Ulster cycle: see Gaelic literature Gaelic literature, literature in the native tongue of Ireland and Scotland. Since Scots Gaelic became separate from Irish Gaelic only in the 17th cent., the literature is conventionally divided into Old Irish (before 900), Middle Irish (until 1350), Late Middle or
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Ulster cycle

or Ulaid cycle

In early Irish literature, a group of legends and tales dealing with the heroic age of the Ulaid, a people of northeast Ireland from whom the modern name Ulster derives. The stories, set in the 1st century BC, were recorded from oral tradition between the 8th and 11th century and are preserved in the 12th-century manuscripts The Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Leinster and later compilations. Reflecting the customs of a free pre-Christian aristocracy, they combine mythological and legendary elements. Among the stories are “Bricriu's Feast,” containing a beheading game that appeared in medieval narratives, and “The Tragic Death of the Sons of Usnech,” dramatized in the 20th century by William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge.