The Green Hero

by Bernard Evslin

  The Green Hero

  Early Adventures of Finn McCool

  Bernard Evslin

  For Dorothy

  From Whose Eyes Green Takes Its Final Luster

  Contents

  Introduction

  Finn and the Snakes

  Finn Serves the Salmon

  The Winter Burning

  The Scroll of Debts

  The Boar of Ballinoe

  Houlihan’s Barn

  Hanratty’s Hunger

  Finn and Goll

  Introduction

  I FOLLOWED FINN’S TRAIL RIGHT to his home grounds, and when I reached Ireland I hunted for him in libraries, bars, and country roads. In the libraries to read the ancient writings; in the bars to recover from the books and listen to the conversation; along miles and miles of misty country road to find the old storytellers who still spun their tales in occasional cottages, and who, I had been assured, could tell me stories never written. Every night I made a few notes about what I had seen and heard. Reading them over, I see that they may serve to set the stage for the entrance of that slender blue-eyed boy who did or did not live eighteen hundred years ago but who is more alive now than most.

  Conversation in a bar near Trinity College Library, Dublin: “Why Finn? Why not Cormac, or Cuchulain, Hound of Ulster? Or Conn of a Thousand Battles? Or Boru? What about McHuegal of the Terrible Hand? Or the Fighting Sons of Usnach? Why Finn McCool?”

  “Because he loses sometimes.”

  “What—Finn a loser? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think I’m saying he’s the greatest hero of all. His world wasn’t quite so simple. He loses and copes with his loss, and goes on to fight again. Also, he has to fight himself as well as the easier enemy. He’s more interesting.”

  “Well, I guess that depends on what interests you.”

  “I guess it does. These other champions are too complete for my taste. Too invincible. They not only win every match, they take every round. It gets predictable. With Finn you never know.”

  “You’re saying he’s more human than our other heroes?”

  “He’s the only one remotely human. The others are muscle-heads. They think with their swords. Finn has a live painful intelligence, ticking inside him. He wonders about things and puzzles them out. Cormac and Cuchulain and the others—they go to the battlefield in the morning and kill ten thousand before noon, and break for lunch, and kill ten thousand more before dinner. But Finn runs into trouble with every enemy. He has bad luck. And bad luck makes good stories.”

  “Mister, you don’t understand the Irish. We’ve got to nourish ourselves on ideas of invincibility. How else could we lose every war we ever fought and still manage to consider ourselves the greatest fighters in the world—and make others believe it? Never mind your heavy-thinkin’ in-and-outers. We need our all-conquering simpletons.”

  “Brilliantly expounded, sir. I buy it. And allow me to buy you another drink on the strength of it.”

  “Well, I’m not sayin’ no.”

  “But let me put it to you. Which of your mythical heroes would have had the wit to say what you just said? Not the kingly Cormac, or Cuchulain, Hound of Ulster, or Conn of a Thousand Battles, or the baleful Boru, or McWhosis of the Terrible Hand. They expressed themselves exclusively in grunts and war cries. Only Finn had the magic gift of gab. In other words, he’s not only more human than the others, he’s more Irish. Or maybe that’s the same thing?”

  “Maybe it is, by god! Hey, Phil, there’s a drought developin’ over here. Bring this American connoisseur of Celtic wit another drink. Bring the Celt one too.”

  After a day at the Trinity Library: Spent the day, and part of the evening, buried in legends about Irish prehistory. A marvelous grab-bag. Each one begins at a different place. Some say the Fir Bolg came first, some say the Tuatha da Danaan. The one I prefer says the island was settled in time beyond memory by one race. But a monstrous tidal wave swept over the land and washed everyone out to sea. Those who didn’t drown climbed ashore in Greece, and immediately began to carry leather bags of earth up the mountains to make vineyards. But after unknown time had passed, half of them still remembered the beautiful island of their ancestors because it kept appearing to them in dreams, and they turned their bags into leather boats and sailed back to Ireland. These were the Fir Bolg. Fir Bolg means leather bag. Years passed, or centuries. And those left in Greece grew restless too, felled trees, built ships, and sailed west. They called themselves Tuatha da Danaan, or People of Greece. Reaching an island, they found people who spoke the same language, and knew they had come home. They burned their boats so that the Fir Bolg would think they had arrived by magic, which the Fir Bolg believed. Finding that they were believed to possess supernatural powers, they began to use them. The men of the Tuatha da Danaan became wizards and the women were sorceresses. War poets sang magic runes that froze the enemy’s blood and made the limbs of their own men swell with power. The women screamed at the mountain, turning heads to stones and stones to heads. The wizards hid rivers and raised forests. And a wizard physician of the Tuatha da Danaan filled a great well with crushed herbs into which he dipped the dead and wounded soldiers, who immediately revived and returned to battle. The Fir Bolg could not stand against this awful magic. They fled. The Tuatha da Danaan enslaved them and ruled Ireland.

  After this victory the Tuatha da Danaan so dominated the imagination of the vanquished that they grew into gods. They lived in the green hills where they built wooden palaces of astounding beauty. In their orchards were trees that never failed. They feasted upon roast pig and good beer. And raided the lowland villages for mortal lovers.

  Then, magically as they had come, they began to fade. They had lived too well and depended too greatly on magic tricks. Now real heroes were brawling on the plains, killing hugely, winning battles. And the pagan gods of Ireland, the Tuatha da Danaan, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination until they turned into elves and fairies. Those who had spoken in thunder and blasted hills with tongues of fire now could only sour milk and tie knots in the hair of dreaming girls. And as the pagan gods grew smaller, the pagan heroes grew larger and larger until they turned into giants.

  Another legend of how things began:

  Only the Irish know that Noah had four sons, not three as the Bible claims. This youngest son was a hellion and a wag. He mocked his father’s weather forecasts and made unkind remarks about the huge clumsy boat the old man was building. Noah lost his temper and took after him with an axe, and the lad decided it might be wiser to leave home. But he must have learned something from his father, because when the flood began he was ready with a tiny ark of his own, upon which he stowed his young bride, two pigs, and two potatoes, and announced that he would sail far far to the west beyond people and beyond sin. He landed on an island now called Eire. His sons and daughters throve and multiplied—also the pigs and potatoes. But the waters never quite receded from that beautiful wet island, and have not to this day.

  Why must we know about this last son of Noah? Because he became known as Cuhal ni Tyrne or King of the Wave in a tongue ancient beyond knowledge—and his descendants became the great clan Cuhal, of which Finn McCuhal was the last and greatest hero, and Finn’s son, Ossian, the last poet.

  Another day, another library. “File” (Fieleh) was the ancient name for poet. And this poet or storyteller—the terms were interchangeable—was prepared for his task by twelve years of precise and brutal training which broke ordinary men in a matter of hours. He had to learn a secret language as well as the transformation of ordinary speech; he learned magic, incantations, meter, composition. He memorized 350 tales—Destruction of Fortified Places, Cattle Raids, Courtships, Battles, Deaths, Feasts, Adventures in the
Fairy World, Elopements, and Visions. After twelve years of this he was called File, and was empowered to tell tales of heroes, to wear a cloak of crimson and yellow feathers, and carry a golden rod. He ranked next to the king himself, and sat next to the king at table. Each year he received twenty-one cows and feed, food for himself and twenty attendants. He was allowed two dogs, six horses, and could grant safety from arrest for any crime except treason or murder.

  The girls here have matchless complexions nurtured on fog and rain. I think of this as I gorge myself on the sight of the lovely long-legged young librarian who comes swinging through the brown light down the aisle, hugging an armful of tomes and offers them to me, smiling. She leaves me in no condition to appreciate Colloquy with the Ancients, Annals of Tiglernach, Psalm of Cashal, The Speckled Book of McEgan, Book of the Dun Cow, Yellow Book of Lecan, and Cattle Raid of Cooley.

  I don’t feel like reading, not at all. But she has brought me this heavy armful of books, and I owe it to her to use them. Besides, what else can I do? She’s young enough to be my daughter, as if that mattered. But I sink myself in the books and pretty soon am more or less safely drowned. But I swim up again. I know her name, Nora McPhail; I saw it on a little plaque on her desk. McPhail … derived from MacFeile, perhaps, meaning child of the poet? Was she descended from one of those eloquent finely-honed bards who sat next to the king in their cloaks of crimson and yellow feathers? Shall I ask her the derivation of her name? With an opening like that I’d be able to present some fancy credentials. She’s too pretty not to ask anything of. …

  Very learned prefaces to these books. They discuss the unresolved question of whether or not the ancient Celts had a written language. They have found a kind of rock-writing composed of vertical and horizontal lines. Some say this was the ancient Celtic script called ogham … on the other hand it may have been birds sharpening their beaks. … The scholars dispute. What it seems to boil down to is this: The ancient Celts either had a written language and forgot it, or didn’t have one and wrote in it anyway. …

  The Celtic mythology does not abound in gods as do the other mythologies. But man was an uncertain quantity too. Gods and demons moved among men and within them. Heaven and earth intermingled. Nothing was as it seemed, and soon would be something else. Magic was the link. Everything speaks, everything lives in the ultimate fairyland. Why? Does the storyteller alone have the true perception? Scientists now have observed that there is motion in matter that was considered inanimate. Will they find voices in the abyss? Fabulists have always known that animals speak, the old stories are full of it. Men of science are questioning dolphins now to find out if this is so. Is imagination an uncanny form of insight? Some sinister sage once said that prophecy was memory of the future. Where did these stories begin, where do they end? Or do they? They flow beyond time, turn upon themselves, and flow back again. So it is fitting to end this beginning with Ossian, favorite son of Finn, who, in the manner of sons, came after his father—and was a poet of poets and told his father’s story.

  Ossian fought in Finn’s last battle, and fell beside his father, but was not allowed to die. He was whisked away over the sea to the Land of Ever Youth, and dwelt there for three hundred years. Then, one day, fishermen casting their nets in the sea off Meath saw a giant gray stallion riding through the waves toward shore. On his back was a giant youth with blue-black hair down to his shoulders and eyes as blue as the core of flame. He was clad in antique armor.

  “Finn,” he called. And the trees bent under the musical blast of his voice. “Finn McCool! Where are you?”

  He listened for an answer, then turned to the men. “What has happened?” he cried. “Why is everything so different? The land is overgrown with brambles and the men I see are small and weak. And there on that hill called Almhain where stood my father’s castle all is waste and desolation. Where is he? Where is Finn McCool? I call him but he does not answer. And I do not hear his hunting horn from the eastern to the western sea.”

  The men told him that they had lived here all their lives, but remembered no castle on that hill. They had heard old tales of Finn McCool and the Fianna, but the warrior race had long passed from the earth, and they could tell him no more.

  He turned to go, but saw a crowd of men, trying to lift a broad flat stone. They said:

  “Come and help us, mighty hero, for you are a man of strength.”

  When he leaned down to move the stone, his saddle girths burst, and he rolled on the ground. Instantly the gray horse fell; its flesh withered, leaving huge white bones. And Ossian lay on the ground, a feeble old man.

  The men lifted him and asked who he was.

  “I am Ossian, son of Finn,” he whispered, peering about with dim old eyes. “I fell with him in battle. I remember now. But I was not allowed to die. I was taken to the Land of Ever Youth where I have dwelt for these three hundred years.”

  “Have you come back to die?” asked a fisherman.

  “I have come back to tell of my father, Finn McCool, and of the men of the Fianna, and their high deeds. For if the memory of Finn dies and falls to dust as has his mortal frame, then the honor of Ireland will die, and its men continue to dwindle until they shrink away to nothing. Give me a sip of water now, and hold me so I do not fall, and listen to what I have to tell.”

  The men did not wish to stay. The day was fading. The wind was sharpening. They wanted to draw in their nets and go home. But for all its feebleness the old man’s voice held them. He fixed them with a glittering eye. They could not leave. He began to tell them what he had come to tell.

  And here are the stories Ossian told, not as inscribed by dusty scholars and entombed in libraries, but in the sound of Ossian’s own voice caught on the wind in the open air—that marvelous voice which was first heard as the dry cricket chirp of an old old man, changing slowly as the listeners gaped into a great freshet of colored sound full of laughter and excitement. For Ossian grew younger as he spoke. He pulled himself up and stood straight and tall until he stood there tall as a tree, full of strength and joy and the fiery sap of youth. He whistled in a certain way, and the bones of his stallion jigged together and put on flesh, and the tremendous gray horse arose from the dust, curvetting, neighing like thunder. Ossian leaped onto him and galloped away across the beach and disappeared into the mist. But before he left he promised to return and tell the adventures of his father after he became chief of the Fianna.

  But that happens in another book.

  Finn and the Snakes

  FINN MCCOOL WAS A giant but much too small for the work; the runt of the litter he was, yards shorter than his brothers and sisters, which was embarrassing. In fact, it is a better thing altogether to be a large dwarf than a small giant. Such a thing has been known to spoil a man’s disposition entirely. But it didn’t spoil Finn’s. He quickly learned how things were in the world, and said to himself:

  “Can’t afford to be bad-tempered, not till I get a reputation.”

  To go back a bit, though. When Finn was an infant he shared his crib with a girl-baby named Murtha, whose own mother, a giantess, had been killed by an avalanche she started herself by throwing her husband headfirst off a mountain because he’d said something rude. So Finn shared his crib with young Murtha, and his porridge bowl, and his rattle, and such.

  Now it is well known that infants are nasty squalling damp objects, except to their mothers, perhaps, but this Murtha was something else. Even as an infant she was beautiful. Her skin was ivory and pink, and she was never bald for an instant, but was born with a marvelous black fleece of hair, and had eyes that were neither green nor blue, but violet—rare for eyes. And teeth—a full set of them—so that she was able to bite Finn quite early. On the other hand, her smile flashed like a stream when the sun hits it. She was a lovely creature, and young Finn fell in love with her immediately, just like that, and had resolved to marry her before he was three days old, but decided to keep it secret awhile because he knew she wasn’t ready to listen to
proposals. Nevertheless, his love for her was so great that he couldn’t rest for trying to win her admiration, which was difficult to do; she didn’t seem to notice him particularly with her violet eyes, except when she decided to bite him or snatch his bottle. She would lie on her back dreamily watching the clouds go by—their cradle was a leather sling set in an oak tree; this is the way with giant babies—and he did not know what to do to attract her attention.

  He noticed that she did not like slithery things. Worms made her unhappy. She would grab a wolfhound by his whiskers and kiss him on the nose, but spiders were a different matter entirely; she hated them and was afraid. This set Finn to thinking.

  “My short time in the world has taught me that the way to a young lady’s heart is by being very brave. Yes, even if you’re not, you must make her believe you are; that’s just as good. Now to be brave is dangerous sometimes, but if you’re a lad of ideas you can get around that part maybe.”

  He thought and thought and put together a bit of a plan. “Now it’s a fact she’s afraid of worms,” he said to himself. “This is quite plain. Oh yes, terrified of the tiny things, bless her heart. But why? They can’t hurt her. They cannot bite or sting. Why then does she fear them? It is their shape, perhaps, for what else is there about them? And that they crawl on their bellies, squiggling along, for what else is it they do? Now when a worm falls off the branch into the cradle I might boldly brush it away from her, but that is not very impressive, after all. She might appreciate it, to be sure, but she would not go mad with admiration. No, no. I must do something more splendid, more bold, bigger altogether. What then is a big worm? Big worm … why yes—a snake. That’s anyone’s idea of a big worm, I should think. Now if she’s afraid of worms, she would go absolutely stark blue with terror, the beautiful child, if she saw a snake, a sight she has been spared so far. If only I could rescue her from a snake, ah that would be a thing to admire. This would count as a great deed. This would win Murtha’s heart. She would know her cousin Finn is a hero, and fit to be wed. Yes, yes, I see it plain; I must save her from a snake. There’s a drawback though. I myself am by no means partial to serpents. Why, as I lie here and think about them, I can feel myself beginning to shiver and shake. I am still but a babe, I haven’t come into my strength, and I couldn’t handle the loopy beast if I did meet one. Nevertheless, for all the fear and doubt, there is an idea here and I must make it grow.”