SOURCE: "The Myth of Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish Literature," in Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 1-36.

[In the following essay, MacKillop studies the long and varied tradition surrounding the Irish mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill.]

Although the English people had shared the British Isles with several Celtic peoples for fourteen centuries, English writers, by and large, did not discover the Celtic world until the sensational success in the 1760s of James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, a bogus rendering of Scottish Gaelic ballads. Despite a critical rebuke from Dr. Johnson and much general controversy over their authenticity, the poems were widely read all over Europe and provided an introduction to Celtic literature for a score of important poets, critics, and tastemakers, including such diverse talents as Goethe, Blake, James Fenimore Cooper, and Matthew Arnold. Not many were taken by the intrinsic art of the poems; after all, Macpherson always described himself as a translator and virtually no one knew the language of the original. That they could be read at all was cause for celebration. Best of all for Macpherson's fortunes, Ossian appeared in the midst of a general European fashion for the primitive and ancient. In them, the reader could seize a literary tradition that had survived among somewhat backward people living on the fringes of modern society, a tradition so archaic that it provided a link between the present and the time of Homer.

The Poems was ascribed to Ossian because so many of the ballads Macpherson employed were composed in the persona of Oisín or Ossian, an old Celtic warrior and poet who sang the glories of a world recently lost to him. The most frequent subject of the poems, as Macpherson "translated" them, was Fingal, Ossian's father. In subsequent decades Fingal and Ossian would become widely celebrated figures in European literature, as would Ossian's son, the noble Oscar, whose name, for example, would be given to more than a half-dozen members of Scandinavian royal houses.

The Fingal of Macpherson's Ossian was based on a figure of traditional Gaelic literature, Fionn mac Cumhaill … [There] was some confusion in the minds of Macpherson and his contemporaries about the relationship of the Irish and Scottish Gaelic languages, and thus many early commentators, no matter what they felt about Macpherson's "authenticity," thought that there should be a distinction drawn between the Scottish Fingal and the Irish Fionn. The desire of scholars to know the background of the Macpherson question helped to lead to the development, especially in France and Germany, of the academic study of the Celtic languages. By the end of the nineteenth century a sufficient number of manuscripts had been edited and translated to demolish the pretensions of Macpherson and, more importantly, to give the rest of the Western world an understanding of the extent, complexity, and beauty of literature in the Celtic languages. Most of the effort in this first chapter will be to determine just what kind of character Fionn was in Irish and Scottish Gaelic literature so we can understand what transformations he underwent as he became a figure in English literature.

The two centuries of scholarship since the time of Macpherson have also given us a better understanding of the relationship between Celtic and English literature. Although the Celtic languages provide a paucity of loan words to English, we now know that there has been a steady transmission of Celtic themes and characters into English literature since early medieval times.… [The] archetype of Fionn mac Cumhaill is one of the many from Irish and Welsh literatures which have been adapted in the Arthurian legends. As far as we know, Fionn first appeared in English literature under his own name in John Barbour's Lallans dialect The Bruce (c. 1375). In the next four hundred years, until the coming of Macpherson, Fionn appeared in a large number of English chronicles and pseudo-histories and also in a number of works of imaginative literature.… With the rise of English-language literature in Ireland, beginning in the early nineteenth century, we find almost a hundred depictions of Fionn mac Cumhaill.…

The suggestion that the disconnected narratives of Fionn mac Cumhaill and his Fianna constitute a mythology would undoubtedly seem a presumption to many modern readers, especially to the Irish, most of whom know him through the storytellers among their country cousins in the Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking areas. For them the "tale" or "legend" of Fionn might seem more suitable. Even academics, usually more tolerant of presumption, may balk, more because of their concern for the current debasement of the word "myth." In a much-cited passage of Hero With a Thousand Faces (1956), Joseph Campbell summarizes seven different definitions used in mid-century academia, many of which are not only mutually exclusive but contradictory as well. Because the present study is investigative and not polemical, I shall not seek to use one theory or definition against another but rather try to limit myself to the definitions of myth which have been used in the study of traditional literature.

In the eighteenth century, when the study of traditional literature began and the only traditional literature anyone studied was that of ancient Greece, the entire matter was much easier to handle. In the divisions of Greek literature made during the generation of Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1810) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), "mythology" dealt with the origin of the world and of many, the vicissitudes of vegetation, weather, eclipses, the discovery of fire, and the mystery of death. Under this generalized definition, myth is distinct from legend in that the latter deals with figures people thought to have been historical, who may indeed have been, although their deeds are most likely invented or exaggerated. "Folktales" are purely imaginary and have no other aim than pure entertainment and thus make no real claim to credibility. All the stories of the Titans and the Olympians are therefore myths, from the narratives of creation found in Hesiod's Theogony to the romances of the gods, even those incorporating scandal such as the one describing Zeus's pederasty with Ganymede. The love of the non-Olympian Orpheus, on the other hand, may have been legendary, and the amatory and military conquests of King Theseus of Athens are more probably legendary. Many of the adventures of Odysseus, sometimes called myth because they are ancient, are actually folktales. The distinction is carried forth by Sir James Frazer and is given tacit support by such contemporary critics of myth as Northrop Frye. One of Frye's more succinct definitions of myth is "a story in which some of the chief characters are gods" [Fables of Identity, 1963].

Under the strictest application of the criteria drawn from Heyne and Herder, it is difficult to argue that there is any surviving body of Celtic mythology at all. The prohibition against putting sacred beliefs in writing in Druidic mystery cults, coupled with early Christianization (fifth century), which sought to destroy profane "pagan" texts, has denied us the hope of finding a Celtic text with a picture of belief comparable to what we find in Hesiod's Theogony. This is not to suggest that there was never a Celtic religion or mythology; the handful of studies of Celtic mythology and religion are based largely on archeological artifacts and interpolations and extrapolations of contemporary texts from Roman and Greek authors. Thus in speaking of Celtic gods we do not know if they were anthropomorphic personalities like the Greek, mere numina like the Roman, or something much less. Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, in Gods and Heroes of the Celts, remarks that it is often difficult to distinguish between gods and heroes in early Celtic narratives, apparently because the dichotomy between mortals and immortals, an importation from the Mediterranean world, was not always honored by Celtic storytellers of different centuries, especially after Christianization.

Unquestionably, many storytellers have considered Fionn not only mortal but historical. This is a question considered more fully in the next chapter, but suffice it for the moment to say that a number of credulous, popular histories of Ireland, for example, Seumas MacManus' The Story of the Irish Race (1921), assert that Fionn is not the figment of anyone's imagination but a genuine historical personage. Among better-informed scholars the question of Fionn's historicity has not been seriously entertained since the late nineteenth century. What is significant in the Irish peasant's tenacious belief in Fionn's historicity is that the hero is usually portrayed as an immortal who always lives in the present. Even as late as 1969, E. Estyn Evans came upon a farmer in County Cavan who spoke of Fionn and his men in the present indicative. "He's not a giant," the man said. "He's only five-foot six."

Such evidence suggests that Fionn is much more than a character in folklore and is at least a legendary hero, similar in status to, say, King Arthur of Camelot. Before we can argue that Fionn is more than a mortal, we must consider the kind of evidence open to us. Traditional literature in Irish, as in other vernaculars, is of two modes, the written or "manuscript," transmitted by literate poets, storytellers, and scribes, and oral tradition, which is transmitted by the unlettered. The term "unlettered" did not carry the pejorative implications of being ignorant or uncouth in earlier centuries, especially in Ireland where there was a professional class of trained but illiterate story-tellers. As Gerard Murphy has pointed out in his Introduction to Volume III of Duanaire Finn (1953), the manuscript and oral traditions can be demonstrated to exist side by side in Irish at least since the eleventh century. The figure of Fionn mac Cumhaill is essentially the same in both, even though the different traditions usually portray different aspects of his personality. The question of which came first, oral or written, is still moot, even though it has been the subject of much scholarly dispute for more than one hundred and fifty years; abundant argument exists to support both sides of the question in Irish as well as in other vernaculars. The relevance of reviewing the two traditions here is that most of the support for the contention that Fionn had divine origin is found in manuscripts written by the learned class.

Quite a bit of scholar's ink has been spilled in the last hundred years on the question of Fionn's divinity. Although there is so little unambiguous evidence as to limit positive conclusions, the subject cannot be shrugged off. Our assumptions about Fionn's origins have much to do with the classifications of Fenian narratives. If Fionn were an historical figure, as uninformed popular opinion has long supposed, or if he were only an aggrandized figure from folk imagination, then perhaps the stories about him would best be classified as legends. But if the persona of Fionn includes elements of the supernatural, then contemporary scholarship is more justified in thinking of him as a mythical figure.

In many stories, admittedly, Fionn does not seem like a god. He cannot control the weather, travel through time, or bring fire. There are no surviving prayers in Fionn's honor, no incantations, shrines, or votive paraphernalia. On the other hand he has what appear to be divinities in his genealogy, he has magical powers to foretell the future, and he may be able to overcome death.

Some of the most persuasive arguments for Fionn's divinity were given by T. F. O'Rahilly in his landmark study, Early Irish History and Mythology (1946). In O'Rahilly's view Fionn was an anthropomorphized remnant of a Celtic god worshipped on the Continent and in the British Isles (pp. 271, 277-78). This same pre-Christian god was the original for the heroes of the other two cycles of Old Irish literature, Lugh Lamhfada and Cuchulainn. O'Rahilly's proposal has received wide acceptance from informed commentators but is based on linguistic and circumstantial evidence.

More compelling in O'Rahilly's discussion is Fionn's power of prophecy, which the hero can summon by chewing his thumb, an attribute he shares with Heracles, the Norse figure Sigurd, and the Welsh Taliesin. In a lengthy chapter devoted to prophecy and devination (pp. 318-40), O'Rahilly argues that Fionn was accorded the unique powers of imbas forosnai (roughly "foresight") and teinm laida (again, roughly, "break open the pith" or "superhuman intuition"). Within narratives Fionn wears his powers lightly. He does not exploit his gifts to win a high status in his society; instead, he is a leader among men because he excels at what all men can do—hunting and making poetry. When he does use his supernatural power, the effect is to disentangle him from a quandary or to free the narrative from an impasse. More significantly, Fionn's powers are the subject of debate between Patrick, when that saint becomes a figure in Fenian narrative, and the aged survivors of the Fianna, Oisīn and Caoilte. Saint Patrick forbids the practice of imbas forosnai and teinm laida in an evangelized Ireland. The old Fenians lament the passing of pagan Ireland and champion the generosity and heroism of Fionn's time as against the Christian present.

The most certain divinity of Fionn's genealogy is Nuadu Argetlám, or "Nuadu of the Silver Hand," described in manuscript literature as the king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the race of immortals who inhabited Ireland before the present generation of humanity arrived. Not only is Nuadu an immortal, but he is an Irish counterpart of the British god Nodons, whose cult flourished in Roman Britain and whose temple ruin may be found at Lydney Park, Gloucester. Nuadu's divinity does not automatically pass on to Fionn, of course, as many early historical Irish, including the entire Eóganacht federation of families in Munster, also claimed the same descent. This is little different from genealogies of ancient Greece in which a distinguished family, such as Erichthonius and his progeny of Athens, claimed descent from the virgin Athena.

A final indication of the residual belief in Fionn's divinity is his ability to overcome death. Fionn does face death, according to different stories, under different forms, a subject considered later in this chapter. Whether he faces death on the battlefield at the hands of many, or alone and slain by a single assassin, he is somehow taken away to a hidden place where he "sleeps" and will return to his people when he is needed. The same is true, of course, of such heroic figures as Arthur and Barbarossa, who are not perceived as gods. Folklorists classify such stories under the "Sleeping Warriors" or "Sleeping Army" motif, index number E502 in the Aarne-Thompson classification. The promise of Fionn's return found more reverence in the popular mind: there are more than thirty-five locations, in both Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, where Fionn and his men are supposed to be sleeping. Readers of Finnegans Wake will recognize that Joyce took a little-known Dublin variant of this motif to help structure that narrative. Joyce felt, as others have, that Fionn's ability to conquer death was not separate from the rest of his adventures.

Indeed, Fionn overcomes death in two identities, as himself, and also as Mongan, an Ulster petty king of the seventh century, described in the eighth-century narrative Imram Brain, "The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal" (edited by D. Nutt, 1895-97, vol. I, pp. 52; vol. II, pp. 6, 281). In a dispute with the court bard, Mongan allows himself to be portrayed as the reincarnated Fionn. The story is narrated by one of Mongan's warriors, alleging himself to be the reincarnated Caoilte. In the story Mongan/Fionn deals quickly with his enemies as, by implication, King Mongan will now.

The evidence when assembled does not prove Fionn's divinity, but it does suggest that if Fionn is not quite a god, he seems to be at least something more than a warrior-hunter-poet of a great mass of stories. Perhaps the safest judgment is that given by Alexander MacBain as long ago as 1894 [in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow], when the impact of modern anthropology was first felt on the study of mythology:

Fionn is, like Heracles, Theseus, Perseus, and other such persons of Greek Myth, a culture hero—probably originally a local deity raised to a national place. He is an incarnation of the chief diety of the race—the Mercury, whom Caesar tells us the Gauls worship—a god of literary and mercantile character. His grandson Oscar is a reflection of the war god, and other characters of the Fenian band no doubt correspond to the other personages of the Gaelic Olympus.

MacBain's analysis makes two points, one explicitly and other implicitly. The first is that Fionn compares with three great heroes of Greek mythology, all of them having some links to the divine. The second is the use of the term "culture hero," which is probably more apt to a Celtic context than in a Greek one. "Culture hero" was first used to describe figures in non-European mythology, such as the Coyote of California Indians or Gluskabe of those in the Northeast. Among the North American Indians there is not a clear demarcation between heroes and gods; a culture hero, whether worshipped or not, is distinct from others by the useful or good things he or she brings. Prometheus, for example, is a culture hero because he is a firebringer, not because he is a Titan. Among the Celts, too, there is no clear line between mortals and immortals. Fionn's status can be grasped by seeing that he is the center of an immense cycle of narratives, much as Heracles is. Fionn is a hunter, poet, seer, and warrior; for those who follow him, he is a benefactor. The persistence of his persona over more than a thousand years argues that his stories offered more than momentary diversion beside the turf fire.

Some questions about the accuracy of speaking of the "myth" of Fionn mac Cumhaill remain. Because the present study purports to say something about English literature, it should acknowledge that the word "myth" has acquired new implications since Joyce's Ulysses, Crane's The Bridge, or for that matter King Kong. Can the narratives of Fionn mac Cumhaill strike a response from our unconscious minds? Do they draw on a character who evokes a memory of the continuity of human experience? In short, do the stories of Fionn function as myth as well as meet the tests that distinguish myth from mere legend or folklore? They do. The stories of the Fenian Cycle are not only ancient and continuous but various as well. They embody supposed attributes of the Gaelic peoples: heroic, romantic, ribald, and even absurd. The working-out of these characteristics and values, over centuries and in different genres, is the labor of the next four chapters. A shorter route to the importance of Fionn as an embodiment of the unconsciously held value systems and beliefs of a suppressed nation is given to us by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. In it Fionn is among the first residents of the monomyth, the single narrative strand that unites all human experience.

Thus far we have established only the externals of the character of Fionn mac Cumhaill. We know he is a figure of traditional Irish literature, sufficiently widely known to be recognized in an allusion today, and we know there is good evidence he is derived from a Celtic god. Such information alone would hardly justify the attention we are giving him, so that it seems a fair question to ask, "Who is—or was—Fionn mac Cumhaill? What does he do that sets him apart from other figures in traditional literature?" The short answer to those questions is that he is the leading figure in one of the great epochs of Irish literature, the focus of several thousand narratives we have called the "Fenian Cycle." An outline of the development of Fionn's character, the major responsibility of this chapter, cannot begin without understanding the place the Fenian Cycle holds in Irish literature. For reasons to be considered later, many scholars prefer to call the cycle "Finnian," in part to denote Fionn's central role in it, or "Ossianic," to underscore Oisín's persona as narrator in many of the tales, especially those from oral tradition. The Fenian Cycle is one of four major branches of narrative in Irish secular literature. The other three are called "Invasions" or "Mythological Cycle," the "Red Branch" or "Ulster Cycle," and the "Cycle of the Kings."

Of the four cycles the "Mythological" is commonly judged to be the oldest. The titling of this cycle, which is sometimes also known as the "Invasions Cycle," indicates that it deals with the origins of Ireland, but it does not mean that the others are less "mythological." Many of the narratives here are pseudo-histories, dealing extensively with the five legendary invasions of Ireland as reconstructed in the Lebor Gabála, "The Book of Invasions." Characteristically, much of this cycle is taken up with the recitation of genealogies of rather implausible families (kings sired by animals, multi-armed and multi-headed warriors, etc.). As is so often the case with fabulous histories such as Hesiod's Works and Days, the men of earlier days appear to be the champions of glory whereas the men of the present appear to be witless, cowardly, and crude. It follows then that the leading figures of this cycle are not the victors of the fifth invasions, those humans called Milesians; instead, most of the stories concern the Túatha Dé Danaan, "the tribe of the goddess Danu," the immortals from the fourth invasion who linger to haunt the usually unimaginative, often hapless Milesians.

The narratives of the Ulster or "Red Branch" Cycle appear to be of later composition than the "Mythological" and are the best-known of all four to English readers, largely through the efforts of W. B. Yeats and his contemporaries. Much richer in character and episode than the earlier materials, the narratives of the Ulster Cycle are the product of disciplined court poets and storytellers. Yeats liked to think of them as "aristocratic" because of the patronage of the arts and education by such northerners as Ruaidhri Ó Conchubhair, "Rory O'Connor" (fl. 1169), who founded a center of learning in Armagh. "Aristocratic" may seem a misleading description compared to French tastes at the opening of Versailles, but Ulster had been the leading province of Ireland long before the English invasion (1170), and the Ulster families were among the most cultivated in Ireland down to the time of the Flight of the Earls and the Cromwellian plantations of the seventeenth century. The Ulster Cycle includes not only the stories of Cuchulainn and Deirdre but also the "Irish Iliad," Táin Bó Cuailnge.

The cycle usually listed third is the Fenian, about which more later, and the fourth is made up of those stories about more or less historical figures that do not fit in the earlier three. Myles Dillon categorized these remainders as the Cycles of the Kings, if "king" is not too grand a translation for the Irish ri, denoting petty chieftains who ruled families in different parts of Ireland. The most celebrated of these kings was Brian Boru, who defeated the Danes at Clontarf (A.D. 1014). Other authorities have argued that the stories of Brian and his family should be called the Dalcassian Cycle, after their narrative region in what is now County Clare.

The third cycle is usually called the "Fenian," although some informed commentators wince at the term. Despite the similarity of phonology, "Fenian" does not refer to Fionn at all but instead derives from a confusion of fini, denoting the oldest, purest, or aboriginal inhabitants of Ireland, and feinn, a variant of fiann/fianna, implying Fionn's band of merry men. There are many other fianna than Fionn's, however, and the very concept of an independent caste of warrior-hunters may be much older than Irish tradition, having antecedent in the Gaulish gaesatae as described by Polybius (second century B.C.) and Roman commentators. What makes the word "Fenian" much more unattractive is that it was coined (in 1804) by the scholarly charlatan, Colonel Charles Vallancey, a man who also argued that the Irish language was derived from Phoenician. Informed readers shunned the word, and it probably would have disappeared if not used by the Irish-American political leader, John O'Mahoney, who adopted "Fenian" for the Irish Republican Brotherhood about 1858. Perhaps because of its political associations, "Fenian" is a term many modern readers recognize easily. Like "Quaker" and "Jesuit," it has become the standard reference despite the implications of its origins.

Rival terms for the cycle are neither more authentic nor more descriptive. "Ossianic," for example, is a neologism derived from Macpherson's spelling of Oisín. At one time it was used to describe all the Irish literature that Macpherson pretended to translate; thus the first large-scale translations of early manuscripts were the Transactions of the Ossianic Society of Dublin, 1854-61. The term more accurately describes such works as the Agallamh na Senórach, "The Colloquy of the Elders," and subsequent ballad literature, beginning in the thirteenth century, in which Fenians surviving to the Christian era, usually Oisín or Caoilte, wrangle with Saint Patrick over the virtues of the old order.

As suggested earlier, the Fenian has been the most popular and widespread of all four cycles with Irish storytellers, in manuscript tradition and even more with unlettered storytellers. Alfred Nutt [in Ossian and the Ossianic Literature, 1910] suggested that as much as 60 percent of all Irish native fiction is from this cycle, and Fenian characters and themes are widely celebrated in lyric, chronicle, pseudo-history, and proverb. Narratives of Fionn and the Fianna have been recorded in all the counties of Ireland as well as in the other two parts of the trifurcated Goidelic branch of Celtic languages on the Isle of Man and throughout Gaelic Scotland. Several dozen place names, such as "Finn MacCool's Pebble," "—Fingerstone," "Fingals' Cave," can be found in many parts of both Ireland and Scotland. Likewise, virtually every dolmen in Ireland has been called "The Bed of Diarmaid and Grainne," though those primitive constructs, each a miniature Stonehenge, would be unsuited for sleep, much less lovemaking. John V. Kelleher has suggested that such mythological allusions in Irish place names have no more meaning than the many "Lover's Leaps" and "Devil's Washtubs" on the American map. But the preponderance of place names, such as the frequent naming of Fionn's seat of power at the Hill of Allen in Kildare, and great number of times in the narrative that Fionn's men are called the "Leinster Fianna," suggest that the homeland of the hero is somewhere along a line running southwest of Dublin from central Kildare to the Leinster/Munster border. Despite this, there is never anything regional about his characterization; the various aspects of his character do not appear to have any geographical pattern. And although different genre, different modes of transmission, and the passing centuries have wrought many changes in the particulars of Fionn's appearance, the archetype of the hero, as Gerard Murphy has demonstrated, is recognizably continuous throughout. This is not to say that the differences in Fionn's portrayals are not significant; indeed, charting and analyzing the changes in their presentations, especially as they appear in English literature, is the principal work at hand. Nevertheless, proceeding further, I want to stress that there is a discernible coherence and continuity in Fionn's character despite the disparity in his portrayal from one narrative to another.

Much of what gives Fionn's portrayal apparent stability through the thousands of narratives in which he performs is borrowed from the traditional European portrayal of kings, especially as they appear in fairy tale and romance. In common with unnumbered counterparts, Fionn is a brave warrior and leader of men, a stalwart defender of his country against all invaders, steadfast in battle and generous in victory. But there are distinctions in Fionn's kingship; he is the king only of his immediate followers, a rigihennid, and his power is nearly always represented as distinct from that of the ardrig, "high king," who is resident at Temhair, or Tara, northeast of what is today Dublin. When Fionn is a young hero the high king is Cormac mac Airt ("Son of Art"), with whom he maintains generally poor terms. Cormac, incidentally, has a much better claim to historicity than does Fionn. The high king during Fionn's maturity is Cairbre or Cairbri ("of the Liffey"), Cormac's son, whose enmity for Fionn and his men grows with every episode.

In his separation and later isolation from royal power in Ireland, Fionn distinguishes himself from his counterparts in the other Irish cycles, Lugh and Cuchulainn. The French Celticist, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, argued that Fionn's relegation to the countryside is what distinguished him most sharply from the more sophisticated hero, Cuchulainn. The myth of the Ulster hero is based on a heritage of an ordered society, of princes, scholars, and clerics, but the myth of Fionn derives from the men outside the tribe, the hunters, the woodsmen, and the soldiers-for-hire. Sjoestedt reminds us that the Fenian texts show that men are not born in the fianna; they acquire that status by choice and rigorous apprenticeship [Gods and Heroes of the Celts, 1949]. Lacking other scholarly conclusions about the fianna, she asserts that they were originally a band of men who lived by hunting and plunder, roving the countryside under the authority of their own leaders. They trained as hunters from May I to November 1, Bealtaine to Samhain, and quartered where they could in winter. In the eyes of what established authority there was, the fianna were indistinguishable from guerillas. They may have been Irish counterparts of the Norse berserkirs. As evidence she suggests that flan has cognates in Old High German, Slavonic, Avestic, and Sanskrit, in each instance with words merging the notions of hunting and warring (p. 83). Thus she thinks that the tales which portray the Fenian heroes as appointed defenders of their country against foreign invaders are of later origin. Although Sjoestedt did not know of his work, Reidar Christiansen, writing several years earlier, provided evidence for her thesis in The Vikings and the Viking Wars in Irish and Gaelic Tradition, where he demonstrated that the historical episodes from the Norse invasions had become imbedded in Fenian stories of much earlier provenience. Cuchulainn does not fight Norsemen because the Ulster Cycle represents a different concept of the hero which does not make allusion to the realities of the countryside. At his most exalted moment in Irish literature, in the Táin, Cuchulainn does battle with Queen Medb and her warriors to retain possession of the Great Brown Bull of Ulster, all figures whose reality is no more likely than his. The distinction in Sjoestedt's summary is that: "The myth of Cuchulainn is the myth of the tribal man, the exaltation of heroism as a social function. The myth of the fianna is the myth of man outside the tribe, the release of gratuitous heroism. These two concepts do not contradict each other, but form an opposition like thesis and antithesis, two complimentary aspects of the racial temperament" (p. 90). And although she spoke only for Celtic tradition, Sjoestedt is also describing the Fionn mac Cumhaill of English literature, especially as he has been recreated in twentieth-century fiction such as Finnegans Wake and At Swim-Two-Birds.

In the Introduction to Volume III of Duanaire Finn, perhaps the most sustained and considerable study of Fenian literature ever published, Gerard Murphy agrees that two of Fionn's primary roles are hunter and warrior, which is demonstrated both in manuscript and oral texts from several centuries. Murphy also argues that Fionn's role of seer is as much a part of his character over a comparable period of time, although this is less of a distinction since his power has analogues in the careers of Heracles, Sigurd, and Taliesin, as we have mentioned before. Fionn's power of devination comes from "chewing" his thumb, or placing it behind his upper teeth, a curious ritual which has been the subject of considerable speculation, including an entire book on the subject of Robert Douglas Scott [entitled The Thumb of Knowledge in Legends of Finn, Sigurd, and Taliesin, 1930]. A character chewing his thumb, not identified as Fionn, also appears on a number of large Celtic Crosses from the early Christian period, as Francoise Henry has observed [in Irish Art in the Early Christian Period to A.D. 800, 1965].

A more important distinction, as Murphy shows us, is Fionn's ability to slay Aillen, "the Burner." According to the most frequently repeated story, Aillen harasses Cormac's court at Tara every November I at Samhain. As in Beowulf, none of the royal retainers can defeat the super-human power until the hero arrives from a land beyond the realm. Aillen burns down the palace and so might be seen as a more formidable opponent than Grendel, but Fionn's power proves to be greater. Fortunately, Aillen is not avenged by his mother. Again as in the Anglo-Saxon narrative, the hero wins the esteem of the royal household but does not become a part of it.

Although the oldest texts of the Aillen motif date only from the twelfth century, closer investigation of even earlier texts reveals that Fionn's opponents are nonhuman personalities whose "name, nickname, known character, habits, or story connect them either with fire in general, or more definitely with the Burner" (p. Ixiii). For example, Fionn does battle with the three Fothadhs in a number of early romances, and further references to the Fothadhs, some of them highly ambiguous, can be found in narratives dating from as early as the seventh century. Although the Fothadhs are not always associated with fire in the narratives, an eleventh-century etymology of their name, viz. fi-aeda, i.e., "venom of fire," includes a description of them which translates, "They were a virulent fire in destroying clans and races." The genealogy of the Fothadhs includes, first, their father, Daire Derg, or Daire the Red, and their grandfather, Gnathaltach, whose epithet is daig garg, "fierce flame." The family line leads back ultimately to Nuadu, who is, coincidentally, Fionn's ancestor.

Another enemy of Fionn, who appears only in very early texts such as "Fionn and the Man in the Tree," is Dearg Corra moucu Dhaighre, whose name Murphy translates as "Red One of Corr[?] of the race of Flame." This "Red One," Murphy further explains, has the peculiar habit of jumping to and fro on the cooking hearth (p. Ixiv).

The traditional enemy of Fionn mac Cumhaill in the prose romances of 1400-1800, and of most literature in English, is not so easily associated with fire or "the Burner." He is Goll of the Clann Morna and the Connacht Fianna who, according to one of the better known narratives of the cycle, Fotha Catha Cnucha, "The Cause of the Battle of Cnucha," has killed Fionn's father, Cumhal, and taken command of all the fianna of Ireland. In one of the tasks the young hero must undertake to prove himself, Fionn overpowers Goll and becomes the head of the Fianna Éireann. In some stories Goll is known as Aed or Aodh ("flame" or "fire"). There is no question of Fionn's killing Goll in the romances, but there is a persistent enmity between the two all through narratives in the manuscript tradition. One instance in English literature where this enmity is continued is Finnegans Wake, where Goll mac Morna is portrayed as a mysterious, incomprehensible, but unavoidable opponent. The several stories from oral sources which portray Goll as admirable or as a bosom companion of Fionn do not obscure the animosity in the oldest tradition.

In sum, Murphy's study of the early materials on Fionn as compared with most recent folklore shows that the irreducible components in Fionn's heroic character are: (a) his powers to slay "the Burner" and subsequently to overpower. Goll mac Morna and become head of the Fianna Éireann; (b) his skill as a hunter; (c) his bravery as a warrior, especially in defense of his people; and (d) his ability to see into the future by chewing his thumb, an ability that allows him to be seen as a prophet or seer. These may be the four roots of his personality as it appears in the literature, but early tales, especially those written before the twelfth century, and oral folklore, even that composed and recorded in the twentieth century, do not develop personality of character as we understand those terms in the literature of the past three centuries. Nowhere is there a characterization of Fionn comparable to what we might have had if the myth had been adapted by Dickens, Balzac, or Strindberg. But to know anything of the fuller character of Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish tradition, we must give some consideration to the vast, tangled body of ballad and romance composed, often extrapolated from earlier tales, between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries.

Because the many narratives of Fionn mac Cumhaill are discontinuous, disparate, and widely dispersed, the full story of his adventures has never been told. There is no epic of Fionn; the closest approximation to epic in the whole cycle is the Agallamhna Senórach, which Oisín is the major figure and Fionn is a secondary character remembered from the distant past. Unlike Deirdre in "The Fate of the Sons of Usnech," or Cuchulainn in the Tain and two or three other narratives, Fionn does not appear as a major figure in any tale which has been of any great interest, either to critics or to adapters. I am excluding the "Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne," in which Fionn plays a supporting role. Part of the continuity of Fionn seems to have been provided by the storyteller's feeling of having known the hero, as we have noted earlier, and his talent for expanding extemporaneously from the known. Unfortunately, there was no Malory in those times to weave together the known and the variants into one continuous fabric of narrative. The task is more difficult for a modern reteller of the tales in that he or she may now know too much about the hero, even though all the work of editing the texts has not been finished; nevertheless, the problem of determining the most authentic version of various stories would be an Herculean—if not Sisyphean—labor. As the eminent Norweigian folklorist Reidar Th. Christiansen has advised us, the mere description of the minutiae of difference between the manuscripts and their filiation is a superhuman task (pp. 46-47).

If a complete and totally coherent retelling of Fionn's adventures is a superhuman burden, we can rejoice that a number of earthbound scholars have given us an interim solution, a kind of scenario of events, based on the apparent life of the hero. I say "apparent" not merely because there is no evidence that such a figure as Fionn mac Cumhaill ever lived, but more because there is none to suggest that Irish storytellers ever considered the concatenation of his adventures in apparently chronological order. A storyteller, or shanachie (Irish: seanchaidhe), in Kerry in the fourteenth century might have told a tale of Fionn in his maturity, while another in Meath in the fifteenth century might have told one of the hero's youth. The time of mythographers is outside that of chronologers. The only vital date of any kind we have for Fionn is given for the hero's death at the Battle of Gabhra, A.D. 283, recorded in the Annals of Tigernach (d. 1088) and inter-leafed in the Annals of the Four Masters in the seventeenth century. The dating in chronicles and annals can be capricious, and those before the supposed date of the introduction of Christianity and literacy in A.D. 432 have little meaning. Within these severe limitations the most celebrated scenarist of Fenian narratives was Lady Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (1904), more than half of which is given to this end. Her version is told in eleven chapters with sixty-four numbered episodes and is based largely on manuscript narratives which had recently been translated in such scholary Celtic journals as the Transactions of the Ossianic Society and Revue Celtique, as she acknowledged in rather incomplete footnotes. Where it suited her taste, she altered or augmented manuscript narratives with materials from oral tradition collected by Jeremiah Curtin, Douglas Hyde, and others, including some variants from Gaelic Scotland. Thus her final product was something never before seen anywhere, and it contained episodes which certainly would have sounded unfamiliar to almost any individual inheritor of Fenian tradition. Nonetheless, for her work in arranging these tales, and even more for Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), W. B. Yeats called her the Malory of the Irish Renaissance, a compliment as much indicative of the influence of her work as of its method of organization.

The extent of Lady Gregory's influence on English writing is a subject for consideration further elsewhere in this study, but for the moment we should acknowledge her dominance in a much smaller area, Fenian adventure fiction. Most of these works are of slight literary distinction and are remembered here because each of them attempted to fit the episodes associated with Fionn into a sequence. The first popular account in English of Fionn's adventures was Standish James O'Grady's Finn and His Companions (1892), a miscellaneous assortment of fantastic adventures, all taken from oral tradition. O'Grady's account is isolated in time and does not present any kind of developing or maturing hero as does Lady Gregory's. After Gods and Fighting Men there were five other novelistic accounts of Fionn's adventures. The first, Donald MacKenzie's Finn and his Warrior Band (1910), gave the stories a Scottish setting. A second portrayed the heroes in Irish Renaissance colorings with theosophic undertones: Heroes of the Dawn (1913) by Violet Russell, wife of George "AE" Russell. Two American authors who reshaped the narratives were Harold F. Hughes in Legendary Heroes of Ireland (1922) and Ella Young in Tangle-Coated Horse (1929); Young's version has been in print off and on for more than fifty years and is stocked in many public libraries. More recently, Rosemary Sutcliff produced an English (as opposed to Anglo-Irish) account in The High Deeds of Finn MacCool (1967). There is in addition a kind of fictionalized folklore collection by T. W. Rolleston, The High Deeds of Finn MacCool (1910), which suggests by its title that it deals exclusively with Fenian matters while actually treating of several cycles. All six later collections have at least three qualities in common with Lady Gregory: they blend manuscript and oral narratives, they consider Fionn's adventures a lifelong story, and they avoid most of the unseemly presentations of the hero, thus subverting the irony present in many of the Irish originals. But unlike Lady Gregory's work the six are, in varying degrees, geared for juvenile readership, much as O'Grady's was. This may have resulted from the Victorian convention of having children read Scott and Cooper novels, the implication being that heroic narratives from the past provided suitable life models for the young.

Two other attempts to weld the Fenian narratives into a whole were not compiled to be considered works of literature themselves. One comes from T. F. O'Rahilly in his Early Irish History and Mythology (431, 1946, pp. 271-81) and is concerned with distinguishing myth from history in pre-Christian Ireland; understandably, O'Rahilly restricted himself to manuscript materials. Sean O Suiilleabhain, on the other hand, devoted himself entirely to oral tradition in his Handbook of Irish Folklore (432, 1963, pp. 588-97), a guide for collectors of living traditions, in which he compiled a thirty-six episode resume of Fionn's adventures.

This still leaves the question: Just what did Fionn do? Lacking a manageable, coherent outline of Fionn's career I now summon the audacity to compile one here, for my present purposes. One of the first assignments is to find the Fionn most attractive to English-language writers over a period of centuries. The complete adventures of Fionn in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish literature must wait for another book, one much longer than this. What is presented here is taken from a reading of eight authors: S. J. O'Grady, Gregory, MacKenzie, Russell, Hughes, Young, Sutcliff, Rolleston, Ó'Rahilly, and Ó Suilleabhan, with references to some significant histories of Irish and Gaelic literatures such as Douglas Hyde [A Literary History of Ireland, 1899], Aodh deBlacam [Gaelic Literature Surveyed, 1929], and Robin Flower [The Irish Tradition, 1947].

Within limits, then, here are eleven key chapters of the Fenian Cycle, especially as they relate to English literature.

Fenian lore begins with the founding of Fionn's family, the Clan Bascna (Baiscne, Baoisgne, Basca, etc.), which grows to become the core of the Leinster Fianna. Leinster is the easternmost of Ireland's four provinces. The rival family of the Clan Bascna is the Clan Morna which is centered in Connacht, the westernmost of the Ireland's provinces.

In these narratives about the early rivalry of the families, the most important figure we encounter is Cumhal mac Trenmor, Fionn's father. Cumhal is killed at the Battle of Cnucha (modern: Castleknock, western County Dublin) by Goll mac Morna of Connacht, a catastrophe that brings a sharp reversal in the family fortunes; as a result, Cumhal's wife, Muirne of the White Neck, a great-granddaughter of Nuadu, flees into exile with the infant hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill.

The most important text in this chapter of Fionn's heroic biography is the manuscript tale, Fotha Catha Cnucha, "The Cause of the Battle of Cnucha," found in the oldest Irish codex, Lebor na hUidre, "The Book of the Dun Cow," dating from the early twelfth century. Although some variants of the story of Fionn's birth and departure into exile have been recorded in oral tradition, the genealogy and early life of Fionn has been of little interest to later storytellers, lettered or unlettered, and it has been ignored by English writers.

After being reared in hiding, the youthful Fionn, then called Deimne, goes through a series of magical adventures which prepare him for his career as a great chief. The first of these is the Salmon of Knowledge episode: Finneigas, a druid, has been waiting for many years by the banks of a river for the appearance of the Salmon of Knowledge. In some versions Finneigas is waiting on the banks of the Boyne, a river rich in mystical associations ("Boyne" is from Boann, one of the principal early goddesses of Ireland), while other versions have the druid waiting at the falls of Assaroe on the Erne Estuary in County Donegal. There is perhaps no need to speculate on the significance of the salmon as the carrier of knowledge as there is a great body of lore associated with the fish all across the northern hemisphere, much of it identifying the characteristic leap of the salmon with inspiration, sexual energy, nimbleness, etc. The salmon has been especially important in Celtic tradition, both Goidelic and Brythonic, as a repository of Otherworldly wisdom. Finneigas succeeds in catching the long-awaited salmon and is proceeding to cook it when Fionn, quite by accident, burns his thumb on the salmon and nurses the burn in his mouth, thus inheriting the power of divination before the druid can.

Buoyant with the new confidence of his spiritual powers, Fionn sets about developing his physical skills and soon excels in running, jumping, swimming, handling of various weapons, and, in oral tradition, prowess in playing hurley or caman, Irish field hockey. While sporting with other young men, he acquires his heroic name when he is called "fionn," the Irish word for fair or white; Fionn is always represented as having blond hair and a fair, broad brow. He also acquires his special, magical sword from Lein (or Lochan), a smith of the gods, his aegis, a banner showing the likeness of the golden sun half-risen from the blue floor of the sea, and, most mysteriously, he wins a bag made of crane skin, corrbolg, which may represent the beginnings of the insular alphabet, ogham. Capping his boyish adventures, as recounted earlier, he overcomes Goll mac Morna to become unchallenged head of the Fianna Éireann, then goes to Tara and slays Aillen, "the Burner."

The most important Irish manuscript tale of Fionn's youth is Macgniamhartha Finn, literally, "The Boyhood Deeds of Finn," found first in the medieval Psalter of Cashel. The sequence of events we have described has been fairly popular in oral tradition; variants are recorded as late as the twentieth century, but the story of the youth of Fionn tends to become confused with parallel stories of other heroes, especially Perceval and the Welsh hero Peredur.²

English adaptations of the story of Fionn's youth have been quite numerous, including early chapters in the several juvenile retellings of Fionn's adventures as well as separate chapters in more than a dozen collections of Irish stories and folk tales. The most distinguished of these is certainly that found in James Stephens' Irish Fairy Tales (1920), which despite its title, devotes more than half its bulk to Fenian stories. Not all English adapters have been so admiring, however; Caeser Otway, an anti-Catholic evangelist and first editor of the peasant novelist William Carleton, wrote a burlesque of the "Salmon of Knowledge" story in his Sketches in Ireland in 1827.

After joining the two warring fianna, those of Leinster and Connacht, into the Fianna Éireann, Fionn quickly establishes his hegemony over the forests, streams, and open places of the four provinces of Ireland with his seat of power at the Hill of Allen (also Almu, Almhain, etc.) in County Kildare in Leinster. Almost immediately we encounter the paradigm of Fionn's character which made him the admired hero of the Goidelic peoples. As Gerard Murphy has pointed out in Duanaire Finn, Fionn is a hunter, warrior, and seer. He is also a poet of some skill, indeed, several poems ascribed to him, the best known of which is "In Praise of May," are still included in anthologies of Irish poetry. In oral tradition he is also something of an incipient civil engineer, building the Giant's Causeway, cutting the pass at Glendalough, even working as far afield as the Grand Canyon in the southwestern United States. Though usually in the company of men, Fionn is occasionally portrayed as a lover; in manuscript tradition he is more restrained, as in Cath Fionntragha, "The Battle of Ventry, or the White Strand," in which he is smitten with the invading princess of Greece, overcomes her, but cannot bear to take advantage of her. In oral tradition he is more bold; one tale collected in Ulster has him steal the clothes of the queen of Italy while she is bathing, and later sire three sons upon her.

We also read of the leading men in the Fianna Éireann, a host of immeasurable size. One text, Airem Muintiri Finn, "The Enumeration of Fionn's People," suggests that the hero was surrounded by thousands of warriors, but a closer reading of the narrative gives no more than thirty names. Across the breadth of Fenian literature, only six figures from the Fianna appear with any regularity. First, from his family, a son Oisín, and later his grandson, Oscar (also Osgar, Osca, etc.), often called by critics the "Galahad of the Cycle," and the embodiment of many of Fionn's aspirations reborn. The more prominent non-familial Fenian is Goll mac Morna, though his protryal ranges from the villainous in some manuscript tales to the moral and physical superior to Fionn in some folk tales. Caoilte (also Cáilte, Keeltya, etc.) mac Ronain is the greatest runner and jumper of the Fianna and a survivor with Oisín until the time of Saint Patrick. Diarmaid O'Duibhne, a son-surrogate of Fionn's, is the greatest lover of the Fianna; no woman who sees his "love spot," ball seirce, can resist him, even if Diarmaid would wish otherwise. Finally, there is Conan Moal ("the bald"), a type for Falstaff and Thersites, a sharp-tongued scold, the butt of most Fenian pranks and, consequently, the comic relief in many early narratives.

Like popular heroes in much of world literature, Fionn is usually best at what all men must do. And yet Fionn, because of flaws which prefigure greater weaknesses to come, is frequently bested by his men. Diarmaid is more attractive to women. Caolite is a better runner and jumper. And both Oisín and Oscar often appear stronger and more virtuous.

Irish texts detailing Fionn's heroic adventures from both manuscript and oral traditions abound through all centuries in which Irish literature has been recorded. Indeed, many of the untranslated texts feature the heroic Fionn and his men in pursuit of wild boar, rescuing maidens and their mothers, performing in contests of strength and skill, many of which are distinguished one from the other only by specific topographical references, "The Chase of Slievenamon," for example. The most significant appearance of the heroic Fionn in English literature is, of course, in James Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, based on rearranged Highland Gaelic ballad collections, elements of which are cognate with Irish ballads. Along with Macpherson came a half-dozen or so imitators, James Clark, the McCallum brothers, and others. Portrayals of the heroic Fionn also appear in the translations of such early and reputable scholars as Charlotte Brooke, notably the "Lay of Moira Borb" in her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). And allusions to the heroic Fionn are common in the writings of English authors from Sir Walter Scott (in Waverley and The Antiquary), and Thomas Moore, down to Padraic Colum. But as might be expected with the declining interest in heroic literature (Seán O'Faolain speaks of a vanishing hero), most of the heroic depictions of Fionn mac Cumhaill in the past one hundred years have been found in juvenille literature. Surprisingly there are some specific omissions: there was no literature about Fionn produced by the Fenian movement, c. 1860-1900, despite the allusion in its naming.

The most celebrated of Fionn's heroic roles in Irish literature is as a defender of Ireland. As Reidar Christiansen has shown in The Vikings and the Viking Wars in Irish and Gaelic Tradition (1931), there is an immense body of ballad literature based on historical predecents in which Fionn is portrayed doing battle with the savage Norsemen, or Lochlanns, as they are known in Irish, the men from beyond the sea. Norse influence in Ireland is the subject of a large chapter in every history of the island, and Norse influence infuses the culture of Gaelic Scotland at every level. Most informed commentators today agree that Fenian narratives predate the Norse invasions of the eighth century and after. One of the evidences for this is the Irish word for Scandinavians, Lochlann, cognate with the Welsh Llychlyn, was previously used for any invader, real or imagined, from beyond the Celtic world. Further, there is no longer much interest in the notion proposed by some German commentators, notably Heinrich Zimmer, that Fionn's characterization was borrowed from Norse invaders. The suggestion would not be worth commentary if James Joyce had not heard a precis of it from Zimmer's son in the early twenties and subsequently included Norse ancestry in the makeup of his Fionn archetype in Finnegans Wake.

Fenian stories in oral tradition, though dominated by Norse invaders when the stories are told in Ossianic frame, include a number of imaginative and allusive alternate invaders. For example, in a story called "The Chase of Glennasmol," Ireland is invaded by another Amazonian princess of Greece, armed with a repertory of tricks, including the Circe-like power of lulling the Fenians to sleep—after which she destroys a hundred of them. One of the best known manuscript tales which portrays Fionn as a heroic defender of Ireland is Cath Fionntragha, "The Battle of the White Strand" (also called "The Battle of Ventry," using the contemporary place name on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry that appears to be a corruption of Fionntrágha). This narrative, one of the longest and most tedious in the cycle, appears to be an Irish instance of the international tale of the "everlasting fight" (Aarne-Thompson 2300, motif 211). In it Dara Donn, variously identified as the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, or the king of Norway, invades Ireland. Fionn leads the defenders at the "White Strand," Ventry Harbor in Kerry, and the battle rages on interminably amid much slaughter. For some reason not apparent in printed texts of the story, the battle at Ventry Harbor seized hold of the imagination of the peasant storyteller and would not let go. Perhaps the Cath Fionntrágha was an invitation to lively histrionics on the part of the storyteller.

Fionn the repeller of invasions has not translated well into English; perhaps because the hero's character is so static in many of these tales, or perhaps because writers in English do not find the defense of Ireland quite so compelling. James Macpherson includes several episodes of Fingal (Fionn) doing battle with Lochlanns in the Poems of Ossian, but of course the country defended is Scotland, as seen through a Tory perception.

The warrior Fionn is much more vincible when pitted against the supernatural powers of druids, magicians, and the like. After his initial establishment of power in the slaying of the Aillén, Fionn is successful in defeating supernatural power in only a handful of stories, notably the early manuscript tale from "The Book of the Dun Cow," usually known as "Finn and the Phantoms." In this it takes Fionn and the Fianna an entire night to destroy an old hag with three heads on one thin neck, her husband with no head and an eye in the middle of his breast, and their equally charmless brood of nine children. In a whole series of tales, from both manuscript and oral tradition, Fionn is trapped in a magical dwelling and cannot get out without help. Following the conventions of those twelfth-century professional poets, the filidh, the stories of Fionn's entrapment always include with the same word, bruidhean, bruidne, etc., which cannot be precisely translated into English. The best approximations appear to be "palace," "hostel," or "dwelling" with Oz-like overtones of "enchanted" or "magical." Anne Ross has suggested that the bruidhean tales evoke the ancient Celtic mode of human sacrifice in which the victim is put inside a wicker container that is then set afire.

The most representative bruidhean tale is probably Bruidhean Chaorthainn, "The Hostel (or Palace, etc.) of the Quicken Trees," which Geoffrey Keating cited as long ago as 1633 to be typical of the "unhistorical" Fenian tales. Midac, the son of the villainous Colga of Lochlann, was a boy whom the Fianna had raised as one of their own after they had found him during the defeat of the invader. Upon reaching manhood Midac left the hospitality of the Hill of Allen and took up residence at his "hostel" or "palace" on the Shannon, a gift from the Fianna. Midac invites Fionn and his men to a banquet, only to lure them into the trap of his enchanted dwelling; once inside the men find that they are fixed to their chairs and cannot cry for help from a window or raise themselves so much as one inch. Midac, it turns out, wants to contain Fionn while he conquers Ireland with the help of his grotesquely fantastic friends, Sinsar of the Battles, Borba the Haughty, etc. Fionn's children and grandchildren, some of them too young to attend the banquet, save the day, and slaughter the enemy as they ford a river; later, they pull their paterfamilias and the Fianna from their chairs, unharmed.

The bruidhean theme is found in texts as early as the tenth century and has been popular in both manuscript and oral traditions. Some of the better known manuscript tales are Bruidhean Eochaid Bhig Dheirg, "The Palace of Little Red Eocha," and Bruidhean Cheis Choriann, "The Enchanted Cave of Kesh Corran," this latter being among the most popular of all Irish prose romances of the late medieval period. Kesh Corran, incidentally, is the best known hideway of Diarmaid and Gráinne. On the contemporary map it refers to a cave about fifteen miles south of the town of Sligo, but in earlier times, it may have referred to all of County Sligo.

The popularity of the bruidhean has never found a counterpart among English writers. To be sure there are a fair number of translations, and at least a few of the collections of Irish traditional narratives include a bruidhean tale; the juvenile collections of Fenian tales, by Ella Young, and others, include at least one such tale, and there is one bruidhean story in Charlotte Brooke's Reliques, but that is the extent of it. The encumbered Fionn is not a part of English literature of the past one hundred years either as a pathetic, comic, or absurd figure.

Just as Arthur virtually disappears in a number of later Arthurian romances, especially those which center on the exploits of Lancelot, so too Fionn is peripheral to the action in a large body of tales found mostly in oral tradition which concerns various helpers of the Fianna. The most numerous of these concern a supernaturally gifted but benevolent helper, or giolla, usually named Céadach. Murphy summarizes and coordinates twenty-five of these in an appendix to Duanaire Finn III (pp. 177-88) and Bruford states that Caedach tales present the most popular of any theme in all of Irish folk tradition and cites 128 versions from Irish and Highland sources [Gaelic Folktales and Medieval Romances, 1969, pp. 106-33].

In the tales where the helper named Céadach is actually an aid to the Fenians, his conventional task is to help defeat a magical or giant opponent who puts his arm down a chimney; Céadach cuts off the arm. This episode is, apparently at least, an analogue of the fight between Grendel and Beowulf, and may be, as the eminent Swedish folklorist, C. W. vonSydow, has argued [in Duanaire Finn III, 1953], the source for it.

More pertinent to our immediate interests are the other tales in which the Fianna is abused by the helper, such as Tóraidheacht an Ghiolla Dheacair (which may be translated as "The Pursuit of the Hard Gilly" or "The Difficult Servant"), and Bodach an Chóta Lachtna, "The Churl in the Gray Coat," both of which are found in seventeenth-century manuscript redactions and numerous oral variants. In the former an irritable and impudent servant coaxes the Fenians (but not Fionn) to sit on the swayed back of his enchanted roan and then runs off with them to the land beneath the waves. The Irish heroes are not only overpowered but also appear a bit absurd; in one Kerry variant they all pile on the back of the old horse and break it with their weight. The "Churl in the Gray Coat" is the sea god, Manannán mac Lir, in disguise; he takes up the challenge of "Ironbones," son of the prince of Thessaly to run a race when the Fenians cannot muster a man. To the chagrin of the heroes, the churl makes no effort to run very fast, and instead sits down to eat blackberries, but nevertheless wins the race handily.

Despite their great popularity in Irish, the helper tales are uncommon in English. Lady Gregory and her imitators include the stories as threads in the whole Fenian fabric, and the "Hard Gilly" story is in at least two dozen collections of Irish folk tales, but other than James Clarence Mangan's early (1840) adaptation of "The Churl in the Gray Coat" there has been no individual English-language interest in this series of episodes. English interest seems to focus on Fionn and Oisín, their rise, which we have just considered briefly, and even more their fall.

In a passage cited above, Marie-Louise Sjoestedt described how the historical fianna of Ireland lived on hunting and plunder. In time, it would appear, their demands on the non-military population became onerous. Not only did the warriors have to be fed, clothed and housed, but they demanded the first option on all virgins in the community before they could be given in marriage. Perhaps for these barely substantial historical reasons, or perhaps because of a cloyed taste for the heroic, Irish storytellers also include in their repertory a considerable number of tales in which Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna Éireann are pictured as something other than admirable. This non-heroic literature is in two modes; in some the Fenians, and Fionn especially, appear to be vicious, despicable brutes who degenerate their heroic ideal in pointless violence leading to their destruction in The Battle of Gabhra or Gowra, recorded by the annalists as having occurred in A.D. 283. In a second mode Fionn, only rarely with an accomplice or two, is made to appear just the opposite of what he is in the heroic literature; in this second mode he is cowardly and clumsy, but still something of a trickster.

Of the two non-heroic modes, the picture of Fionn mac Cumhaill as villain is less common in both Irish and English. The most important manuscript tale which portrays Fionn as a cruel rowdy is probably the Bóramha, "Boromian Tribute," although Fionn is not the only heavy in the piece. In oral tradition, perhaps because of the lesser refinements of audiences for the tales or perhaps because of the oral convention which frequently portrays Fionn as a giant, we find a crude and cruel Fionn more frequently.

The abused and comic Fionn is quite another matter indeed. As seen in the bruidhean and helper stories, the leader of the Fenians has a vulnerability to contretemps. The earliest reference to a comic Fionn is in an eighth-century manuscript where the hero is attacked by his son Oisín. David Krause has speculated in an insightful essay that a considerable body of literature has been lost, in which Oisín has focused his Oedipal anxieties in order to torment his father into a kind of farcial Laius. Such stories most probably were suppressed by clerical scribes. Be that as it may, in the literature which survives the comic and anti-heroic Fionn seems disproportionately a part of oral tradition, so much so that some scholars would identify that characterization with peasant humor. Whether the comic Fionn is as old as the eighth century, as Krause suggests, or only the creation of culturally dispossessed peasants after the Flight of the Earls in the seventeenth century, the comic Fionn is well established in English literature from the writing of William Carleton as early as the 1830s to our own time, in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, both in 1939.

Of all the tales in the Fenian canon, the one with the greatest critical reputation is also the one which bears the closest analogies to international medieval romance narratives: Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne, "The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne." Not surprisingly, it has been adapted in English more often than other Fenian narrative, as a play, novel, narrative poem, and opera libretto. So much attention has been devoted to it that it almost deserves to be considered as a cycle by itself, especially as Fionn's role is nearly always supportive to the main characters, the lovers. In all but one or two versions Fionn is cast as a most unattractive, vengeful, jealous cuckold.

Gráinne is the coquettish young dauther of Cormac mac Airt, the high king at Tara. For the convenience of her father she has been betrothed, and in some versions actually married to the now aging Fionn mac Cumhaill, who, when all of the texts are coordinated, has had something like thirty wives. The action begins when the Fianna Éireann is invited to Tara for a wedding feast and Grainne for the first time sees Diarmaid, a favorite of the band and a surrogate son to its leader. Diarmaid is not only a handsome physical specimen but he is endowed with a magical "love spot," ball seirce, which makes him—literally—absolutely irresistible to women. Grainne is immediately taken with him and although Diarmaid does not reciprocate, the two lovers flee from Tara and spend as many as the next twenty years travelling all of Ireland; Scottish variants, understandably, extend the itinerary to Scottish locales. Fionn and his men eventually find the lovers, usually in northwestern Ireland, often at Kesh Corran, and the disappointed old bridegroom entices the young warrior to join his old comrades in a boar hunt. The reforged bond between the men is short-lived when Diarmaid is injured by the boar and Fionn desists from a chance to save him.

The exact parallels with the stories of Naoise and Deirdre in the Ulster Cycle and Tristan and Iseult in European literature need hardly be mentioned except to say that the differences, such as Diarmaid's hesitance as a lover, are ultimately more interesting than the parallels.

Nessa Ni Sheaghdha has shown in the introduction to the best contemporary edition of a manuscript text that part of the uniqueness of the tale is that it incorporates and extrapolates from earlier Fenian narratives, some dating from the tenth century. The manuscript scenario of the tale, summarized above, apparently took form in the seventeenth century, but folk variants continued to appear until the twentieth century.

As I have said, "The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Grainne," has been adapted in English more often than any other Fenian tale; further, the adapters have included such distinguished figures as W. B. Yeats with George Moore, Lady Gregory, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the ninth Duke of Argyll, and Austin Clarke, as well as a dozen lesser known figures. The continued interest in the tale from writers in the different genres in both Irish and English is probably more indicative of the intrinsic merits of the narrative than of a public hunger for a villainous portrayal of the national hero of Ireland.

Fionn and his men are recorded as having overcome many enemies and obstacles, animals, other Irish warriors, Lochlanners and other invaders, and when acting in unison, even supernatural powers. But the literature is divided on their success in the greatest of all heroic labors, the conquering of death. Many Irish storytellers never acknowledge that Fionn ever aged past maturity, much less died. For example, in the early modern manuscript tale, Bruidhean beg na hAlmhaine, "The Little Brawl at Allen," Fionn performs feats of valor alongside his great grandsons Eachtach and Illan. In an oral tale of uncertain date, "The Chase of Slieve Guillean," Fionn is transformed into an atrophied old man by a jealous member of a trio of weird sisters reminiscent of Macbeth. Later, with the help of the Fianna and another of the sisters, Fionn is restored; if he cannot quite conquer death he can muster the power to resist it.

Yet the annalists record a date for his death, and at least two stories depict the end of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. In an article [in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (1897)] that Kuno Meyer devoted to this subject we find that one version has Fionn decapitated (a significant mode of execution among the Celts from earliest times, as Roman writers observed) by Aiclech mac Dubdrenn at a battle named Ath Brea on the banks of the Boyne; this is first found in a tenth-century text by the poet Cinaed hua Hartacain and repeated by Tigernach (d. 1088) and subsequently by the "Four Masters" in the seventeenth century. This version is known to romance in at least one manuscript text, Aided Finn, "The Violent Death of Finn" (1892) and three fragments. But the far better known version in romance literature is given in the text of Cath Gabhra, "The Battle of Gabhra (Gowra)." Here the end of the Fenians is presented more dramatically. Along with the retreat from their heroic ideals which we suggested above, the Fenians begin to squabble among themselves; specifically, the Leinster Fianna revives the memory of wrongs it had suffered from the Clan Morna of Connacht at the Battle of Cnucha when Cumhal was killed. The reigning high king at Tara, Cairbre of the Liffey, resolves that he would rather die in ridding the country of the Fianna Éireann than try to rule an Ireland blighted by their immorality. Cairbre provokes the final conflict by killing Fionn's servant Ferdia, obliging Fionn to declare war. In the battle which ensues at Gabhra (Gowra, or on modern maps, Garristown in northwest County Dublin), the bloodbath is enough to rival that of the poorer Elizabethan horror dramas. The Fianna Éireann splits when Fer-tai of the Clan Morna falls in with Cairbre and fights his former comrades. Both sides use swords and spears, and the most common deaths are decapitations. Oscar, conventionally the most innocent of the Fenians, runs Cairbre through with his spear, and subsequently is killed by Cairbre's household guard within view of his grandfather. Fionn himself, although drawing blood on all sides with either hand, did not initially distinguish himself; he fulfills Cairbre's vision of him when he beheads the young son of Fer-tai, Fer-li, who stands alone against the host. One by one the Fenians fall, all except Oisín, who is not described at all, and Caoilte, the swiftest of runners, until Fionn stands alone. When the five sons of Urgriu come upon him with spears drawn Fionn knows he is defenseless and lets his aegis and shield drop to his feet, standing straight and unmoving as a pillar. Thus in death Fionn receives five wounds, not only like Christ but in keeping with conventions of Continental romance.

Although this version of Fionn's death is the best known in the early romances, it is by no means widely known or acknowledged across the body of the Fenian Cycle in Irish literature. Oral storytellers for the most part do not remember any tale in which Fionn is killed. Their view seems to be either (a) that he never engaged Cairbre in a final battle, or (b) he was wounded in an unnamed battle and now waits, "sleeping," at some specific spot, any of several caves all over Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, until he is again needed in the defense of his country. The reluctance of oral storytellers to speak of Fionn's death does not necessarily indicate a finicky unwillingness to deal with the distasteful, especially considering the buffoonish humor such tellers used to portray the anti-heroic Fionn. Instead, it seems more likely that folk tradition was presented with a dilemma by the Christian environment of Ireland, as seen in stories in the Ossianic frame. The reward of the unbaptized hero would be damnation. Yet even without the obstacle of revealed religion, storytellers seem to have difficulty in conceiving an end for Fionn and the Fianna. As Anton van Hamel points out [in Proceedings of the British Academy 20 (1934)] this is one of the distinctions between the Fenian and earlier cycles: "to Fionn and his warriors eternal bliss is unattainable."

Other than as a late chapter in Lady Gregory's work and that of some of her imitators, the story of Fionn's violent death in battle is unknown in English. Indeed, English writing knows of a different version of Fionn's death not found in Irish. Meredith Hanmer (1543-1604) records in his Chronicle of Ireland that Fionn died at an advanced age as a beggar in great poverty.³ The greatest significance of Fionn's death to English literature is, of course, that one alluded to by Joyce in Finnegans Wake; this is a little known oral variant on the "sleeping warriors" myth which would place Fionn's head under Howth, his body under Dublin proper, and his feet stretching all the way to Chapelizod.

Explanations of why Oisín did not stand with his father and comrades in their annihilation are varied. The best known today is that he was seduced by a beautiful fairy woman, Niamh of the Golden Hair, who leads him to the Tir na nÓg, "Land of Youth." Although voyages to the Land of Youth or the Ever-Young are common in Celtic literature, just what happens to the fortunate who go there is not always clear, as David Spaan's dissertation ["The Otherworld in Early Irish Literature," 1970] has shown. The only known Irish text which treats with the narrative comes from an identifiable poet, Micheal Coimin (1676-1760), Laoi Oisín i dTir na nÓg, "The Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth,"⁴ which may mean that details have been individualized from a tradition we have lost. Coimin (anglice: "Comyn" or "Cummings") is airily unspecific about both Niamh and Tir na nÓg; apparently Oisín enjoys no sexual or other gustatory pleasures in the paradise of youth. For these or other reasons, Oisín grows bored after three hundred years and longs to return to the land of mortals. The Ireland he finds upon his return is domesticated and inhabited throughout by small men who bow to the authority of Saint Patrick and his bishops. As soon as Oisín, now a comparative giant, touches the earth when he tries to help some puny mortals lift a boulder, he is transformed to his actual age, thus appearing to be a semi-fossilized remnant of the past when he finally meets Patrick.

As Coimin's text is unique there is room for speculation that his narrative is the product of his own genius, especially as the name of Niamh is not associated with Oisín elsewhere in the cycle. Nevertheless, the episode of Oisín's survival to later times is extremely common in both manuscript and oral tradition. A completely loveless counterpart to Coimin's lay can be found in the oral narrative, Fear ma dheiradh na Feinne, "The Last of the Feni; or the Man Who Went to the Land of Youth" (1908). Whatever his entanglement with Niamh, the Oisín who survives from a lost heroic time to compose nostalgic poetry in the glamourless present has several counterparts elsewhere in Celtic literature. Llywarch Hen, a sixth-century Welsh poet, laments the ruin of the great halls of Cyndylan and Urien. Likewise, Myrddin, a possible ancestor of the Merlin of the Arthurian legends, is credited with poems celebrating the heroic past of Wales, often championing pagan ideals against Christian.

In any case, Fionn's role is completely subsidiary to Oisín's in this segment of the scenario. We see him in Coimin's text as a benign, not an abused father, an embodiment of all that the younger hero has lost in time. This flattering picture of the older Fionn is not as important for Irish literature as it is for English, as W. B. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisín" (1889), based on early translations of Coimin, has established the picture of an authoritative, refined, and pagan Fionn which may supersede that of any other in the minds of those readers who know Irish mythology only from its use in English poetry.

The Elders of the Agallamh na Senórach, the only text in the cycle which might be called epic in breadth and length, are Oisín and Patrick.⁵ As mentioned often before, an elderly Oisín tells Saint Patrick of the adventures of the Fenians in pre-Christian times in the early manuscript, and further, this frame serves in oral tradition for the retelling of hundreds of different narratives. As these narratives in fact recapitulate many of the portrayals of Fionn mentioned in the previous pages, there are no new roles for him to play here. David Krause, in his essay, "The Hidden Oisín," feels that Oisín in the Agallamh has inherited a pugnacity from his disputes with his father. Thus when Saint Patrick affirms his patriarchal prohibitions he simultaneously assumes the role of a surrogate father and becomes an analogue for Fionn. This does not mean that we have even the beginnings of evidence that Fionn is actually identifiable with Saint Patrick, although it is worth mentioning that Oisín frequently remarks that his father had predicted the saint's coming; further, both Irish and Scottish commentators have remarked on the confusion of Fionn and Saint Patrick in the folk traditions of their countries. Except in the mind of Joyce writing Finnegans Wake, the association of Fionn with Saint Patrick is probably not worth pursuing.

Perhaps because of the relatively great size of the text of the Agallamh or because of the popularity of the Ossianic frame in folk tradition, the scenario of the "Colloquy of the Elders" has had a separate tradition in English literature, almost independent from the rest of the cycle. Macpherson's Poems of Ossian, to name but one example, are named for Oisín because their "translator" perceived them to have been composed by their persona. During the heyday of the Irish Renaissance, 1890-1920, at least two dozen poems appeared in periodicals with names such as "Oisín and Saint Patrick." An American poet, Mary Grant O'Sheridan, produced an entire volume of verse in 1922, Lays and Ranns from the Folk-Lore of the Gael, which is in fact an unstructured and highly interpretive "recension" of the translation by S. H. O'Grady. Darrell Figgis, one of the more secular writers of revolutionary Ireland, produced a novel based on the Agallamh in 1923 entitled The Return of the Hero, in which Saint Patrick becomes an anti-clerical effigy (23). But quite apart from translations, adaptations, or Irish tradition, Oisín, alias Ossian, is one of the most widely distributed figures of Western literature, certainly in excess of any other character of Irish origin. Even in American poetry he can be found as far afield as in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, who published a poem entitled "Ossian's Grave" in 1933.

When confronted with the unfolding of heroic character in Irish tradition, Standish James O'Grady, nephew of the great translator, wrote in 1878 that "Heroes expand into giants, and dwindle into goblins, or fling aside the heroic form and gambol as buffoons." He was speaking of Fionn in particular, but he could have intended any of a number of figures in European tradition. What makes Fionn more distinctive is that the different parts of his character exist simultaneously in tradition. Perhaps because of his broad social appeal or perhaps because he was never ossified in one perfected romance which superseded all others, Fionn has remained alive in tradition, far in excess of any other Irish traditional figure. Because he remained alive in tradition, unlike Cuchulainn or even Arthur, there was never any need to revive him. He was both contemporary, familiar, and perhaps less than heroic, as well as ancient, revered and patriarchal. In contrasting Fionn with Cuchulainn, Padraic Colum wrote, "He is a folk-hero, crafty as well as brave, vindictive as well as generous." He is, in short, neither a contradiction nor only an accumulation of discontinuous personalities but rather a paradox.…

…² The most pertinent passages from Brown's work are in vol. 18 (1920-21), 201-28, 661-73. Cf. Sheila McHugh, "Sir Percyvelle ": Its Irish Connections (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1946). This subject is treated at greater length in chapter 2, where Fionn is considered as a parallel to other European heroes, including Arthurian figures.

³ Hanmer's Chronicle was published in 1633. Wilson M. Hudson, who has commented on the Chronicle in "Ossian in English Before Macpherson," Studies in English [Texas] 19 (1950): 125, thinks that the episode is new with Hanmer and is not based on a lost Irish original.

⁴ Thomas Flannery provided the only scholarly edition in 1895 (Dublin: M. H. Gill), but the poem has been translated several times, the first as early as 1863. Curiously, Coimin's quite traditional composition (c. 1750) was just prior to Macpherson's Ossian (1760-63).

⁵ The Agallamh has been translated several times; the most celebrated of these seems to be that of S. H. O'Grady in Silva Gadelica II (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892), 101-264. The best modern Irish edition is by Nessa Ni Sheaghdha, 3 vols. (Dublin: Oifig an tSoláthair, 1942-45).