This thesis charts my creative response to the archetypal figure of the warrior woman, and my critical research into her integral relationship to the oral narrative verse traditions of the ballad and the epic.The Creative Submission contains twenty poems, including short responses to contemporary news stories and gender theories; a ballad about sixteenth century Irish chieftain Gráinne O’Mháille; a lyric sequence exploring my own political activism; and the opening section of an epic poem about Boudica, first century chieftain of the Iceni. My critical commentary on my own poetry is incorporated into my Critical Submission, which is divided into three sections. The Introduction outlines a non-dualistic, non-essentialist ‘connectionist’ theoretical framework of gender and archetypes. Part One argues that the ballad, traditionally associated with both love and war, the oral and the written, legend and history, has always been a home for the transgressive figure of the warrior woman. Chapter One is an academic analysis of her role in three centuries of ballads including the Granuaile aislingi, the early modern female sailor broadsides, and the literary work of E. Pauline Johnson and Helen Adam. Chapter Two examines my own balladry in the context of modern literary examples of the form including Nick Cave’s murder ballads, Blake Morrison’s ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ and Carol Rumens’s ‘The Morning After’. Part Two challenges the conventional view of the epic as a masculine form. Chapter Three examines ancient heroines including Dido, Atalanta and the Amazons, demonstrating that Greek and Roman epics were powerful tools in the dismemberment of the warrior woman archetype in the West. Chapter Four reaches back to the dawn of Western mythology in the epics of Inanna, Ancient Sumerian goddess of the Morning and Evening Star, and argues that, in contrast, this earliest known epic poetry conveyed a gender-neutral vision of leadership, and in its lyric qualities formally honoured Venus as much as Mars. Chapter Five concludes this thesis with a discussion of the historical and literary context of my own epic-in-progress ‘Ter Death Lay O’ Boudiga, Last Chieftain o’ ter Ickneys’.