The Fenian Cycle
The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn
Macgnímartha Finn
A druid and a warrior woman hide a hunted boy in the woods. Years later a poet on the Boyne gives him a salmon to cook, and tells him not to taste it.
I The Battle of Cnucha
Before there was any Fionn, there was his father.
Cumhall son of Trénmór was a man of the Fianna, the roving bands that lived by hunting and fighting in the wild places of Ireland. He wanted to lead them, and so did Urgriu of the Luagni, and a quarrel like that is settled only one way. Cumhall had a wife by then: Muirne of the fair neck.
They met in battle at Cnucha, west of where Dublin stands now. With Urgriu came Daire the Red, whose other name was Morna Wryneck, and Daire’s son Áed. In the thick of the fighting a warrior called Luchet came against Áed and wounded him, and put out one of his eyes. From that day Áed was called Goll, the one-eyed. 1 Goll killed Luchet.
Then the battle turned against Cumhall. The man who kept his treasure-bag wounded him. And Goll mac Morna killed him, and stripped him of his spoils, and carried off his head.
That was the root of the feud between Fionn and the sons of Morna, handed down from father to son like a sword.
And Fionn was not yet born. When Cumhall fell, Muirne was carrying his child.
II The Hunting-Booth
Muirne bore a son, and his name was Demne.
She dared not keep him with her. So two women came and took the child away: Bodhmall, who was a druid, and Liath Luachra, the Grey One of Luachair. Both were warrior women. They carried him into the forest of Sliabh Bladhma, the Slieve Bloom mountains, and there they reared him in secret for a long time.
They had need of the secrecy. Many a hard young fighter of the Luagni and of the sons of Morna was lying in wait for that boy, and for Tulcha, another son of Cumhall’s.
Six years went by before his mother came to see him. She found the hunting-booth among the trees, and the boy asleep in it. She lifted him to her breast and held him close. She was carrying another child by then. And as she held him she made verses over him, a suantraí, a sleep-song:
Sleep in peaceful slumber... 2
Then she turned to the two women. Keep him, she said, until he is fit to be a fighter.
She went away again, and the boy grew on in the forest until he was fit to hunt.
III The First Chase
One day the boy went out alone and saw wild ducks on a lake. He let fly among them, and his cast cut the feathers and the wings from one, so that a trance fell on her. He took her up and carried her home to the hunting-booth.
That was Fionn’s first chase.
After that he went off with a band of travelling craftsmen, to keep out of the way of the sons of Morna, and he hid with them about Crotta. Their names were Futh and Ruth, Regna, Temle, Olpe and Rogein. His head broke out in scabs among them and his hair fell out, so that for a while he was called Demne Máel, Demne the Bald.
In those days there was a reaver in Leinster, Fiacail son of Codna. He fell on the craftsmen and killed every one of them but Demne. And Demne lived with him after that, at Sescenn Uairbeóil, in the house of the man who had killed his companions, until the two women came south looking for him and took him home.
IV The Name
Afterwards he went off by himself to Mag Life, the plain of the Liffey, and came to a fort there. The boys of the fort were hurling on the green in front of it, and Demne went in and played against them.
He came back the next day. They set a quarter of their number against him, and he beat them. They set a third of their number against him, and he beat them. At last they all went against him together, and he won his game from them all.
What’s your name? they asked him.
Demne, he told them.
The man of the fort heard of it. Then kill him, said he, if you know how, and if you’re able.
We couldn’t do a thing to him, they said.
What does he look like?
A shapely lad, they said. Fair. Fionn.
Then Demne will be called Fionn, said the man of the fort. And from then on the boys called him Fionn.
The next day he came back to play, and they all threw their hurleys at him at once. He turned among them and threw seven of them to the ground, and went off into the forest of Sliabh Bladhma.
A week later he came back. The boys were swimming in a lake near the fort. Come in, they called to him, and try to drown us. He leapt in among them, and drowned nine of them in that lake, and went back to Sliabh Bladhma.
Who drowned the boys? people asked.
Fionn, they were told. And that name held.
V Go From Us Now
One day he was crossing Sliabh Bladhma with the two women, and they saw a fleet herd of wild deer on the ridge of the mountain, against the sky.
Alas, said the old women, that we can’t lay hold of one of those.
I can, said Fionn.
He ran at the herd and laid hold of two bucks, and brought them home to the hunting-booth. After that he did the hunting for the women, always.
But no forest could hide him for ever. Go from us now, lad, the women said at last. The sons of Morna are watching to kill you.
So he went off alone, far into the south-west, to Loch Léin above Luachair. He took service there with the king of Bantry, and did not say who he was. There was not a hunter to equal him in those days, and the king saw it.
If Cumhall had left a son, the king said to him, a man would think it was you. But we never heard that Cumhall left any son except Tulcha.
VI The Sow Called the Beo
He went on to the country that is called Kerry today, and took service with its king. One day the king sat down to play fidchell. Fionn prompted him at the board, and the king won seven games, one after another.
Who are you? said the king.
The son of a peasant of the Luagni of Tara, said Fionn.
No, said the king. You are the son that Muirne bore to Cumhall. Don’t stay here any longer, or you will be killed while you are under my protection.
So Fionn went to Cullen of the Uí Cuanach, to the house of Lochán, a chief smith. Lochán had a daughter, Cruithne, a very beautiful girl, and she fell in love with the young man.
I’ll give you my daughter, said Lochán, though I don’t know who you are.
Make me spears, said Fionn, and the smith made him two.
When Fionn was setting out, Lochán gave him a warning. Don’t go by the road where the sow is, he said, the one they call the Beo. She has laid waste the middle of Munster.
Fionn met the sow all the same. He thrust his spear at her so that it went right through her, and he brought her head back to the smith as a bride-gift for his daughter. That is why there is a Slieve Muck in Munster: the Pig’s Mountain.
Then he went on towards Connacht, to look for Crimall, his father’s brother.
VII The Treasure-Bag
On the road he heard a woman keening, and went to find her. She was weeping tears of blood, and then blood came in a gush, so that her mouth was red with it.
My only son is dead, she told him. Glonda. A tall warrior killed him.
Fionn went after the warrior, and they fought, and the warrior fell. He had a bag with him: the treasure-bag, the corrbolg, with the treasures of Cumhall in it. 3 And the man who lay there was the Grey One of Luachair, who had given Cumhall his first wound at Cnucha. 4
Fionn went on into Connacht and found Crimall there, an old man now, living in a wild wood with a band of old Fianna men who did his hunting for him. Fionn showed him the bag, and told him his whole story from beginning to end, and how he had killed the man who carried it.
He could not stay, even so. He dared not live in Ireland at all, the old text says, unless he took up poetry, for fear of the sons of Urgriu and the sons of Morna. So he went to the Boyne, to learn poetry from Finnéces.
VIII Linn Féic
Finnéces had been seven years on the Boyne, watching the salmon of Linn Féic, Féc’s Pool. It had been foretold to him that he would eat the salmon of Féc, and after that nothing would be unknown to him. 5 Seven winters and seven summers he watched one pool for it: the bradán feasa, the salmon of knowledge.
At last the salmon was found, and the poet gave it to the boy to cook. Cook it, he said, and don’t eat any of it.
The boy cooked it and brought it to him.
Have you eaten any of the salmon, lad? said Finnéces.
No, said the boy. But I burned my thumb, and put it in my mouth afterwards.
What is your name, lad?
Demne, said the boy.
Then Fionn is your name, lad, said Finnéces, and it was to you the salmon was given to be eaten. You are the Fionn.
It was the second time that name had been given to him. The boy ate the salmon then, and that is what gave Fionn his knowledge. After that, whenever he put his thumb in his mouth and sang, whatever he had not known was shown to him. 6 He learned the three arts that make a poet. And then he made this lay, to prove his poetry:
May-day, season surpassing!
Splendid is colour then.
Blackbirds sing a full lay,
if there be a slender shaft of day. 7
It was the first of his poems. There would be many more, and a lifetime of hunting besides, with the Fianna of Ireland at his back and a white fort of his own on Almu in Leinster. 8 And all his life, when he wanted to know what was coming, he put his thumb in his mouth. Centuries later he is still doing it, in a fireside tale from Tyrone.
What the tale keeps
A boy whose father was dead before he was born, hidden in the woods by two women and fed on what he could run down. The land reared him before any poet did: a lake with wild duck on it, a ridge where the deer ran, a pool on the Boyne.
A poet waited seven years for the salmon, and its knowledge went to the boy who cooked it. The tale does not say why. And when all that knowing came into him at once, the first thing he made of it was a song for May: blackbirds singing if there be a slender shaft of day, the cuckoo calling out its welcome to summer. Of everything there was to know, that came first.
Notes
- “Luchet wounded Aed, and destroyed one of his eyes, whence the name of Goll, (i.e. the One-eyed) clave to him from that time forth.” (Kuno Meyer, “The Boyish Exploits of Finn”, Ériu 1, 1904) ↩
- The manuscript gives only the first line of Muirne’s verses, “Sleep in peaceful slumber”, and then “etc.” (Meyer, 1904). The rest is not written down. Lady Gregory’s retelling (1904) calls it “a little sleepy song”. ↩
- Meyer translates corrbolg as “treasure-bag”. It is the same word as Manannán’s Crane Bag, and Lady Gregory’s retelling (1904) makes them one bag: “it went from Manannan to Lugh, son of Ethlinn, and after that to Cumhal”. Meyer’s text does not say so. ↩
- The text gives the same name, the Grey One of Luachair, in Liath Luachra, both to the woman who reared Fionn and to this man who struck Cumhall first at Cnucha. It never explains why. ↩
- “Seven years Finnéces had been on the Boyne, watching the salmon of Fec’s Pool; for it had been prophesied of him that he would eat the salmon of Féc, when nothing would remain unknown to him.” (Meyer, 1904) The text does not say where on the Boyne the pool was. Finnegas, the name in many modern retellings, is a later form of Finnéces. ↩
- Knowledge came to him “whenever he put his thumb into his mouth and sang through teinm láida, then whatever he had been ignorant of would be revealed to him.” The three arts are “teinm láida, imbas forosna, and dichetul dichennaib”; Meyer leaves all three in Irish. (Meyer, 1904) ↩
- The opening of the poem in Kuno Meyer’s translation (Ériu 1, 1904); the Irish begins Cettemain, cain ree. The text says only that Fionn made the lay “to prove his poetry”. Calling it his first poem is our reading. ↩
- The Dindshenchas poem on Almu calls it “a fort of the Fians”. Nuada the druid built it, the poem says, and rubbed alum over the whole fort until it was white, “as if it had received the lime of all Erin”. (The Metrical Dindshenchas, ed. Edward Gwynn, 1906) ↩
Where the tale comes from
Medieval manuscript. A Middle Irish prose tale, probably of the 12th century. It survives in a 15th-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and breaks off unfinished.
- The tale survives in Bodleian Library MS Laud 610, a manuscript written in the 15th century. Scholars date the text itself to the 12th century. John O’Donovan published a translation in 1859; Kuno Meyer edited the Irish text in the Revue Celtique (1882) and translated it again as “The Boyish Exploits of Finn” (Ériu, 1904).
- Like nearly all the old tales, it was set down by Christian scholars long after the conversion. Even so, it names the poet’s arts of knowledge plainly, as the things that make a poet.
- After the May-day poem the text runs on. Fionn learns more poetry from Cethern son of Fintan. On Samhain night, sitting between the two Paps of Anu, he sees the mounds of the sídhe standing open with fires inside, and a spear he casts kills Aed son of Fidga. Later, near Slieve Slanga, he snatches a brooch from a woman of the síd, and there the manuscript breaks off, in the middle of a sentence.
- Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men (1904) weaves this tale together with others. Her poet is Finegas, living on the Boinn; a blister rises on the salmon’s skin, and the boy burns his thumb pressing it down. Meyer’s text has no blister.
- The Dindshenchas poem on Almu tells what came before and after. Cumhall had carried Muirne off by force from her father, Tadg; and when Fionn was grown he demanded a price from Tadg for his father’s death. Tadg would not face him in battle, and “abandoned to him all Almu as it stood”.
Sources
- "The Boyish Exploits of Finn", Ériu 1 (1904) · Kuno Meyer
- The Metrical Dindshenchas: "Almu I" and "Almu II" · ed. Edward Gwynn (1906), via CELT
- Gods and Fighting Men · Lady Gregory (1904)
- Placenames Database of Ireland · logainm.ie