Despite Fionn’s customary association with the countryside, and the hundreds of allusions to him in surviving, often remote place-names, the first great feat usually attributed to him is a defence of the seat of the and rí [high king] at Tara. Aillén mac Midgna, usually known as ‘the burner’, had been a fairy musician of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who lived at Sídh Finnachad in the north (also home to Lir, father of the swan children) or nearby Sliab Fúait [Slieve Fuad]. Each Samain Aillén would come to Tara, playing on his timpán, a kind of drum or tambourine. The sweetness of Aillén’s music concealed his darker motives. Once the men of Tara were lulled to sleep, even those suffering from wounds, Aillén would spew forth flaming rock from his mouth and burn the residence to the ground. Unresisting, the powers at Tara allowed this to continue for twenty-three years. Each year they would dutifully rebuild the palace, and when Samain came they submitted to Aillén’s next visit. Sensing their despair, Fionn offers to rid them of Aillén if all those present at Tara – nobles, poets and druids – will guarantee his heritage, meaning the restoration of Clan Baiscne with Fionn at its head. They agree. The hero first makes himself immune to Aillén’s musical charms by inhaling the poison of his own spear, whose point is so venomous as to forbid sleep. This immunization against the allure of music evokes Odysseus’ resistance to the songs of the sirens in Book XII of the Odyssey. Aillén’s magic has the expected effect on the rest of the party, which falls into a deep sleep. When Aillén’s mouth opens to send out a great, engulfing flame, Fionn is prepared, thrusting forward his crimson, fringed cloak. The garment drives the fire downward, where it scorches a massive crater deep in the earth. Seeing his power thwarted, Aillén flees to his underground lair in the north with Fionn in hot pursuit. Before Aillén can reach safety, Fionn impales him with his spear. Quickly cutting off Aillén’s head, Fionn returns with it to Tara, where he fixes it on a pole for everyone to see the next dawn. Overjoyed at his deliverance, the king of Tara proclaims that Fionn son of Cumhall shall be the new chief or rigfhéinnid of the fianna. Goll mac Morna, slayer of Cumhall, agrees, striking his palm against Fionn’s, making himself the ally of the son of his old enemy. In subsequent tales Goll may be a cohort or a rival. Goll is also linked to Connacht, home of many of Fionn’s mortal rivals.
Fionn is a defender, never an invader. With fair hair, broad shoulders and a broad brow, he enjoys the good looks of a romantic hero, early or modern. His enemies may be from other parts of the Gaelic world, often Connacht, or Scandinavia, that is, Lochlainn. Sometimes his enemies are exotic, like ‘The King of Greece’ or ‘The King of the World’. Some with names implying darkness, Arca Dubh [Black Arky], Borba [harsh, arrogant], or Dealra Dubh [dark sheen], seem to pop up only so Fionn can knock them down. While highly mobile, Fionn is always portrayed on foot, never in a chariot like Cúchulainn. He is not assigned a favourite horse. John V. Kelleher once remarked that allusions to Fionn and the Fenians in local place-names are as common as ‘lover’s leap’ and ‘devils’ washtub’ are in North America. Often the attribution implies giant strength such as the ‘Parallel Roads’ that line Glen Roy in Inverness-shire, which are actually markers from ancient glacial lakes. Fionn is thought to have cut mountain passes with his sword, but also lends his name to lesser landscape features such as caves and ‘fingerstones’ (bare, vertical rocks).
In still another class of stories Fionn tangles with the supernatural. Among the most common of these are many of the bruidhean [hostel, banqueting hall] type, in which Fionn and his men are lured into an attractive residence and find all exits closed once they are inside. Anne Ross (1967) has suggested that the fear associated with the bruidhean derives from the burning of human sacrifices in wickerwork images in pre-Christian times. The motif is not unique to the Fenian Cycle and a close parallel can be found in Togail Bruidne Da Derga [the Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel], part of either the Ulster or Mythological Cycle. Often, but not always, the seducer is a beautiful but treacherous woman. In the widely known (both Ireland and Scotland) Bruidhean Chaorthainn [Hostel of the Quicken Trees] the villain is Midac, a young man of Lochlainn who had been raised with the Fianna at the Hill of Allen. He invites his former benefactors to his residence along the Shannon River only in hopes of betraying them to the King of the World. Yet other stories are clearly allegorical, as in the fifteenth-century text where Fionn and his men encounter an old man, a ram, and a beautiful young woman. The ram who butts the men’s food from their table and will not be restrained is the world. The woman who tells Fionn he has had her already, as she rejects him, is youth. And the old man who makes quick work of the ram is old age, which eventually subdues all.
Among Fionn’s many powers is the ease he has with most women. Unlike Cúchulainn with Emer, he lacks a constant mate. Encounters with more than fifty named women produce innumerable progeny. One of the many named Áine swears she will sleep with no man except Fionn. The imposition of Christian ideas of monogamy classifies some of these women as ‘wives’ and others as ‘lovers’, a distinction not made by the original storytellers. The best remembered of these today, though not necessarily the most important, is Sadb the deer-maiden, also known as Saba or Blaí. Her story comes in two versions. In the first she has been enchanted into deer form by Fer Doirich the druid. After the hounds Bran and Sceolang chase her into the Hill of Allen, Fionn gives the deer shelter and is delighted when it turns into a beautiful young woman. They become lovers, and she gives birth to the child Oisín, whose name is the diminutive of deer, os. When Fionn returns to hunting, Sadb is again enchanted by Fer Doirich, and so abandons her infant son. Seven years later Fionn finds him naked under a rowan tree near the storied mountain of Ben Bulben in Sligo. In the second version the lover, sometimes named Blaí, is usually a beautiful young woman married to Fionn who is transformed into a deer by a malicious but unnamed magician while her husband is away. Once again the mother abandons the child, only to have the father find him some years later. Oisín becomes an important member of the fianna though not necessarily as an heir of Fionn or as a leader of men. Within the older, Irish-language manuscript tradition the favoured offspring is Oisín’s son Oscar, Fionn’s grandson, the ‘Galahad of the Cycle’. In certain later narratives, to be considered in this chapter, Oisín becomes the lover and poet who inspired James Macpherson’s chicanery.
THE HERO AND THE ANTI-HERO
Standish James O’Grady put it most simply: ‘Heroes expand into giants, dwindle into goblins, or fling aside the heroic form and gambol as buffoons…’ (1878). He should have made the qualification that the arc from acclaim to pratfall is followed by popular heroes such as Heracles, rather than by epic heroes such as Achilles. Heracles was the subject of an immense body of popular literature, not all of which survives, that inverted his most admirable virtues. By the time of Aristophanes’ The Frogs (405 BC) he had been reduced to a figure of slapstick motivated by gluttony and lust. Achilles, whose character is fixed in the Iliad, suffers no such transmogrification, and neither does Cúchulainn, whose character is kept in place by the Táin Bó Cuailnge. The popular Fionn, the Fionn of oral tradition, is a highly protean character, much cruder than the Fionn of manuscript tradition, as Gerard Murphy points out in the introduction to volume III of Duanaire Finn (1953), one of the most searching and profound analyses of the cycle. To a certain extent, the very ubiquity of a heroic character is enough to invite his deflation. Raphael Patai (1972) has observed a parallel phenomenon in modern popular literature in which industrialization can reproduce characterizations with a speed and thoroughness unanticipated before the printing press. In such media the hero-buffoon, Buster Keaton or Dagwood Bumstead, is a commonplace.
Portrayals of the comic and anti-heroic are more common in later oral literature, and more common in English-language and Hiberno-English stories than in Irish, Scottish Gaelic or Manx stories. David Krause in The Profane Book of Irish Comedy (1982) traces the roots of the comic Fionn to an eighth-century manuscript whose English title is �
�The Quarrel Between Finn and Oisín’, in which the son speaks antagonistically to his father. Whereas we are used to Oisín singing his father’s praises in dialogue with the authoritarian St Patrick, Krause asserts that this older Oisín was a rebellious Oedipus set on humiliating his father, Laius. As the centuries passed and Christianity became more a part of the narrative, Oisín transferred his aggressions to the new religious authority imported from abroad and began to puff up the reputation of his departed father.
A taste for coarse humour is more evident in the Fenian Cycle than any of the other three. In later folktales the once-heroic Fionn has his vanity deflated with such demeaning challenges as being asked to whistle with a mouth full of oatmeal. Only the Fenian Cycle has produced anything like the 128 surviving Céadach tales from both Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, with still more from Nova Scotia. The mischievous and querulous Céadach is an interloper to the Fenian milieu. Often disguised in skins, he seeks to elbow into the fianna for reasons that are never clear. Often an unwanted ‘helper’, he may be called Céadach or may bear any of many names, or he may have a nickname like ‘the hard gilly/servant’ or the ‘churl’. Fionn is rarely the butt of his contrivances, but leading members of the fianna are. Once he persuades them all to climb on the back of a tired old horse, which then collapses under the weight. After urging them all to mount another horse, he watches as the horse rushes off to take the warriors under the sea.
The best-known story of Fionn as a buffoon-hero is not recorded before the nineteenth century, and then only in English without a known Irish-language antecedent. William Carleton (1794–1869), an Ulster-born Catholic turned Protestant novelist, gave his fifteen-page version the title ‘The Legend of Knockmany’ in an 1845 collection of stories. Knockmany is a hill in Carleton’s native county of Tyrone, a site with no special Fenian associations. Carleton’s story probably first appeared in a serial now lost. The early folklorist Patrick Kennedy published a variant in his Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866). But after William Butler Yeats republished the Carleton text in the influential Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), its prominence was assured. More than twenty plagiarisms and un-credited adaptations have made this the portrait of Fionn that many in the English-speaking world outside Ireland, especially children, are most likely to know.
In ‘The Legend of Knockmany’ Fionn the giant, here in the Hiberno-English form ‘Fin M’Coul’, is at work on the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim when he hears that another giant, named ‘Cucullin’ [sic], is headed his way, spoiling for a match of strength. In manuscript tradition, of course, Fionn and Cúchulainn never meet, their cycles being discrete. Popular literature is not troubled by such distinctions, and, as we shall see, this may be a case of mistaken identity. Fin returns home to his wife Oonagh at Knockmany, quaking in fear that he is going to be ‘skivered like a rabbit’ by his enemy. Oonagh is more confident, knowing that the rival giant’s power resides in the middle finger of his right hand, and so sets about to outwit him. She has Fin dress as a baby and hide in an unnamed son’s cradle, while she prepares to bake bread in which she has inserted granite stones. Giving false hospitality to Cucullin, who is annoyed at not finding Fin home, Oonagh offers Cucullin the granite bread. After trying twice to eat the bread, losing teeth in each attempt, Cucullin refuses to take another bite. At this point Oonagh offers another loaf, minus the granite insert, to Fin whom she blandly describes as her baby. Fin, of course, has no difficulty in eating at all, which leaves Cucullin amazed and apprehensive about confronting the father of such a child. Cucullin now wishes to leave Knockmany, but not before feeling the teeth of such an astonishing infant. Readying for the climax, Oonagh invites Cucullin to place his magic finger well into Fin’s mouth. Fin immediately bites the finger off, jumps out of the cradle and makes short work of the visiting giant – now debilitated.
The implications of castration with the severed finger are likely to leap out at the contemporary reader, but they should not obscure the humiliations heaped upon Fionn: cowering in fear from an invader, dressed in infant’s clothes and protected by his resourceful wife.
Carleton certainly did not invent this story, nor was he the first to attach it to the Fenian Cycle. The central motif of deception to overcome an enemy is at least as old as the anonymous Maistre Pierre Pathelin (c.1464), one of the original French stage farces, which can still raise a laugh when performed today. Eleven years before Carleton’s publication, novelist Frederick Marryat put a variant of the story into the mouth of an Irish character named O’Brien in his Peter Simple (1834). Here Fionn is called Fingal, after Macpherson, and he, not his wife, thinks of the granite-loaf strategy. The rival giant is described as Scottish. If the story is of foreign origin, this is hardly the first time a narrative from abroad has been interleaved into an Irish corpus. The origins of the story of the conflict between Cúchulainn and his son Connla are in early Indo-European tradition and are found as far afield as Persian literature.
A year before Peter Simple yet another version, entitled ‘The Legend of Fin-Mac-Cool’, appeared in the pages of the Dublin Penny Journal (1833) with intriguing variants. The anonymous author, cited only as ‘Q’, follows the same scenario we find in Carleton, with the location switched from Knockmany to Ballynascorney in County Dublin. The Scottish giant is here named ‘Usheen’ for Fionn’s own son, Oisín. As the identity of the invading giant is flexible, one is tempted to think that Q simply plucked an available name, one that the Macpherson controversy had made prominent. Then again, ‘Usheen’ is a phonetic rendering of what Oisín sounds like to English ears, a spelling that derives from hearing spoken Irish. Q’s tone never responds to the thunderous Oedipal implications of father Fionn quailing in terror at the advance of his grown son striding toward him. But here in the nineteenth-century penny press is an unmistakable reprise of the eighth-century ‘Quarrel Between Finn and Oisín’.
The lack of an antecedent for ‘Knockmany’ in Irish or Scottish Gaelic does not mean the story has not entered Celtic oral tradition. Variants, with significant changes from Carleton’s model, are recorded in the Hebrides in the 1860s and in Ulster in 1913. Whether they predate the printed sources or follow from them is difficult to know.
The more significant issue is that the Knockmany story, whatever its origin, should have attached itself to Fionn mac Cumhaill instead of to another hero. Part of the reason must be that he was the most available because Fenian tradition was very much alive in oral tradition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas the other cycles had receded from the popular mind until the revival of Old Irish from the mid-nineteenth century and after. Whoever asserted this connection – not Carleton, Marryat or Q – saw within Fionn’s persona a wiliness and resilience that would triumph over humiliation as well as over redoubtable adversaries. The capacity to fall and rise again is what attracted James Joyce in linking his Finnegans Wake (1939) to Fenian lore. The myth of Fionn does not serve the same function in the Wake that Odysseus does in Ulysses because Joyce had much wider ambitions in portraying language, man’s fate and the fortunate fall. His famously challenging narrative is larded with Fenian allusions, one of which is present in the pun of the title, ‘Finn again wake’, a call to Fionn to begin his career again, from preening hero to gambolling buffoon.
Early sources disagree about accounts of Fionn’s death or even whether or not he was mortal. In one of the better known, Fionn and the fianna have worn out their welcome at the court of Cairbre Lifechair, Cormac mac Airt’s son and successor. As different factions squabble among themselves, the king himself provokes a climactic battle by killing Fionn’s servant Ferdia. It takes fully five men to murder Fionn at what is now Garristown, County Dublin. In another source an assassin named Aichlech mac Dubdrenn slays Fionn at the Ford of the Brea on the Boyne River, not far from where the hero first tasted knowledge. A variant version has Goll mac Morna dispatch Fionn at the same site. Yet other stories cite locations in Cork, Kerry, a
nd the Scottish shire of Perth. Fionn may be reincarnated as Mongán in the Cycles of the Kings, or he may be a part of the Sleeping Army (folk motif E502), at rest in a remote cave, like King Arthur, Charlemagne or Barbarossa, biding his time until his people call for him again. Many sites are also named as his burial mound, including Druim Derg in Co. Meath.
FIONN, DIARMAIT AND GRÁINNE
Far darker than Fionn the farcical hero is Fionn the jealous cuckold in Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, the greatest, most resonant prose narrative of the Fenian Cycle, usually known in English as ‘The Pursuit of Diarmait and Gráinne’. Fionn’s portrayal in this story resembles what happens to the otherwise admired Ulster king Conchobar mac Nessa in the nearly parallel Deirdre story. In both stories we have an ageing powerful man who cannot have what he wants, a reluctant, beautiful young woman, the woman’s preferred lover, and flight. Among the great differences are that the Diarmait and Gráinne story is more than six times as long, chock full of digressions and colourful supporting characters, and comes to quite a different conclusion. Both the Fenian and the Ulster stories anticipate the love triangle between Tristan, Iseult and King Mark of Cornwall, a stand-in for Arthur. Needless to say, the Arthurian story is the most widely known of these in Western culture, but the two Irish narratives have long been recognized as the older. James Carney (1955) has argued that the roots of the two Irish stories are older still, having been adapted from the late Roman love triangle between Mars, god of war, Venus, god of love, and Adonis, Venus’s consort. References imply that this Fenian story was known by the tenth century although it did not take the form we now recognize until well after 1200. A named author, Dáibhi Ó Duibhgeannáin, composed a full manuscript version in 1651. This did not stop the Diarmait and Gráinne story from being immensely popular in oral tradition. Until well into the twentieth century a common appellation for the megalithic dolmens or portal tombs that dot the Irish countryside was ‘beds of Diarmait and Gráinne’.
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