Elizabeth A. Gray, the editor/translator of the Cath Maige Tuired (‘The Battle of Mag Tuired’), a medieval Irish saga that will be the focus of this study, formulated in an article on this text an eloquently compact functional definition of the kind of narrative that concerns us in this essay. ‘In structural terms, the function of a myth is to present issues and problems raised by conceptual categories in order to clarify – if not necessarily to resolve – the tensions inherent in any ordered perception of human experience.’ From the perspective provided here by Gray, ‘myth’ and ‘history’ are not at all incompatible or mutually exclusive genres of storytelling. A ‘myth’, fulfilling the function described above, might be presented by a storyteller (oral or literary) and received by the teller's audience as a striving-to-be-faithful or approximate account of the events of the past. Or a story fitting Gray's description may be presented as an account of events that preceded the past of living memory or that takes place outside a temporal framework.

As different as their orientation and points of reference might be, both types of narrative can persist in and pervade a culture because they serve to express key ‘issues and problems’ with which it is important for the people in that culture to be familiar.