rickery is accept!
             able in and in what situations it is not acceptable. Or rather, they indicate that trickery itself is acceptable, but that disloyalty or using trickery to abuse the justice system is unacceptable. The connection between the kingship and the supernatural is also significant and provides a great deal of insight on what was important in early Irish judgments. It was the responsibility of the Otherworld to judge the kings and to keep a just ruler on the throne. According to the tales, the Otherworld certainly did depose numerous kings for unjust actions, but how it decided which kings were just and which unjust is reveals even more about the early medieval Irish sense of justice. The Otherworld did not depose kings based solely on a single unjust action; rather, it judged them as they themselves judged others. If a king acted precipitously, he was judged precipitously; if he was patient, he was given time to prove or disprove himself. Despite the tales' harsh criticism of k!
             ings who allow their emotions and kinship loyalties to interfere with their judgments, early Irish justice was not supposed to be unaffected by the personalities of those being judged. It was important for the kings not to be partial, but a just judgment took into account the temperaments of those involved. One of the primary roles of kingship literature was to educate kings and future kings about how to fulfill their duties properly; in addition to serving this purpose, it now reveals a great deal about early Irish kingship and social values.
             Kingship and social values are considered to be among the most important themes which Early Gaelic literature discusses. However, while even the study of Early Gaelic or Old Irish can be considered recent in comparison to academic studies on other languages from the eighth to tenth centuries, within the study of Early Gaelic, the study of literature as literature rather than literature as myth ...