Fianna

Nine men stand in a line across nine furrows of ploughed ground, each with a spear balanced in his hand. In front of them a young man has been set in a pit up to his belt. He has a shield, a hazel stick the length of his forearm, and nowhere to go. The nine throw together. If a single point draws blood, he climbs out and walks home, and nobody will ever call him one of the Fianna.

That was only the second test. The first was harder to bleed from but harder to pass: a candidate had to be a trained poet, master of the twelve books of verse, before anyone handed him a shield at all. After the pit came the woods. His hair was braided, he was given a short start, and the whole band came after him through the trees. He failed if they caught him, if a spear trembled in his hand, if a branch pulled one braid loose, or if a dry twig cracked under his foot. He had to clear a bough as high as his forehead and duck one as low as his knee without breaking stride, and draw a thorn from his heel at a full run. Then he was in.

The men who set those tests belong to legend, but the kind of band they describe was real. Early Irish law knows the fían well. It was a small company of free-born young men, often the sons of nobles, who had finished their fostering and had not yet come into the land that would make them householders. Until they did, they lived outside the settled world, hunting, raiding, hiring out their spears and learning their trade. They wore their hair long at the back with the front of the scalp shaved, and carried marks on their heads that are generally read as tattoos. The wolf and the deer seem to have been their emblems. Churchmen disliked them heartily, called them marauders and sons of death, and wrote with satisfaction about saints who talked them out of the life. Most of them went home in the end. They inherited, married, and became the kind of men who complained about fianna.

The storytellers took that rough institution and gave it a captain. Under Fionn mac Cumhaill the Fianna become a standing army of the high king at Tara, sworn to keep invaders off the coast. The year splits in two. From Samhain to Beltaine the nobles house and feed them, and they keep order in return. From Beltaine to Samhain they are on their own in the hills, living off what they kill and selling the skins. A summer evening in one of their camps is easy enough to see: the hounds flat out and panting in the bracken, a deer butchered beside a pit of water, and men dropping fire-heated stones into it one after another until the water seethes and the meat begins to cook. Someone washes the blood off his arms in the stream. Someone else is already making a verse about the chase.

They were never one happy family. The band was built from two great kindreds, the Clann Baíscne of Leinster and the Clann Morna of Connacht, and there was blood between them from the start, since it was Goll mac Morna who had killed Fionn’s father Cumhall and held the captaincy before the boy grew up to claim it. Fionn and Goll served side by side for years with that death lying unpaid between them. Around them gathered the names the cycle is made of: Fionn’s son Oisín the poet, Oisín’s son Oscar, the swift runner Caoilte, the handsome Diarmuid who ran off with Fionn’s bride, and bald, sharp-tongued Conán, who was nobody’s favourite and everybody’s entertainment.

What they could do followed from how they lived. They could outrun deer and track anything that left a print. They could fight in a rank or alone, feed themselves in any country, and turn the day’s work into poetry by nightfall. Their war cry, the Dord Fiann, was a low droning chant raised before and during battle, half a signal and half a threat. Asked long afterward what had carried them through, old Caoilte gave three things: truth in their hearts, strength in their arms, and deeds that matched their words.

Their limits were just as plain. They owned nothing. Their bread came from kings, and a king can change his mind. When Cairbre Lifechair took the high kingship he decided that the Fianna cost too much and presumed too much, and the old quarrel between the kindreds gave him allies inside the band. The two sides met at Gabhra. Oscar and Cairbre found each other in the press, and each gave the other his death wound. The tellings disagree about whether Fionn was even alive to see it; in one of them he comes to the field, finds his grandson dying, and raises the Dord Fiann one last time before he goes in among the enemy. By evening the Fianna were finished as a fighting force. Gabhra left a field of dead and a handful of old men.

Two of those old men had the longest road. Oisín and Caoilte are said to have lived on for generations, huge and grey and out of their time, until they met Saint Patrick and his clerks walking the roads of a Christian Ireland. The priests came barely to their waists. Patrick, once he had got over the size of them, asked for their stories, and had his scribes write the answers down. So the wild bands the Church had once cursed ended their career dictating their memoirs to a saint.

Some country people held that the matter was not closed even then: Fionn and his men lie asleep in a cave somewhere under the hills, and the Dord Fiann sounded three times will wake them. Later centuries borrowed the name freely. Nineteenth-century rebels called themselves Fenians, and the word still sits in the title of an Irish political party and on the cap badge of the Irish army.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Fianna in Irish mythology?

The Fianna were bands of hunter-warriors in Irish mythology, best known as the company led by Fionn mac Cumhaill in the Fenian Cycle. In the tales they serve the high king, guard Ireland’s coasts and spend the summer half of the year living by the hunt. Famous members include Oisín, Oscar, Caoilte, Diarmuid, Goll mac Morna and Conán.

Were the Fianna real?

The legendary Fianna are based on a real institution. Early Irish law describes the fían as a small band of free-born, landless young men who lived by hunting, raiding and mercenary work until they inherited property. The Church disapproved of these bands and called their members marauders and sons of death.

How did a warrior join the Fianna?

A candidate for the Fianna first had to be a poet who knew the twelve books of verse. He then stood in a waist-deep pit with a shield and a hazel stick while nine warriors threw spears at him, and failed if he was wounded. Finally he was chased through the woods with braided hair and failed if he was caught, loosened a braid or cracked a twig underfoot.

How did the Fianna end?

The Fianna were destroyed at the Battle of Gabhra. The high king Cairbre Lifechair turned against them, and the band split along the old feud between Clann Baíscne and Clann Morna. Oscar and Cairbre killed each other in the fighting, and only a few of the Fianna survived.

What was the Dord Fiann?

The Dord Fiann was the war cry of the Fianna, a deep droning chant raised before and during battle. It served as a signal among the warriors and as a way to frighten enemies. A later folk belief says that sounding it three times will wake Fionn and the Fianna from their sleep in a cave.

Related Entries

Finn mac Cumhal, Oisín, Caoilte mac Rónáin, Diarmuid Ua Duibhne, Gráinne, Salmon of Knowledge, Cormac mac Airt, Hill of Tara (Teamhair), Aengus Óg, Cathbad, Sídhe