Fionn and the Fianna

At a Glance

• Central figures: Fionn mac Cumhaill, leader of the Fianna; his father Cumhal, slain by Goll mac Morna; the poet Finnegas; and the warrior band itself - Oisín, Diarmuid, Caílte, Goll, and Oscar among them.
• Setting: Ireland, from the banks of the River Boyne to the forests and hills of Munster and Connacht, during the reign of Cormac mac Airt as High King at Tara.
• The turn: The boy Demne, raised in hiding, tastes the Salmon of Knowledge on the Boyne and gains the wisdom that will let him reclaim his father’s place at the head of the Fianna.
• The outcome: Fionn proves himself at Tara by killing Aillen, the fire-breathing creature of the sídhe who burned the hall each Samhain, and Cormac mac Airt grants him command of the Fianna over Goll mac Morna.
• The legacy: The Fianna became the defining warrior institution of Irish tradition, and the stories of Fionn’s band - the Fenian Cycle - survived as the great body of tales told across Gaelic Ireland and Scotland for a thousand years.

The boy had no name anyone would remember. His mother called him Demne, and she sent him into the deep woods of Slieve Bloom with two warrior women who taught him to run and to fight and to sleep on hard ground. His father was dead before his birth. Cumhal, captain of the Fianna, had been killed at the Battle of Cnucha by Goll mac Morna, who took leadership of the warband for himself. The child’s mother hid him because Goll’s people were hunting every son of Cumhal’s line.

He grew up fast and wild. By the time he was ten he could outrun deer. By the time he was twelve he had beaten boys twice his age at hurling on the green at Tara, and the defeated boys asked his name, and someone said: look at him, fair-haired - fionn. The name stuck. It was the name that would follow him the rest of his life and far beyond it.

The Salmon on the Boyne

Fionn came to the River Boyne looking for knowledge. He found Finnegas instead.

Finnegas was an old poet who had spent seven years on the bank of the Boyne waiting for one fish. This was the Salmon of Knowledge - bradán feasa - which fed on the hazelnuts that dropped into the Well of Wisdom at the river’s source. Whoever first tasted the salmon’s flesh would possess all the knowledge in the world. Finnegas had devoted his life to this single catch.

The day Fionn arrived, Finnegas pulled the salmon from the water. He set the boy to cook it over a fire and warned him: do not eat any of it. Fionn turned the fish on the spit. A blister rose on the salmon’s skin. He pressed his thumb against it to push it down, and the hot fat burned him. He put his thumb in his mouth.

When Finnegas came back and looked at the boy’s face, he knew. Something had changed behind the eyes.

Did you eat any of it?

Fionn told him about the blister. Finnegas sat down heavily on the bank. Seven years, and the knowledge had gone to a boy who burned his thumb. He told Fionn to eat the rest. There was no point keeping it now.

From that day, whenever Fionn put his thumb to his teeth, he could see what was hidden - what was coming, what had been, what others meant to do.

Aillen of the Burning Breath

Every year at Samhain, when the doors between worlds thinned to nothing, a creature came out of the sídhe to Tara. His name was Aillen mac Midgna. He played music on a silver harp - a music so sweet it put every warrior in the hall to sleep - and then he opened his mouth and breathed fire over the roof beams until the great hall burned. Year after year the men of Tara rebuilt. Year after year it burned again. No one could stay awake against the music.

Fionn came to Tara that Samhain. He was young, unknown except to those boys he’d beaten at hurling. He went before Cormac mac Airt, the High King, and offered to stop Aillen. Cormac looked at the boy and asked what he wanted in return.

What is mine by right. Leadership of the Fianna. My father’s place.

Cormac agreed.

An old warrior of the Fianna - Fiacha mac Conga, who had served under Cumhal - gave Fionn a spear with a head of dark bronze. When the music begins, he told the boy, press the flat of the blade against your forehead. The spear’s venom will keep you awake.

That night the fire on Tara’s hill burned down to embers and the harp-music drifted in from the dark, sweet as sleep itself. Men slumped where they sat. Fionn pressed the spear-point to his skin and felt its cold bite and stayed on his feet, shaking, alone in a hall full of sleeping warriors.

Aillen came through the door wreathed in blue flame. Fionn drove the spear into him. The creature fell. Fionn cut off his head and set it on a stake above the gate of Tara before the dawn came.

The Band Assembled

Cormac kept his word. Goll mac Morna stepped aside - not gracefully, but he stepped aside, and he served under Fionn for years afterward, and the tension between the two of them never fully died. The Fianna were Fionn’s now.

He shaped them into something harder and stranger than an ordinary warband. To join the Fianna, a man had to stand in a hole dug waist-deep and defend himself with a hazel stick and a shield while nine warriors threw spears at him. If he was wounded, he failed. He had to run through the forest at full speed while men pursued him, and if a branch cracked underfoot, or if his braided hair caught on a twig, or if his hands trembled when they were checked at the end, he failed. He had to leap a branch at the height of his forehead and pass under one at the height of his knee without slowing. He had to draw a thorn from his foot while still running.

And he had to know twelve books of poetry.

The Fianna were not just killers. They were poets, hunters, keepers of order in the wild places between the kingdoms. They lived in the open, in the forests and hills, outside the walls of any king’s fort. Oisín, Fionn’s son, became the greatest poet among them. Diarmuid Ua Duibhne became the most beautiful. Caílte mac Rónáin could outrun any horse in Ireland. Oscar, Fionn’s grandson, hit harder than anyone alive.

The Hound’s Long Reign

Fionn led the Fianna through decades of hunts and battles and strange encounters with people who came out of the sídhe and did not always go back in. He fought the armies of Lochlainn. He judged disputes for Cormac. He married, lost wives, buried sons. His thumb still told him things when he pressed it to his teeth, and sometimes what it told him was bitter.

The Fianna held because Fionn held them. When he grew old and the quarrel with Goll mac Morna finally broke into open violence, when Diarmuid died on the slopes of Ben Bulben under a boar’s tusk and Fionn’s slow hand with the healing water came too late, when Oscar fell at the Battle of Gabhra and the Fianna shattered against the High King’s armies - even then, the thing Fionn had built did not vanish. It passed into the keeping of the poets.

Oisín, the last of them, survived into a changed Ireland. He spoke the stories to anyone who would listen. The forests were the same forests. The rivers were the same rivers. The Fianna were gone from them, but their names had settled into the hills and the water and the names of places, and they stayed.