The Poem of Finn mac Cumhaill

 

This wonderful poem attributed to Finn was translated by Lady Augusta Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (John Murray, 1904), and is part of the medieval tradition of poetry in praise of spring and summer (in comparison to the harshness of winter). As to the age of the poem, the Fenian Cycle which relates the deeds of Finn mac Cumhaill dates in written form to the 8^th century. The poem follows a brief account of how Finn received his poetic powers (by accident). 

The prophetic, wisdom-giving water of the well of the moon, guarded by three women of the supernatural Tuatha de Danaan, reminds me of the well or spring of the dwarf Mimir in Norse mythology, from which Odin drank to obtain wisdom and understanding, giving one of his eyes for the privilege; also to the spring of Urđr (fate), guarded by the Norns, three maidens whose daily task was to water Yggdrasil the World-Tree with its pure waters. The accidental splash that gets into young Finn’s mouth comes in addition to a previous adventure when, roasting the Salmon of Knowledge for the poet Finegas, he burns his thumb while ‘putting down a blister that rose on the skin’, and sucks the burn to cool it: ‘from that time Finn had the knowledge that came from the nuts of the nine hazels of wisdom that grow beside the well that is below the sea.’ A similar story is told in the Mabinogion about the Welsh bard Taliesin.

Whoever wrote the poem clearly knew and loved landscape and nature. We’re there with him (or her), hearing the rustling of the rushes and the song of the cuckoo, the murmur of ‘the sad restless sea’: a paean of joy to ‘May without fault, of beautiful colours.’

 

There was a well of the moon belonging to Beag, son of Buan, of the Tuatha de Danaan, and whoever would drink out of it would get wisdom, and after a second drink he would get the gift of foretelling. And the three daughters of Beag, son of Buan, had charge of the well, and they would not part with a vessel of it for anything less than red gold. And one day Finn chanced to be hunting in the rushes near the well, and the three women ran to hinder him from coming to it, and one of them, that had a vessel of the water in her hand, threw it at him to stop him, and a share of the water went into his mouth. And from that out he had all the knowledge that the water of that well could give.

          And he learned the three ways of poetry; and this is the poem he made to show he had got his learning well:–

 

“It is the month of May is the pleasant time; its face is beautiful; the blackbird sings his full song, the living wood is his holding, the cuckoos are singing and ever singing; there is a welcome before the brightness of the summer.

          “Summer is lessening the rivers, the swift horses are looking for the pool; the heath spreads out its long hair, the weak white bog-down grows. A wildness comes on the heart of the deer; the sad restless sea is asleep.

          “Bees with their little strength carry a load reaped from the flowers; the cattle go up muddy to the mountains; the ant has a good full feast.

          “The harp of the woods is playing music; there is colour on the hills and a haze on the full lakes, and entire peace upon every sail.

          “The corncrake is speaking, a loud-voiced poet; the high lonely waterfall is singing a welcome to the warm pool, the talking of the rushes has begun.

          “The light swallows are darting; the loudness of music is around the hill; the fat soft mast is budding; there is grass on the trembling bogs.

          “The bog is as dark as the feathers of the raven; the cuckoo makes a loud welcome; the speckled salmon is leaping; as strong is the leaping of the swift fighting man.

          “The man is gaining; the girl is in her comely growing power; every wood is without fault from the top to the ground, and every wide good plain.

          “A flock of birds pitches in the meadow; there are sounds in the green fields, there is in them a clear rushing stream.

          “There is a hot desire on you for the racing of horses; twisted holly makes a leash for the hound; a bright spear has been shot into the earth, and flag-flower is golden under it.

          “A weak little lasting bird is singing at the top of his voice; the lark is singing clear tidings; May without fault, of beautiful colours. 

“I have another story for you; the ox is lowing, the winter is creeping in, the summer is gone. High and cold the wind, low the sun, cries are about it; the sea is quarrelling.

          “The ferns are reddened and their shape is hidden; the cry of the wild goose is heard; the cold has caught the wings of the birds; it is the time of ice-frost, hard, unhappy.”

 

Picture credit:

Horseman: detail from the Book of Kells, circa 800 AD: Trinity College Library MS A. I 58. (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Spells of Sleep, Enchanted Apple Boughs

 

Following my series of posts on 'Enchanted Sleep and Sleepers' (see links: #1, #2 and #3), here is a sort of appendix: three tales from Irish mythology. The Fenian Cycle tells how Finn son of Cumhail once tried to wed a woman of the Sidhe. He was hunting on the mountain Bearnas Mor with his companions of the Fianna, when a great wild pig turned on their hounds and killed most of them. Then Finn’s hound Bran got a grip on it. It began to scream, and at the noise a tall man came out of the hill. He asked Finn to let the pig go. Finn agreed, and the man led them into the hill of the Sidhe and struck the pig with his Druid rod. At once, it changed into a beautiful young woman whom he called Scathach, the Shadowy One. Whether this is the same Scathach who in the Ulster Cycle teaches warrior-craft to Cuchulain on the Isle of Skye, I do not know. Maybe! The extracts that follow are from Lady Augusta Gregory’s translations in Gods and Fighting Men, 1904.)

And the tall man made a great feast for the Fianna, and then Finn asked the young girl in marriage, and the tall man, her father, said he would give her to him that very night.

            But when night came on, Scathach asked for a harp to be brought to her. One string it had of iron, and one of bronze, and one of silver. And when the iron string would be played, it would set all the hosts of the world crying and ever crying; and when the bright bronze string would be played, it would set them all laughing from the one day to the same hour on the morrow; and when the silver string would be played, all the men of the whole world would fall into a long sleep.

            And it is the sleepy silver string the Shadowy One played upon, till Finn and Bran and all his people were in their heavy sleep.

            And when they awoke at the rising of the sun on the morrow, it is outside on the mountain of Bearnas they were, where they first saw the wild pig. 

In another legend, Bran son of Febal also falls asleep to Otherworldly music: 

One day, in the neighbourhood of his stronghold, Bran went about alone, when he heard music behind him. As often as he looked back, ‘twas still behind him the music was. At last he fell asleep at the music, such was its sweetness. When he awoke from his sleep, he saw close by him a branch of silver with white blossoms, nor was it easy to distinguish the bloom from that branch. 

Bran takes the branch into his royal hall, where a strange woman appears and sings: 

A branch of the apple-tree from Emain

I bring, like those one knows:

Twigs of white silver are on it,

Crystal brows with blossoms. 

After many verses praising the beauty of her home, Emain, the Land of Women, she takes the branch from Bran and vanishes, commanding him to follow her across the sea. Bran sets out with three coracles of nine men each. On the voyage they meet the sea-god Manannan mac Lir driving his chariot over the waves; the god explains that what to Bran and his men seems to be the wild ocean, for him is a fresh plain full of flowers. Arriving at the Land of Women, Bran and his men each take a lover and stay for what feels to be only a year, until his comrade Nechtán mac Colbrain begins to long for Ireland. The woman of the silver branch allows Bran to leave with his companions, but warns them not to set foot on Ireland’s shore. On nearing land, Bran calls out his name to the folk on shore – to discover that centuries have passed and he is now a figure of legend. Nechtán leaps from the boat and crumbles into ashes, and after recounting his story from the boat, Bran sails away, never to be seen again. 

A visitation similar to this Otherworld woman with her sleep-bringing silver branch comes to Cormac, grandson of Conn, King of Teamhair: 

And this is the way it happened. He was by himself in Teamhair one time, and he saw an armed man coming towards him, quiet, with high looks, and having grey hair; a shirt ribbed with gold thread next his skin, broad shoes of white bronze between his feet and the ground, a shining branch having nine apples of red gold on his shoulder. And it is delightful the sound of that branch was, and no one on earth would keep in mind any want or trouble or tiredness when that branch was shaken for him, and whatever trouble there might be on him, he would forget it. 

A complicated story follows. The stranger – who in fact is Manannan mac Lir – gives the branch to Cormac on the condition that he shall receive three gifts in return, whenever he shall ask for them. Perhaps foolishly Cormac agrees to this carte blanche and accepts the branch. 

He went back then into the royal house, and there was wonder on all the people when they saw the branch. And he shook it at them, and it put them all to sleep from that day to the same time on the morrow. 

Wondrous though it is, this sounds most inconvenient... Then things get trickier. The stranger asks first for Cormac’s daughter, then his son, and spirits them both away. Everyone grieves, but when Cormac shakes the branch they forget all their sorrow. For the third gift, the stranger Cormac for his wife. This is granted, but then Cormac sets out to find and rescue his family. He enters a land where Riders of the Sidhe are thatching a hall with the white wings of birds. After more wonders, he comes to a great king’s house and is welcomed as a guest by a tall man and lovely woman. The man is Manannan himself, who after showing him many marvels, sings him to sleep. When Cormac wakes his wife and children are standing before him: and because Cormac kept his word, Manannan swears friendship with him and gives him a magical gold cup which can judge between truth and lies. Next day, Cormac wakes in his own house, his family restored. 

There is no real lapse of time in Cormac’s tale or in Finn’s. An enchanted sleep of a night or twenty-four hours can hardly compare with the lost centuries experienced by characters like King Herla, Rip van Winkle or the Sleeping Beauty. Nevertheless, all three of these tales involve a visit to the Otherworld: the under-hill dwelling of the Sidhe in the adventure of Finn, reminiscent of the caves visited by many characters in my first two posts; and the Land of Women and the Land of Promise - alternative names for the same Otherworld island, the home of Manannan mac Lir. In each tale the heroes cross a boundary between this world and another: they go under the earth or pass over water. In all three tales, a musical instrument figures: the three-stringed harp played by Scathach, the branch of silver apple-blossom which enchants Bran and the branch of golden apples which Cormac desires. These produce enchanting music which sends the hearers into a deep sleep. And the fact that the magical branches are apple-branches is suggestive. 

Miranda Aldhouse-Green, commenting on the story of Bran in her 2015 book The Celtic Myths, says of the Land of Women: 

This Otherworld was the Land of Forever Young (Tir na n’Og) but the enchantment ceased to work if humans returned to their own world of time. The name Avalon, the legendary island burial-place of King Arthur, means ‘Apple-Tree Island’. According to medieval French Arthurian romances, such as the story of the Holy Grail, Avalon was situated at Glastonbury, an ‘island’ in the middle of the marshy, low-lying and apple-rich Somerset Levels. 

Another name for Manannan’s Otherworld island is ‘Emain Ablach’ or ‘Emain of the Apples’, and according to James Mackillup’s wonderful Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (1998), ‘Emain Ablach appears to be one of several Celtic contributions to the Arthurian concept of Avalon’. The apple, he says, was ‘celebrated in numerous functions in Celtic mythology, legend and folklore; it is an emblem of fruitfulness and sometimes a means to immortality.’ I suspect that this immortality is equivalent to death: those given it possess it only for so long as they remain in the Otherworld. To make the return journey, to set foot on mortal soil – is to re-enter time and crumble into dust. 

There is doubtless much more to be said about the enchantments that cause sleep in folklore and fairy tales (think of the Hand of Glory!), but I will revisit the theme another time. 

Picture credits:

The Voyage of Bran: Bran meets Manannan mac Lir.  Tapestry by Terry the Weaver, 1996

Thou Shalt Not Eat the Flesh of a Dog!

‘Geasa’ – the magical prohibitions or tabus laid upon Irish heroes such as Cú Chulainn – must have been very difficult and frustrating to endure, especially since it seems to have been the fate of most heroes eventually to violate them.

You remember how the young Setanta, son of Sualtim, gained the name Cú Chulain (‘Chulain’s Hound’), after killing the fierce guard-dog belonging to the smith Chulain? When Chulain complains of his hound’s death, the boy offers to make it up to him:

“If there is a whelp of the same breed to be had in Ireland, I will rear him and train him until he is as good a hound as the one killed, and until that time, Chulain,” he said, “I myself will be your watch-dog, to guard your goods and your cattle and your house.”

(Translation by Lady Augusta Gregory, ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne’,1907)

After that, Cú Chulain was laid under two geasa: never to refuse a meal offered to him by a woman, and never to eat the flesh of a dog.  At the end of his life, when he is riding out to fight against Maeve’s great army, the geasa are used against him by three witches at least as deadly as those in 'Macbeth':

After a while he saw three hags, and they blind of the left eye, before him in the road, and they having a venomous hound they were cooking with charms on rods of the rowan tree.  And he was going by them, for he knew it was not for his good they were there.

But one of the hags called to him, “Stop a while with us, Cuchulain.”  “I will not stop with you,” said Cuchulain.  “That is because we have nothing better than a dog to give you,” said the hag.  “If we had a grand, big cooking hearth, you would stop and visit us, but because it is only a little that we have, you will not stop.”

…Then he went over to her, and she gave him the shoulder-blade of the hound out of her left hand, and he ate it out of his left hand. And he put it down on his left thigh, and the hand that took it was struck down, and the thigh he put it on was struck through and through, so that the strength that was in them before left them.

It couldn’t be more ominous, and presently, in forlorn battle against the odds, Cú Chulain is mortally wounded and straps himself to a pillar-stone, or standing stone, west of the lake of Muirthemne, so that he will not meet his death lying down: and his horse, the Grey of Macha, defends him with its teeth and hooves, until at last the hero dies and the crows descend upon him.  Fans of ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ will notice that Alan Garner has used this scene for the death of the dwarf Durathror, who straps himself to the pillar of Clulow on Shuttlingslow, defending Colin and Susan from the morthbrood.

In ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, which is another part of the Ulster cycle, King Conaire, whose father was a magical bird-man, is placed under a truly startling variety of geasa:

“Do not go righthandwise round Tara and lefthandwise around Bregia. Do not hunt the evil beasts of Cerna.  Do not go out beyond Tara every ninth night; do not settle the quarrel of two of your own people; do not sleep in a house you can see the firelight shining from after sunset; do not let one woman or one man come into the house where you are after sunset; do not let three Reds go before you to the House of Red.”

But of course, one by one Conaire breaks all the geasa. He goes out to make peace between two of his subject lords, and travels the wrong way around Tara and Bregia to avoid raiders; he hunts the beasts of Cerna without realising what they are. 

And it was the Sidhe that had made that Druid mist of smoke about him, because he had begun to break his bonds.

At last, on his way to find shelter in the hostelry of his friend Da Derga of Leinster, with its seven doors, Conaire sees himself preceded by three horsemen clad in red:

Three red bucklers they bore, and three red spears were in their hands: three red steeds they bestrode, and three red heads of hair were on them. Red were they all, both body and hair and raiment, both steeds and men.

(Translation by Dr Whitley Stokes, ‘The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel’, 1902)

Knowing another geas has been broken, Conaire sends his young son Lefriflaith after the men to ask who they are.  Lefriflaith calls out to them three times, and the third time one of them calls back that they are three of the Sidhe, banished from the elfmounds:

Lo, my son, great the news.  Weary are the steeds we ride.  We ride the steeds of Donn Tetscorach from the elf-mounds. Though we are alive we are dead. Great are the signs: destruction of life: sating of ravens: feeding of crows: strife of slaughter: wetting of sword-edge, shields with broken bosses after nightfall.  Lo, my son!

The incantatory prose of Whitley Stokes’ translation has again been wonderfully taken up and adapted by Alan Garner in the chapter called ‘The Horsemen of Donn’ of ‘The Moon of Gomrath’, when Colin and Susan kindle fire on the mound:

They were dressed all in red: red were their tunics and red their cloaks; red their eyes and red their long manes of hair bound back with circlets of red gold; three red shields on their backs and three red spears in their hands… Red were they all, weapons and clothing and hair; both horses and men.

“Who – who are you?” whispered Colin.  “What do you want?”

The middle horseman stood in his saddle and raised a glowing spear over his head:

“Lo, my son, great the news!  Wakeful are the steeds we ride, the steeds from the ancient mound.  Wakeful are we, the Horsemen of Donn, Einheriar of the Herlathing. Lo, my son!”

King Conaire’s last two geasa are broken when a lone woman comes to the door of Da Derga’s hostel (or inn):  she has the Druid sight, and ill-wishes the king:

“It is what I see for you,” she said, “that nothing of your skin or of your flesh shall escape from the place you are in, except what the birds will bring away in their claws. And let me come into the house now.”

With great unwillingness the king allows the woman to enter, though not unnaturally “none of them felt easy in their minds after what she had said.”  Finally, firelight from the hostel is spotted by Conaire’s enemy, Ingcel the One-Eyed and his army of reivers.  They attack the hostel, great destruction is wrought, and Conaire dies.

A last example, just as ill-fated, is the geasa placed on Diarmuid by Gráinne, daughter of King Cormac and the promised bride of Finn MacCool. At the wedding feast Gráinne is put off by Finn’s age (older than her father!) and falls in love with one of his warriors, young Diarmuid.  After sending Finn a cup that makes all who drink of it fall asleep, she asks Diarmuid to marry her, and when he refuses, she says,

I place thee under geasa, and under the bonds of heavy druidical spells, that thou take me for thy wife before Finn and the others awaken.

(Translation by P W Joyce, ‘Old Celtic Romances’, 1879)

Diarmuid replies:

Evil are those geasa thou hast put on me, and evil, I fear, will come of them.

He asks those of his friends whom Gráinne has not put to sleep what he should do, and they all agree he must follow the geas even if it results in his death, which of course it eventually does, though not before many others have died first. Wounded by a boar, Diarmuid explains to Finn that Gráinne ‘put me under heavy geasa, which for all the wealth of the world I would not break,’ and begs Finn to save his life with a drink of water cupped in his healing hands.  But, thinking of Gráinne, Finn spills the water three times and Diarmuid dies.

Maybe geasa were just a poetical, literary device, the equivalent of the prophecies about Greek heroes like Achilles and Oedipus, where the narrative imperative says that Achilles’ heel will be his undoing; that Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, etc. If not, though – if they ever had any real currency – you have to wonder. Could anyone use them? If so, how often? How carelessly?  Could you do the equivalent of putting your children under geasa to pick up their socks and tidy their rooms?   Or would that kind of thing backfire just as badly as most of them seem to have done in the tales?  Geasa seem to have been impossible to refuse, however arbitrary or awkward they might be. In my next post, I’m going to take a closer look at how they actually operate, both in fiction and – maybe – in real life.  

Picture credits:

Cuchulain in Battle by Joseph Christian Leyendecker, Wikimedia Commons

The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner, cover by George Adamson