Every time I tell the tale, I cannot put out of mind how the loss of two young ones is more than just a tale, how no amount of beering or tears will bring them back to Effie and me. If only there’d been such a Selkie the day that Tommy drowned. But the hope that no good deed goes unrewarded comforts our wee children, they who have no memories of a brother and a sister lost to trouble them. I hope it comforts Effie, too.
I watch their tiny heads nod and drop and we carry them to bed.
When Effie’s not looking, I find my steps have carried me to talk to my now-gone peedies, my little ones, my first-born son and daughter. ‘My Tommy boy, I’ll build a boat and ye shall sail it, just like the paper boats we’d build together. Ye’ll be with me, I know, when I’m out upon the water.’
‘And Janet. My sma’ and gentle Janet, we’ll bring you too. Your voice and gentle ways could tame the Tangie, all covered with his kelp, and bring us safely back to harbour.’
And yet we two, Effie and I, we cannot mourn together. Instead we get on as best we can with our building of what we think will rescue us. Although the apples from that tree beside the graves grow thick and heavy, we cannot bring ourselves to pick them. Instead they fall, all in a rookel upon the ground, feeding the wasps and creepi-craalies. No good can come to us from such a harvest.
The harvest from the earth and other trees I gather grudgingly, but I gather. Our small remaining family have need of what this land gives up. Yet it has taken from us what cannot be given back. The stony pool that claimed my son, the pestilent air that filled my daughter’s lungs, the snow that clarted up my path when I went after help – I hate them. As I hate the choice that brought us here, and I the one that made it.
Now what can I do but build, give them a house like Mansie dreamed of, take only what I have to of the devil’s store.
Build what I must to save us.
Mythological Context: The Selkie
Due to the close association between water and the spiritual world in ancient times, the Otherworld was often considered to be located underwater (usually in the sea but also accessible through lakes and rivers) and there are numerous old stories and folklore associated with this belief. It’s no surprise therefore, that a number of narratives subsequently came into being involving creatures who lived underwater (the maighdean marra [mermaid] and fear mara [merman]) but who behaved and operated within the established constraints of ‘Na Sidhe’, that is, linked to the dead and potentially dangerous to humans.
These underwater creatures were very different to the more contemporary interpretation of what’s commonly known as the mermaid: a creature with a human torso and a fish-like tail. The latter are based on elements from Assyrian tales, the Greek sirens and other, later, influential narratives such as Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Elements of these overseas stories did enter Ireland, Scotland and Wales from medieval times and are thought to have had some influence on the portrayal of the original Celtic mythological creatures.
One of the most common stories involving the maighdean mara tells of a young man who spots a beautiful woman on the sea shore. When the woman puts her magic cloak aside, the man seizes it, thus taking her under his power. Accompanying him home, the maighdean mara becomes his wife and they have a number of children. One day, one of those children discovers the magic cloak (which had been hidden by the young man) and returns it to his mother. Taking the cloak, she flees back to the sea and enters it, never to be seen again. Variations of this legend are believed to have spread to Scotland and Iceland in the late Middle Ages.
Up in the Orkney islands and the Western Isles of Scotland, these stories appear to have developed into a more specialised lore around a seal people called Selkie (the word ‘selkie’ is thought to be an old Orcadian dialect for “grey seal”) although those tales are also found in other parts of Scotland and Ireland. Much of the more common lore with respect to selkie seems to have been sourced specifically from the works of a nineteenth century Orkney writer, Walter Traill Dennison, who wrote a number of tales based on beliefs and traditions from that area, many of them romanticised and possibly differing from the original lore through the transfer to prose. The most prominent theme to this selkie folklore relates to their shapechanging ability: they are seals who can take on human form by removing their skin or pelt. If that skin is lost or taken, the selkie is restricted to human form until it is recovered.
Sheelagh Russell Brown’s use of the old tale “The Selkie that deud no’ Forget”, originally published by the Walter Traill Dennison in 1880, is a classic and effective use of a ‘tale within a tale’, in this case providing a brilliant foil to grief-stricken parents to heart-breaking effect.
Brian O’Sullivan
In a Small Pond
Marc McEntegart
Around sunset, the boy would come to find the old man fishing in the pool, the day’s catch lying in the cool black earth of its bank. The boy would gather up the fish and the two would make their way back to the tumbledown cottage. There, they would eat the fish while the aging poet Finnegas taught the boy Fionn as best he could.
The two spent their daytime hours apart, the boy tending to the house and occasionally snaring a rabbit, while the poet continued his quest for knowledge. By night, Finnegas would sing him the old poems and Fionn would ask questions about the world around them.
Though she had never seen these things, she knew them to be true, because she knew all there was to know.
When they had first met, the poet had refused to take Fionn in, his days being full already with his fishing in the hope of ultimate wisdom. Indeed, the two had met in the poet’s house and its state of sorry disarray was evident from the loose sheafs of paper littering every available surface. The old man would have turned him away, had the boy not offered to guarantee the smooth running of his home in exchange for an education. They shook on it over the yellowing pages of some abandoned verse, and Fionn agreed to facilitate the old man’s quest for the salmon of knowledge.
As their months together became years, Fionn’s mind sharpened. From time to time, he would ask questions that the sagely poet could not answer. At first, they were the simple and direct questions that only a child would think to ask, but as he grew he would pose problems to which the poet could not put his mind. In those cases, Finnegas would smile and make a note of the boy’s question, sure that the day would come when he would answer them all.
Once, the boy had watched him add a question to the stack of unanswerables and asked, ‘And how do you know the salmon of knowledge is real?’
The poet gave him a sympathetic look and said, ‘I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen him myself, boy, large as life.’
She knew this, because she knew all there was to know.
Isolated from the flow of the river proper, she had circled her pool for long years without change. The sun would slide across the sky each day, the moon each night, and by and by the seasons would pass. Summers would give way to autumns with red-brown leaves drifting on the water’s surface, until the first freeze of winter pinned them in place. The darkness of winter would give way to the lightness of summer like night to day.
With the weight of her accumulated wisdom came the understanding that, as long as she lived, she would remain in her pool by the Boyne. For her, there would be no long, against-the-current struggle to where she was spawned. She would lay no eggs before she died, she would have no successor. The world would know only one salmon of knowledge.
When the poet first arrived, she had found him a tremendous novelty. She would wait each morning to see him approach, his silhouette a welcome change among the reeds that surrounded her pool. Before long, though, he had become just another part of the too-familiar pattern. Just before dawn each morning, his lure would appear on the water, and she would watch it as it twitched above the pool.
As the sun rose, its light would touch the lure before it reached into the water. For a few short seconds, that twist of shining feathers
suspended just on the surface was seductive even to her. Many fish had snapped at it only to find themselves snagged, tugged struggling from the safety of the pool.
She knew that she would one day follow them.
She knew too that, each morning, Finnegas would watch her while she eyed the lure, his eyes as round and unblinking as her own. He’d watch until the sunlight pierced the pool, when she’d twist and disappear into the depths, the morning sunshine gleaming along her flank. That momentary sheen of sun on scale was her lure, her guarantee that he would come back the following day.
Though he had been young and strong when his search for ultimate wisdom began, she had watched grey creep into his hair and a bend make its way up his back. She had watched his skin tan and crack over long years in the elements. Where once he had stood tall and proud, he had been eaten away by his hunger for her. He had confined himself for too long to this short stretch of the Boyne.
She knew enough of the world to know that her wisdom would die with him on the banks of the Boyne. He would continue to compose poetry, and sing it to any who happened upon him, but he would do so alone. For all the wisdom in the world, Finnegas would father no children, would have no successor. He could no more leave his pool than she could hers.
But even the boy Fionn would leave him one day, and in that there was the hope that some part of her might survive to see something more than the same rock and water, the same sunrises and seasons. At length, she began to form a plan, for even with all the knowledge in the world a salmon is not naturally inclined to planning. Her plan would require her to wait until the day was right. She would need it to be cold for the old man to leave the boy alone while the she cooked.
Everything would need to be just so, but she had time, she had waited before and she would know when the time was right.
It happened on a crisp November morning, the sun cool and hugging the horizon, the first freeze of the season just visible at the top of her pool. The sunshine highlighted the soft edges of the ice at the banks as she stared up at the lure and knew that today would be the day that she would bite. The lure filled her vision as she breached the surface, the brilliant yellow of its feather not quite covering the gleam of the hook.
The old poet carried his prize home held high over his head, the salmon still wriggling as he carried it aloft, an instinct that all the knowledge in the world could not smother. When he returned to the tiny cottage he shared with the boy, Fionn was sweeping the floor. At the sound of the door, he looked up to see Finnegas triumphant, the enormous fish held aloft.
‘Stoke the fire, lad. Today’s the day.’
The boy set to work as Finnegas gutted the fish, stacking more firewood on the hearth and setting the spit in place. When the old poet was done, his hands trembling, he set the fish on the spit and looked his student in the eye, ‘Fionn, winter’s closing in and it looks like being a long day, we’ll need more firewood. For all the care I’ve given you, promise me you won’t eat any part of this salmon before I return.’
The boy gave a solemn nod. After his master had left, he turned the spit steadily until the fish began to crackle. Obedient to a fault, he didn’t flinch from his task until the skin began to crack and spit, sending a thin jet of fat onto his thumb. Reflexively, he raised it to his mouth to soothe the burn, and all at once received a flash of brilliant insight, a hundred thousand thoughts and memories came crashing in on him. He reeled as he felt the world expand around him in every direction. Numb with realisation, his left hand continued to turn the spit.
There are those who will tell you that when Finnegas returned, he saw the light of wisdom on Fionn’s face, and knew immediately what had transpired. As it happened, the search for firewood took longer than expected. When the poet returned, Fionn had had the time to pull himself together. He had prepared the fish for the older man and laid it on the table, seasoned with a little salt and the few herbs that had survived into winter.
When Finnegas was ready, he sat and began to eat, and as he ate the boy sat opposite him and asked, ‘Finnegas?’
‘Yes?’
‘If the salmon of knowledge knew all that there is to know…’
‘Yes?’
‘Then she knew about fishermen, knew about you…’
‘Yes?’
‘Why would she ever take the bait?’
Smiling, the poet chewed and stared down at his plate as he searched his mind for the answer, but his face fell as he found that he had no response for the boy. With the silence stretching between them, he realised that Fionn wasn’t waiting for an answer, wasn’t even looking at him. Instead, his student’s eyes were fixed on the tabletop between them, an uncharacteristically morose expression on his face.
Fionn had expected the older man to be furious, but instead he seemed to sag, withering under the weight of the realisation. Shaking his head, Finnegas slid his plate across the table and bade the boy eat the remainder of the salmon. While the boy ate, Finnegas stood and walked about the room, packing the boy’s few small belongings into an old leather pack. When Fionn had finished, the old man handed him the bundle and sent him out into the cool air of early evening.
With the gloom of twilight closing in and his breath misting in front of him, Fionn lifted his thumb to his mouth and once again knew all that there was to know, all there ever was, and much that might once have been. With eyes open wide and round, he inspected the few yellow-brown leaves still on the trees, plucking one and turning it this way and that.
He shut his eyes and listened to the distant gurgle and suck of the Boyne, knowing how it looked and sounded from below, how it felt to twist and turn in the water. He knew the rush of water over fins and gills, knew what it was to spend long years alone, knew how it felt to have longed to be something more.
He looked back at the cottage that he had shared with Finnegas. At the thought of him, Fionn remembered what it was like to twist and writhe in the old poet’s hands, coarse fingers against his scales as he struggled for life. He knew with a chilling certainty that he would never again meet the old man.
The part of him that was still a boy pulled his thumb from his mouth. As the tide of knowledge receded, he could almost forget what it was to know all there was to know, could almost forget what it was to have been a fish, could almost forget what it was like to have spent lifetimes alone beneath the surface of a pool by the Boyne.
He felt the familiarity of the place closing in on him then, the cottage, the wind in the trees, and the pool by the river all too much, a little too close to home. He hitched up his pack and started walking. He didn’t pick a direction.
He knew it wouldn’t matter. He knew where he was going, because he knew all there was to know.
Mythological Context: The Salmon of Knowledge
Of all the Fenian Cycle tales, the story of Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge has generally remained, if not the most preferred, then certainly the most well known. Believed to date from the tenth century, the earliest remaining version of the tale is found in the twelfth century text Macgnímartha Find (the Boyhood Deeds of Fionn). A section of that text outlines how a seven-year old Fionn, named Demne in the text, goes to the Boyne to learn the skills of a poet from the poet/druid Finnegas and the subsequent events that occur there. Marc McEntegart’s version of this ancient tale is unique in that he doesn’t use the perspective of Fionn or Finnegas – normally, the two principal characters – to tell the story. Instead, he focuses on the Salmon of Knowledge itself which gives those subsequent events an epic, almost timeless quality.
Tradition has it that the well of Seghais, the source of the River Boyne, was encircled by hazel trees that dropped their nuts (often used by our ancestors as a metaphor for wisdom) into the water. These floated downriver where they were eaten by a salmon that, by consuming the nuts, absorbed all the wisdom and knowledge of the hazel trees.
At heart, the Salmon of Knowledge story in the Fenian Cycle seems quite a simple one but in fact there are layers withi
n it. The name of the poet/druid Finnegas (or Finnéices) for example, literally means ‘Fionn the Seer’ which is far too odd to be sheer coincidence and, possibly, refers to Fionn himself as an older and wiser man. The core theme of the story, meanwhile – a hero’s acquisition of esoteric or forbidden knowledge through the consumption of magical food – is one that’s found among the mythology of many different cultures. Welsh mythology has a very similar version outlined in Historia Taliesin (The Tale of Taliesin) which describes how the early Brythonic poet Taliesin (Gwion Bach in the story) acquired the gift of knowledge by stealing three magic drops from Cerodwen’s cauldron.
Similarly, in Norse mythology there’s a version of the story where the legendary hero Sigurd, having killed a dragon, is asked by his comrade Regin to roast the dragon’s heart. While Sigurd is carrying out this task, a sudden spurt of blood from the heart burns his thumb and, putting it into his mouth to cool it, he finds he’s received the knowledge to understand the speech of birds. Afterwards, when he eats the dragon heart he gains the gift of ‘prophesy’, just as Fionn does.
If you look at one of the creation stories in the Book of Genesis, of course, you’ll also find that similar pattern where Eve takes a bite out of the apple from the forbidden tree of knowledge. It just goes to show how old stories often hide many truths that go deeper than the literal ones.
Brian O’Sullivan
Lir
Coral Atkinson
You can hate me if you choose; most folk do. I’m the one that did the deed, the wicked stepmother who deserved what she got.
The storytellers and harpists spread it about that I’m dead. A convenient falsehood that discourages gossip, so I don’t dispute their silly lie. No one recognises me now, or remembers that the ancient hag in the black shawl mumbling among the rocks was ever young.
The Celtic Mythology Collection 2016 Page 3