Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference)

by James MacKillop

  Emboldened by the sight of the raven where it would otherwise never perch, Erc and Lugaid approach Cúchulainn, lifeless but still standing. As Lugaid pulls back Cúchulainn’s hair, hoping for a clean swipe at the neck, the Ulsterman’s sword falls, severing Lugaid’s hand at the wrist. In revenge Lugaid and his men remove both the right hand and the head of Cúchulainn, which they bear in triumph to Tara. The hero’s body, still tied to the pillarstone, remains in the field. Tradition associates Cúchulainn’s death with the stone called Clocharfarmore [stone of the big man] still standing about four miles south of Dundalk.

  Later Conall Cernach avenges his friend’s death by killing Lugaid.

  11

  The Fenian Cycle

  FÉNI, FIANNA, FENIANS

  Stories from the third cycle of Irish heroic literature are often set far from the seats of royal power and usually depict men in battle. Sometimes the men are in conflict with rapacious mortal invaders, at other times with different bellicose factions of their own warrior caste, or perhaps with alluring supernatural figures. At the centre of the action, not always portrayed favourably, is the poet–warrior–seer Fionn mac Cumhaill, along with his armed companions, the Fianna Éireann. Many of the later stories of the cycle are set within a narrative frame that asserts that Oisín, Fionn’s son, and Caílte mac Rónáin, Fionn’s cohort or nephew, have survived to a later date and are recalling wondrous deeds from earlier days. The third is also the most voluminous of all the cycles, with more stories recorded in manuscript tradition than from the other three, as well as much celebration in oral tradition. It is the only cycle still alive in the mouths of traditional Irish and Scottish Gaelic storytellers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some stories, old and new, are filled with rollicking adventures told with a Boys’ Own Paper depiction of hard-won victories. Stories told within the Oisín and Caílte narrative framework, especially when the listener is a Christian figure such as St Patrick, are tinged with a sense of loss and regret for a stout-hearted, generous heroism that cannot be regained.

  Today ‘Fenian’ is the usual name for the cycle, but this has not always been so, and many commentators are uncomfortable with it. In much of the nineteenth century, ‘Ossianic’ was the preferred name, under the influence of the Scottish charlatan James Macpherson’s invention of ‘Ossian’ for ‘Oisín’. Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian had borrowed heavily from oral traditions of this cycle, and the use of ‘Ossianic’ seemed to imply that here one might find the untainted originals. Oisín is indeed the narrator of many of the stories of the cycle. From the nineteenth century through to the present some observers have preferred ‘Finn Cycle’, employing an Old Irish form for Fionn mac Cumhaill, the foremost presence. One still sees that phrase in print, but it is not the most common.

  The word ‘Fenian’ is a neologism coined in 1804 by yet another charlatan, Colonel Charles Vallancey, outwardly appearing to be an anglicization of the Irish ‘fianna’. Contained within it, however, is an apparent word-play on the Old Irish Féni, another name for the early invaders of Ireland, the Goidels, the people who brought the Irish language to the island. They are often thought ‘true Gaels’. In early Irish law the Féni are the old, aboriginal or purest population, free land-tillers, never to be confused with servants or slaves. To someone who knows no Irish the words Féni and fianna might appear similar, but from their roots they have no linguistic connection. ‘Fenian’ nonetheless entered popular usage in the nineteenth century and acquired political associations that do nothing to illuminate Old Irish literature. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, the revolutionary body founded in 1858, adapted ‘Fenian’ as an alternative name, and so it was cited in story and song, as in ‘The Bold Fenian Men’. Fenian activity peaked in 1866–7, with an armed invasion of Canada by US members, most of them veterans of the Union Army in the Civil War, and open rebellion in British-occupied Ireland. More recently ‘Fenian’ has been the popular designation for Republican, anti-British advocacy, especially in the six counties of Ulster still a part of the United Kingdom.

  If ‘Fenian’ is seen as the equivalent of fianna, there is a certain appropriateness in naming the cycle after the band of men instead of their leader. Fionn, after all, does not appear in every story, whereas the fighting men do. Furthermore, the fianna (sing. fian) are rooted in history, while Fionn, despite sustained and passionate belief in his historicity, was never a mortal being. The capitalized Fianna Éireann are the creatures of the third cycle of Irish heroic literature, but the lower-case fianna were an everyday part of medieval Irish life. The Brehon Laws tell us that they were bands of non-subject, landless men, who were not foreigners. They stood apart from the rest of society and were responsible for defending Ireland against external enemies, both natural and supernatural. Their first allegiance was to the ard rí [high king]. In exchange for lodging and board, they might serve a regional king who did not maintain an army of his own. We read of their resistance to the Norsemen in the eighth and ninth centuries, but there is no mention of them when the Normans arrived after 1170. How early they might have existed is a question that invites speculation. The Irish fianna may have an antecedent among the ancient Gauls known as the gaesatae [spear-men?]. The Greek historian Polybius (second century BC) describes them in the Upper Rhône Valley, armed men who were not a part of the Celtic settlements they defended. In the past 200 years or so of Celtic studies, commentators have differed over what status the fianna held in Irish life. Initially they were seen as Irish counterparts of the chivalrous Knights of the Round Table, and later as samurai. Such a vision encouraged the leading political party of independent Ireland to call itself Fianna Fáil, or the ‘soldiers of destiny’. Others have seen them as parasitic marauders, living off the fruits of common labour that they disdained.

  Membership in a fianna was exclusive but not hereditary. An applicant had to distinguish himself intellectually as well as physically. He must become a prime poet and master twelve books of poesy. Among the ordeals he had to endure was standing waist-deep in a hole armed only with a shield and a hazel stick while nine warriors threw their spears at him from a distance of nine furrows; to suffer even one wound was to fail. He would be rejected if his weapons quivered in his hands, if his braided hair was disturbed by hanging branches, or if his foot cracked a dead branch as he strode through the forest. He should have the ability to make a running leap over a bough equal to the height of his brow or to pass easily under one as low as his knee. One of the most difficult tests required him to pull a thorn from his foot while running, without slowing down.

  Although the names of Fionn, his son Oisín and his grandson Oscar are among the most widely known from early Irish tradition, their relative celebrity owes little to the influence of individual Fenian texts. The bulk of narratives is much larger than in the other three cycles, a testimony to their appeal to popular audiences over many centuries. But readers whose tastes have been formed on prestige Western literature are likely to find Fenian heroics wanting. Sean O’Faoláin called Fenian stories the ‘sow’s ear of Celtic literature’. Contrast the Ulster Cycle’s Táin Bó Cuailnge with the Fenian near-epic Cath Fionntrágha [The Battle of Ventry], which probably dates from the twelfth century but survives in a fifteenth-century recension. Ventry is an actual place, four miles west of the modern town of Dingle, Co. Kerry. In it Fionn and his men ferociously resist Dáire Donn, ‘the king of the world’, probably a stand-in for the Holy Roman Emperor. Clash of arms might be the climax to a suspenseful narrative, but page after page of uninterrupted sword-play and derring-do make for tedious reading. Such a narrative evidently brought a different effect when recited to audiences with few other entertainments. Folklorists speak of the ‘endless battle’ motif, formula Z12, tale type 2300. Many of the English-language adaptations of Fenian stories have been in juvenile fiction, heavily edited and bowdlerized. The most often adapted narratives, the love stories of Diarmait and Gráinne or Oisín and Niam, are not typical of the cycle. When Willia
m Butler Yeats embodied the spirit of old Ireland in his depiction of the 1916 insurrectionists, he chose Cúchulainn not Fionn mac Cumhaill.

  Some of the most admired passages from the Fenian Cycle are not narrative but rather nature poetry, such as those in the fifteenth-century Duanaire Finn [The Poem Book of Fionn], which cannot be known adequately in translation. The twentieth-century poet and fiction writer James Stephens evoked the earlier tradition in a widely quoted passage in his Irish Fairy Tales (1920). In it Fionn quizzes his men as to which sound provides the finest music to be heard. Their answers are all worthy: the calling of a cuckoo from a high tree, the ring of a spear on a shield, the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack of hounds heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laugh of a gleeful girl or the whisper of a beloved. The master then answers his own question. ‘The music of what happens,’ says great Fionn, ‘that is the finest music in the world.’

  FIONN ASCENDANT

  Fionn’s stories are known in all parts of Ireland, Gaelic Scotland, the Isle of Man and Gaelic-speaking Nova Scotia. His usual fortress or ‘palace’ is the Hill of Allen [OIr. Almu; ModIr. Almhain] in County Kildare, a claim not supported by archaeological research. Appearances in so many texts over centuries in different lands mean that Fionn has such a shifting persona he can sometimes appear to be an entirely different personage. Not surprisingly, there are more than twenty spellings of his usual name, including the anglicized Finn Mac-Cool. Many commentators prefer the classical Irish spellings Finn and Find, consistent with most others in this volume. The spelling ‘Fionn mac Cumhaill’ cited here is Modern Irish, in part because he is portrayed in more Modern Irish stories than other heroes, but also to distinguish him from the more than two dozen other early Irish figures named Finn or Find. And as with Cúchulainn, this is a name he acquires as he matures.

  Chronicles assigned Fionn the death date of AD 283, and Geoffrey Keating (c.1580–c.1645/50) sanctioned his historicity. He is thought to have lived during the reigns of the legendary kings Cormac mac Airt and his son Cairbre Lifechair. The lack of evidence for there ever having been such a person as Fionn did little to restrain the confidence of oral storytellers in his having once walked the byways of Ireland. In the early 1970s an Irish countryman soberly advised folklorist E. Estyn Evans that Fionn was not a giant, as some held, but actually stood at only five foot six.

  Linguistically, Fionn’s antecedents are incalculably ancient. The gloss of his name as ‘fair’ or ‘light-haired one’ links him to a continental Celtic divinity Vindonnus – cf. Gaulish vindos [white] – whose name is cited in a dozen place-names from the Roman occupation, notably Vindabona along the Danube on the site of the modern Vienna. This is not to suggest that Fionn is directly descended from Vindonnus, but rather that the name of the continental deity is refracted in scores of names of figures from early Ireland and Wales, including the Welsh Gwynn ap Nudd, whose name is the equivalent of Fionn’s although the two are not exact counterparts.

  A more immediate anticipation of the heroic figure is Find, the early Irish personification of wisdom suggested by the geographer Ptolemy (second century AD). According to Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (1988), this Find was venerated by Leinstermen in the Boyne valley who were driven from their homeland by the depredations of the Uí Néill dynasty from Ulster. Certain families among them, such as the Uí Fháilghe, then projected Fionn the poet-warrior-seer who lives in the countryside, prepared to defend his people while not ruling them. His continuing enmity is with the Uí Néill, the most powerful political force in pre-Norman Ireland. Fully formed as a persona as early as the sixth century, Fionn had been accommodated in Leinster genealogies by the seventh.

  While his pedigree might have been fabricated, the names within it remain fixed, even when personalities behind them are almost vaporous. His father is always Cumhall, cited in the ubiquitous patronymic, mac Cumhaill, of the Clan Baíscne. Cumhall is killed by the rival Clan Morna, led by Goll mac Morna, even before Fionn is born. The young Fionn will enter upon a world in which bloody rivalry between the two clans is a given; his challenge will be to reunite them under his leadership. Fionn’s mother is Muirenn Muncháem [of the white neck] through whom the hero claims his most important ancestor, Nuadu Airgetlám [of the silver hand], king of the Tuatha Dé Danann; or perhaps it was only Nuadu Necht, a Leinster manifestation of Nuadu Airgetlám. When his widowed mother is unable to raise Fionn, she has him nursed by her sister Bodhmall, a druidess. Another family member, Fiacclach mac Conchinn, also fosters the boy, endowing him with a spear that never misses its mark.

  From birth the hero is known as Demne Máel, a name implying short hair and associations with druids, craftsmen and poets. Like Cúchulainn, born Sétanta, or Heracles, born Alcides, he must win the name by which he will be known. His growth to young manhood is outlined in a short text Macgnímartha Find [The Youthful Exploits of Fionn], unmistakably modelled on the boyhood career of Cúchulainn as told in early sections of the Táin Βó Cuailnge. Setting out to seek his fortune, Demne comes to a group of boys on the plain of the Liffey and engages them in a series of athletic contests, including the early stick–ball game of hurling or hurley. No matter what the sport, young Demne is victorious, even when all of the others are against him. The jealous chieftain of the nearby fortress urges the boys to be rid of the upstart by drowning him in a nearby lake, but Demne drowns nine of them. A spectator calls out, ‘Who is the fair boy?’ [ModIr. Cé hé an giolla fionn?]. And thus he becomes Fionn the son of Cumhall.

  Young Fionn may excel at what all men must do, being a superior runner and jumper in a milieu that lacks cavalry, but he also gains from exploits denied to ordinary mortals. Among the most famous stories attached to him is how he acquired ‘knowledge’ – not erudition or learning, but what we would call occult or esoteric knowledge. While still a youth he becomes the pupil of the druid or seer Finnéces, who has been waiting seven years to find the Salmon of Knowledge at Linn Féic [Fiac’s Pool], along the Boyne River. A later tradition places this episode at the falls of Assaroe on the Erne in Co. Donegal. The druid’s name means ‘Finn the seer’, which might imply a link to old Find, the early personification of wisdom or a doubling with Fionn himself. Finnéces’ patience is rewarded when he at last catches the salmon, which he roasts on a spit over an open fire. Wanting the salmon’s power for himself, he asks the boy to leave it alone. But when Fionn touches it and burns his thumb, he thrusts the injured digit into his mouth. He has not eaten the fish, but merely tasting the salmon’s flesh is enough to deny Finnéces wishes. When the druid asks the boy his name he still answers ‘Demne’. Finnéces responds, ‘Your name is Fionn, for it was prophesied that a fair-haired man would eat the Salmon of Knowledge, and you are that fair-haired Fionn. Eternal knowledge is yours now, not mine.’ An alternative, less well-known story of the eighth century has Fionn gain superhuman knowledge when he catches his thumb in the door of an otherworldly dwelling on Sliab na mBan [Slievenamon], Co. Tipperary. The thumb motif is constant, however. Through a thousand stories Fionn can always summon up his special powers of knowledge by bringing his thumb to his mouth.

  The Modern Irish name for Fionn’s esoteric knowledge is fios, which in other contexts may also denote second sight. Above this he is attributed powers of divination known by specific if cryptic names that were earlier seen as the province of the druids. Díchetal do chennaib [OIr. extempore incantation (?)] is a kind of spell or incantation composed on the spot, often using the fingertips. It may have been a kind of clairvoyance or psychometry in which Fionn conveys his message in quatrain or verse. Druids and certain poets also possess this power, which St Patrick did not condemn because it did not involve pagan rites. Such rites are called for in imbas forosnai [poetic knowledge that illuminates], in which the practitioner chews a piece of red flesh from pig, dog or cat. He then sleeps for three days and nights, after having placed the flesh on a flagstone, chanting invocations to unnamed gods. He must also chant over his two p
alms, asking that his sleep be not disturbed. After the three-day sleep Fionn judges if imbas forosnai has come to him. This is a power shared by the highest rank of poet, the ollam. Lastly is the enigmatic teinm laida [OIr. breaking open of the pith], another chewing of the thumb with powers greater than fios, perhaps a combination of some of the others. St Patrick banned this as ‘giving offerings to demons’.

  Like Cúchulainn, Fionn is trained by an amazonian tutor, Búanann, but he also studies with a male, Cethern mac Fintain. His unnamed spear that never misses its mark is not his only weapon; he also wields the famous sword Mac an Lúin. When charging into battle Fionn and his men intimidate their enemies by shouting the war cry of Dord Fían. When hunting, his favourite quarries are wild boar and deer. His favourite animal is the dog, and the two most associated with him, Bran and Sceolang, are his transformed cousins. He is described as slaying a serpent in nearly every body of water in Ireland, the Isle of Man and Gaelic Scotland.