Fionn and the Giant’s Causeway

I The House on Knockmany

This is a fireside tale, and it has been told many ways. Here it is as William Carleton wrote it down in 1845, with the old voices still in it. ¹

Fionn mac Cumhaill and his wife Oonagh lived on the very top of Knockmany, in Tyrone. It was a windy place with hardly a drop of water, and Fionn chose it for one reason: from the top he could see anyone coming. There was one man he was always watching for.

In those days Fionn and his giants were at work on the Causeway, a road of stone out across the sea to Scotland. But word came to him at the work that Cucullin was looking for him. Cucullin, who with one blow of his fist had flattened a thunderbolt into the shape of a pancake, and kept it in his pocket to show his enemies. Cucullin, who had beaten every giant in Ireland but one.

Fionn was the one. He went home to Knockmany in a hurry.

II Oonagh’s Charm

At home Fionn put his thumb in his mouth, the way he always did when he wanted to know what was coming. ² He knew. Cucullin was on his way to Knockmany.

Oonagh did not waste any time being afraid. She drew out nine woollen threads, each a different colour, and plaited them into three plaits of three colours. One she tied round her right arm, one round her heart, and one round her right ankle. After that, the tellers say, nothing she set her hand to could fail.

Then she went round the neighbours and borrowed twenty-one iron griddles. She kneaded twenty-one cakes of bread and baked a griddle into the heart of each one. She put by a lump of soft white curds. And she dressed her husband up as a baby and tucked him into the cradle.

Lie there, she told him. Say nothing, and do what I tell you.

III The Visitor

Cucullin came up the hill like weather. Is this where Fionn mac Cumhaill lives? he asked.

It is, said Oonagh. But he’s away at the Causeway. A giant called Cucullin has been looking for him, and Fionn has gone out to find him. God help that man when he does.

Cucullin said nothing to that.

While you’re here, said Oonagh, would you do me a turn? The wind is blowing straight in the door, and Fionn always turns the house round when it does. So Cucullin pulled the middle finger of his right hand until it cracked three times, went out, and turned the house to face the other way. In the cradle Fionn felt the sweat break out on him.

And we’re short of water up here, said Oonagh. Cucullin cracked his finger again, and tore the rock of the hill open. The cleft is there still, and people call it Lumford’s Glen.

Then Oonagh sat him down to eat.

IV Bread and Stone

She set a cake in front of him. He bit into it and roared: he had broken his teeth on it. That’s the bread Fionn eats, said Oonagh, mild as milk. The child in the cradle eats it too. She gave him another, and he broke more teeth.

Then she gave the child in the cradle a cake of his own, one without any iron in it, and the child ate it down.

Cucullin looked at that child for a long time.

He picked up a white stone and squeezed it, to show what he could do. Not a drop came out of it. Let the child try, said Oonagh, and she slipped the soft white curds into Fionn’s hand. Fionn squeezed until the whey ran out between his fingers.

I’d like, said Cucullin slowly, to feel the teeth of a child who can eat bread like that.

So he put his finger into the child’s mouth: the middle finger of his right hand, where all his strength lay. And Fionn bit it off. ³

Every bit of Cucullin’s strength went out of him at once, like water from a broken jug. He fell, and he never rose again, and that was the end of the giant who had flattened the thunderbolt.

V The Other Endings

Walk the Causeway today and you may hear it told another way. In that telling the giant is a Scot called Benandonner, and Fionn loses his nerve when he sees the size of him striding over the stones. Oonagh puts Fionn in the cradle. Benandonner looks at the baby, imagines the father, and runs for home, tearing up the causeway behind him so that Fionn can never follow. All that is left are the stepping-stones at either end: here in Antrim, and across the water at Fingal’s Cave on Staffa.

That ending is younger than it looks. The name Benandonner turns up in print in 1832, in the Dublin Penny Journal, in the mouth of an Antrim farmer. In his version Fionn got leave from King Cormac to build a causeway to Scotland so that the bragging Scot could come over and be beaten, and Benandonner was beaten, and settled in Ireland, and married. In Patrick Kennedy’s collection of 1866 the Scottish giant, Far Rua, goes home across the causeway without breaking it. We have not found a nineteenth-century source for the torn-up road. ⁴

Fionn was not finished with the landscape, either. Chasing a red-haired Scottish giant one day, Kennedy says, he tore up rocks and clay and heaved them after him. The whole mass overshot and fell into the sea and became the Isle of Man, and the hollow it left filled with water and became Lough Neagh.