireland that Yeats envisaged was a nation with a distinctive cultural and spiritual identity, and he imagined a community free of sectarian differences and conflicts. That vision was not as revolutionary as some critics have supposed, and it hardly outlasted the 1890s. A century later, however, we find an unusual amount of interest in his early writings.