Read Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) Online
Authors: James MacKillop
Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (31 page)
Standish James O’Grady put it most simply: ‘Heroes expand into giants, dwindle into goblins, or fling aside the heroic form and gambol as buffoons…’ (1878). He should have made the qualification that the arc from acclaim to pratfall is followed by popular heroes such as Heracles, rather than by epic heroes such as Achilles. Heracles was the subject of an immense body of popular literature, not all of which survives, that inverted his most admirable virtues. By the time of Aristophanes’
The Frogs
(405
BC
) he had been reduced to a figure of slapstick motivated by gluttony and lust. Achilles, whose character is fixed in the
Iliad
, suffers no such transmogrification, and neither does Cúchulainn, whose character is kept in place by the
Táin Bó Cuailnge
. The popular Fionn, the Fionn of oral tradition, is a highly protean character, much cruder than the Fionn of manuscript tradition, as Gerard Murphy points out in the introduction to volume III of
Duanaire Finn
(1953), one of the most searching and profound
analyses of the cycle. To a certain extent, the very ubiquity of a heroic character is enough to invite his deflation. Raphael Patai (1972) has observed a parallel phenomenon in modern popular literature in which industrialization can reproduce characterizations with a speed and thoroughness unanticipated before the printing press. In such media the hero-buffoon, Buster Keaton or Dagwood Bumstead, is a commonplace.
Portrayals of the comic and anti-heroic are more common in later oral literature, and more common in English-language and Hiberno-English stories than in Irish, Scottish Gaelic or Manx stories. David Krause in
The Profane Book of Irish Comedy
(1982) traces the roots of the comic Fionn to an eighth-century manuscript whose English title is ‘The Quarrel Between Finn and Oisín’, in which the son speaks antagonistically to his father. Whereas we are used to Oisín singing his father’s praises in dialogue with the authoritarian St Patrick, Krause asserts that this older Oisín was a rebellious Oedipus set on humiliating his father, Laius. As the centuries passed and Christianity became more a part of the narrative, Oisín transferred his aggressions to the new religious authority imported from abroad and began to puff up the reputation of his departed father.
A taste for coarse humour is more evident in the Fenian Cycle than any of the other three. In later folktales the once-heroic Fionn has his vanity deflated with such demeaning challenges as being asked to whistle with a mouth full of oatmeal. Only the Fenian Cycle has produced anything like the 128 surviving Céadach tales from both Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, with still more from Nova Scotia. The mischievous and querulous Céadach is an interloper to the Fenian milieu. Often disguised in skins, he seeks to elbow into the fianna for reasons that are never clear. Often an unwanted ‘helper’, he may be called Céadach or may bear any of many names, or he may have a nickname like ‘the hard gilly/servant’ or the ‘churl’. Fionn is rarely the butt of his contrivances, but leading members of the fianna are. Once he persuades them all to climb on the back of a tired old horse, which then collapses under the weight. After urging them all to mount another horse, he watches as the horse rushes off to take the warriors under the sea.
The best-known story of Fionn as a buffoon-hero is not recorded
before the nineteenth century, and then only in English without a known Irish-language antecedent. William Carleton (1794–1869), an Ulster-born Catholic turned Protestant novelist, gave his fifteen-page version the title ‘The Legend of Knockmany’ in an 1845 collection of stories. Knockmany is a hill in Carleton’s native county of Tyrone, a site with no special Fenian associations. Carleton’s story probably first appeared in a serial now lost. The early folklorist Patrick Kennedy published a variant in his
Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts
(1866). But after William Butler Yeats republished the Carleton text in the influential
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
(1888), its prominence was assured. More than twenty plagiarisms and un-credited adaptations have made this the portrait of Fionn that many in the English-speaking world outside Ireland, especially children, are most likely to know.
In ‘The Legend of Knockmany’ Fionn the giant, here in the Hiberno-English form ‘Fin M’Coul’, is at work on the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim when he hears that another giant, named ‘Cucullin’ [
sic
], is headed his way, spoiling for a match of strength. In manuscript tradition, of course, Fionn and Cúchulainn never meet, their cycles being discrete. Popular literature is not troubled by such distinctions, and, as we shall see, this may be a case of mistaken identity. Fin returns home to his wife Oonagh at Knockmany, quaking in fear that he is going to be ‘skivered like a rabbit’ by his enemy. Oonagh is more confident, knowing that the rival giant’s power resides in the middle finger of his right hand, and so sets about to outwit him. She has Fin dress as a baby and hide in an unnamed son’s cradle, while she prepares to bake bread in which she has inserted granite stones. Giving false hospitality to Cucullin, who is annoyed at not finding Fin home, Oonagh offers Cucullin the granite bread. After trying twice to eat the bread, losing teeth in each attempt, Cucullin refuses to take another bite. At this point Oonagh offers another loaf, minus the granite insert, to Fin whom she blandly describes as her baby. Fin, of course, has no difficulty in eating at all, which leaves Cucullin amazed and apprehensive about confronting the father of such a child. Cucullin now wishes to leave Knockmany, but not before feeling the teeth of such an astonishing infant. Readying for the climax, Oonagh invites Cucullin to place his magic finger well into Fin’s mouth. Fin immediately bites
the finger off, jumps out of the cradle and makes short work of the visiting giant – now debilitated.
The implications of castration with the severed finger are likely to leap out at the contemporary reader, but they should not obscure the humiliations heaped upon Fionn: cowering in fear from an invader, dressed in infant’s clothes and protected by his resourceful wife.
Carleton certainly did not invent this story, nor was he the first to attach it to the Fenian Cycle. The central motif of deception to overcome an enemy is at least as old as the anonymous
Maistre Pierre Pathelin
(
c
.1464), one of the original French stage farces, which can still raise a laugh when performed today. Eleven years before Carleton’s publication, novelist Frederick Marryat put a variant of the story into the mouth of an Irish character named O’Brien in his
Peter Simple
(1834). Here Fionn is called Fingal, after Macpherson, and he, not his wife, thinks of the granite-loaf strategy. The rival giant is described as Scottish. If the story is of foreign origin, this is hardly the first time a narrative from abroad has been interleaved into an Irish corpus. The origins of the story of the conflict between Cúchulainn and his son Connla are in early Indo-European tradition and are found as far afield as Persian literature.
A year before
Peter Simple
yet another version, entitled ‘The Legend of Fin-Mac-Cool’, appeared in the pages of the
Dublin Penny Journal
(1833) with intriguing variants. The anonymous author, cited only as ‘Q’, follows the same scenario we find in Carleton, with the location switched from Knockmany to Ballynascorney in County Dublin. The Scottish giant is here named ‘Usheen’ for Fionn’s own son, Oisín. As the identity of the invading giant is flexible, one is tempted to think that Q simply plucked an available name, one that the Macpherson controversy had made prominent. Then again, ‘Usheen’ is a phonetic rendering of what
Oisín
sounds like to English ears, a spelling that derives from hearing spoken Irish. Q’s tone never responds to the thunderous Oedipal implications of father Fionn quailing in terror at the advance of his grown son striding toward him. But here in the nineteenth-century penny press is an unmistakable reprise of the eighth-century ‘Quarrel Between Finn and Oisín’.
The lack of an antecedent for ‘Knockmany’ in Irish or Scottish Gaelic does not mean the story has not entered Celtic oral tradition.
Variants, with significant changes from Carleton’s model, are recorded in the Hebrides in the 1860s and in Ulster in 1913. Whether they predate the printed sources or follow from them is difficult to know.
The more significant issue is that the Knockmany story, whatever its origin, should have attached itself to Fionn mac Cumhaill instead of to another hero. Part of the reason must be that he was the most available because Fenian tradition was very much alive in oral tradition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whereas the other cycles had receded from the popular mind until the revival of Old Irish from the mid-nineteenth century and after. Whoever asserted this connection – not Carleton, Marryat or Q – saw within Fionn’s persona a wiliness and resilience that would triumph over humiliation as well as over redoubtable adversaries. The capacity to fall and rise again is what attracted James Joyce in linking his
Finnegans Wake
(1939) to Fenian lore. The myth of Fionn does not serve the same function in the
Wake
that Odysseus does in
Ulysses
because Joyce had much wider ambitions in portraying language, man’s fate and the fortunate fall. His famously challenging narrative is larded with Fenian allusions, one of which is present in the pun of the title, ‘Finn again wake’, a call to Fionn to begin his career again, from preening hero to gambolling buffoon.
Early sources disagree about accounts of Fionn’s death or even whether or not he was mortal. In one of the better known, Fionn and the fianna have worn out their welcome at the court of Cairbre Lifechair, Cormac mac Airt’s son and successor. As different factions squabble among themselves, the king himself provokes a climactic battle by killing Fionn’s servant Ferdia. It takes fully five men to murder Fionn at what is now Garristown, County Dublin. In another source an assassin named Aichlech mac Dubdrenn slays Fionn at the Ford of the Brea on the Boyne River, not far from where the hero first tasted knowledge. A variant version has Goll mac Morna dispatch Fionn at the same site. Yet other stories cite locations in Cork, Kerry, and the Scottish shire of Perth. Fionn may be reincarnated as Mongán in the Cycles of the Kings, or he may be a part of the Sleeping Army (folk motif E502), at rest in a remote cave, like King Arthur, Charlemagne or Barbarossa, biding his time until his people call for him again. Many
sites are also named as his burial mound, including Druim Derg in Co. Meath.
Far darker than Fionn the farcical hero is Fionn the jealous cuckold in
Tóraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne
, the greatest, most resonant prose narrative of the Fenian Cycle, usually known in English as ‘The Pursuit of Diarmait and Gráinne’. Fionn’s portrayal in this story resembles what happens to the otherwise admired Ulster king Conchobar mac Nessa in the nearly parallel Deirdre story. In both stories we have an ageing powerful man who cannot have what he wants, a reluctant, beautiful young woman, the woman’s preferred lover, and flight. Among the great differences are that the Diarmait and Gráinne story is more than six times as long, chock full of digressions and colourful supporting characters, and comes to quite a different conclusion. Both the Fenian and the Ulster stories anticipate the love triangle between Tristan, Iseult and King Mark of Cornwall, a standin for Arthur. Needless to say, the Arthurian story is the most widely known of these in Western culture, but the two Irish narratives have long been recognized as the older. James Carney (1955) has argued that the roots of the two Irish stories are older still, having been adapted from the late Roman love triangle between Mars, god of war, Venus, god of love, and Adonis, Venus’s consort. References imply that this Fenian story was known by the tenth century although it did not take the form we now recognize until well after 1200. A named author, Dáibhi Ó Duibhgeannáin, composed a full manuscript version in 1651. This did not stop the Diarmait and Gráinne story from being immensely popular in oral tradition. Until well into the twentieth century a common appellation for the megalithic dolmens or portal tombs that dot the Irish countryside was ‘beds of Diarmait and Gráinne’.
While grieving for a wife named Maignis, Fionn complains that a man alone cannot sleep well and so goes in search of a new mate. His retainers tell him of the lovely Gráinne, daughter of King Cormac mac Airt, who is reported willing, if he can only prove a worthy son-in-law.
Fionn succeeds, but at the betrothal feast Gráinne is disappointed to see that her prospective husband is older than her father. Her eye travels to other members of the party, first Oisín, who rebuffs her, and then to dark, curly-haired Diarmait Ua Duibne, with whom she is soon smitten. In versions of the story in oral tradition Gráinne cannot resist Diarmait’s mysterious
ball seirce
[love spot], which he usually keeps modestly covered with a cap. Listeners familiar with Fenian stories would know two of Diarmait’s aspects without their being explained in this text. One is that he is Fionn’s favourite among the Fianna, and the other that he must constantly be on the lookout for a wild boar, the transformed spirit of a murdered half-brother. Taking the initiative, Gráinne slips a sleeping potion to all present except Diarmait, whom she entices to run away with her. When he delays out of loyalty to Fionn, she threatens him with a
geis
of destruction, and so, somewhat shrug-shouldered, he follows her. The lovers flee to a forest across the Shannon River, where Diarmait builds a dwelling with seven doors. Fionn and the Fianna are upon the couple in no time, but the men restrain their leader’s hunger for vengeance. Oisín sends two warnings to the lovers, but Diarmait ignores both. Instead he plants three kisses on Gráinne’s compliant mouth in full view of the enraged Fionn. At this the lovers, aided by Diarmait’s patron Angus Óg, the god of poetry, envelop themselves in a cloak of invisibility and make a magical escape in one bold leap over the heads of Fionn and the Fianna.
The route of the fugitive lovers takes them to all corners of the Gaelic world, in Ireland and Scotland. The fever of the chase does not quickly light Diarmait’s passions, however, which may be restrained by a reserve of respect for Fionn. This disappoints Gráinne. When they are crossing a stream, some water splashes her leg, prompting her taunt that it is more daring than he. Not long afterwards their love is consummated, and soon Gráinne is with child. The pregnancy causes Gráinne to crave the red berries of the rowan tree retrieved from Tír Tairngire [the land of promise] – now found in the forest of Dubros in Co. Sligo – and guarded by a one-eyed surly troll named Searbhán. This ugly ogre, skilled in magical arts, is a formidable guard of the berries, but Diarmait learns how to turn his own weapon, an iron club, against him. Both mother-and father-to-be feast on the berries, finding those on the highest branch to be the most delicious.
While Diarmait is aloft, Fionn and the pursuing fianna come to rest under the very same rowan tree. The men try to relax by playing the chess-like boardgame of fidchell. Looking down, undetected, Diarmait sees that his ally Oisín is getting the worst of the match with Fionn. The skilful lover then aims berries toward specific points on the board, indicating the best next move, and so determines the outcome of three successive matches. Recognizing how the games have been won, Fionn demands that Diarmait show himself. In complying, though, Diarmait gives Gráinne three more kisses before Angus Óg can spirit her off to his residence at Brug na Bóinne in the Boyne valley. Diarmait once more escapes by leaping over the heads of his pursuers.
The lovers retreat to safety at Céis Chorrain [Keshcorran], Co. Sligo, where they rear four or five children and live peacefully. Diarmait easily turns back further attempts to capture them. In some versions Fionn contents himself with another of Cormac’s daughters, but in most he still longs for his betrothed. Eventually, Angus Óg negotiates a peace between the chieftain and the pursued, and so the fugitive lovers can come to rest, almost like a settled domestic couple. One night Diarmait’s sleep is troubled by the cry of a hound on the scent, a beckoning to return to the chase. Ignoring Gráinne’s warning of the implicit danger, he leaves his bed to join the hunt with his former comrades. Fionn has organized a boar hunt near Ben Bulben in Sligo. In some versions Fionn warns Diarmait of his
geis
never to hunt pig; in others he is silent. The old chieftain certainly knows the danger to Diarmait, which would deliver a widowed Gráinne to her betrothed, but the young man is also a warrior who had been nearly a surrogate son. Diarmait knows what he is entering upon but happily rejoins his brothers-in-arms. But the hunt does not go well: Diarmait’s arms are useless. The boar charges Diarmait as all expect and gores him mortally. This leads to Fionn’s most odious scene in the story. Standing over the wounded Diarmait, Fionn gloats that all the women of Ireland should see him now that his beauty has been so sullied. Nearly breathless, Diarmait nonetheless reminds his old captain that he has the power to heal this grievous wound by carrying water in his magical hands. Fionn’s grandson Oscar seconds this plea for help, with which Fionn reluctantly complies. Finding water nearby, he cups his hands to carry a quantity back to the stricken Diarmait, but when
he arrives it has all drained away. This half-hearted attempt to save the rival is repeated twice more until, at last, Diarmait succumbs.
The remainder of the story is told in many ways. Sometimes Gráinne exhorts her sons to wreak vengeance upon Fionn. In others she wears widow’s weeds, mourning Diarmait until her own death. In still others – the versions that remain popular with English-language adapters of the story – she is reconciled with Fionn. Stories from oral tradition portray Gráinne harshly as a lewd woman, unworthy of Diarmait’s chastity. In the Fenian ballads surviving in the seventeenth-century collection
Duanaire Finn
, Gráinne puts aside her disgust with Fionn’s age and his vile treatment of Diarmait, and embraces him in marriage.