In 1910 T. W. Rolleston, Dublin classicist and one of the founders of the Irish Literary Society in London, published this retelling of the bardic romances of ancient Ireland. He was not chasing the Kiltartan fireside the way Lady Gregory was. He was chasing the bard himself, the man in the hall with the harp, who shaped these tales as deliberate works of art. Rolleston rendered them in careful, literary English, the way Tennyson had retold the Arthurian stories in the Idylls of the King, keeping the shape of the bardic intention behind every sentence.

The book falls into three movements. The Bardic Romances gather the older tales: the Children of Lir turned to swans for nine hundred years, the Quest of the Sons of Turenn paying an impossible ransom, the Secret of Labra, King Iubdan and King Fergus, the Carving of mac Datho's Boar, the Vengeance of Mesgedra, the Story of Etain and Midir, and how Ethne quitted Fairyland. The High Deeds of Finn follow Finn mac Cumhal from his boyhood and the coming of the Fianna through the Chase of the Gilla Dacar and Oisin's journey to the Land of Youth.

The History of King Cormac tells of the wise third-century High King: his birth, his judgments, his marriage, his instructions, his disappearance into Fairyland, and his Christian death.