1 The Narrative Structure of the Comperta and Other Irish Birth Tales Anna June Pagé 1. IntroductIon The extraordinary birth tale is a near universal story type that displays wide- spread and striking similarities in narrative traditions throughout the world. Birth tales of this type are typically designed to mark the child being born as a person of signiicance, a god or a hero, for example, and they do so through themes like semi-divinity, supernatural strength, spiritual purity, or predestined sovereignty. These stories all focus on the destiny of the child, and all are used to preface the full life-story of the hero or god. Most studies of the extraordi- nary birth narrative focus primarily on the identiication of a single underlying structure shared among the stories, generally as part of what is known as the “Heroic Biography”, and on seeking to account for the widespread attestation of this pattern. While this paper will take the Heroic Biography as a starting point for understanding the narrative framework of these stories, a closer exa- mination of the structural properties of the comperta as a genre reveals a much greater degree of articulation in the underlying narrative pattern than is cap- tured by the any of the standard formulations of the Heroic Biography. This paper provides an examination of the comperta and a small subset of similar stories and establishes them as participating in a speciic genre by identifying their shared narrative structure, and further compares the proposed structure of the comperta with that provided in treatments of the Heroic Bio- graphy pattern. This study is necessarily based on a small sample of textual sources, and its indings must therefore be seen as only preliminary to a fuller and more detailed examination of the birth tales. The stories under considerati- on here will be shown to represent a more or less uniied pattern to which they conform with varying degrees of faithfulness and speciicity. It must be noted KF 7 · 2015-16, 59–76 Keltische Forschungen 7 (2015-16). Pre-print version. Correct page range is: 61-90.