Travel is a prominent feature of every cycle of medieval Irish literary tales with roots in the pre-Christian narrative tradition, as well as in the majority of stories that originated in the Christian era, including lives of saints and legends about historical figures that took shape in this period. Underlying early Irish society and culture was a tension between competing movements, one attracted by the conceit of centripetal stability and the other fuelled by a centrifugal dynamic. A reassuring ideology of cultural and linguistic unity, cultivated by tradition-bearers such as poets and clerics, sought to balance out the instabilities of a volatile social order that frequently experienced realignment, fission, and reconfiguration. Related to this underlying tension was the paradox that, even though the typical person’s status, sphere of activity, and safety were circumscribed within the same social space from birth to death, medieval Irish storytelling and even Christian Ireland’s religious culture glorified travel – that is, the heroic going-forth well beyond the realm of the familiar, and the leaving behind of one’s safety zone.