Finn mac Cumhal

Also Known As: Old Irish Find mac Cumaill; Modern Irish Fionn mac Cumhaill; born Demne; anglicised Finn McCool; Scottish Gaelic Fionn mac Cumhail
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Irish Mythology, Celtic Mythology, Scottish Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He can call up hidden knowledge at will by putting his burnt thumb between his teeth, a gift taken from a salmon he cooked but did not eat.
Role in Mythos: He is the leader of the fian, the roving band of hunter-warriors who live outside the settled kingdoms, and he is a poet and a seer as much as a fighter.
Relation to Humans: Finn is himself mortal, a man with a birth, a beard of grey hairs at the end, and a grave that the annalists dated. Ordinary people met his fianna as protectors, as a nuisance quartered on them for the winter, or as a rumour crossing the ridge above the tree line.

Seven years the poet Finnéces had waited on the bank of the Boyne, watching one particular pool. He was there for a fish. It had been foretold that when he ate the salmon of Fec’s Pool nothing in the world would stay hidden from him, so he watched the water while the reeds went brown and green and brown again, and eventually the salmon was caught. He handed it to the boy who had come to learn poetry from him and told him to cook it and to eat nothing of it.

The boy brought it back cooked. The poet looked at him and asked whether he had eaten any of the fish.

No, said the boy. He had burned his thumb, and afterwards he had put the thumb in his mouth.

That is the whole of it. Nine centuries of Fenian literature turn on a scalded thumb and a boy telling the truth. The poet asked his name, and the boy said Demne, and the poet told him that Finn was his name now, and that the salmon had been given to Finn to eat, and that he was truly the Finn of the prophecy. Then the boy ate the rest of the fish. Ever after, whenever he set that thumb between his teeth and chanted, whatever he had not known was shown to him.

He had come to the river running. His father Cumall had been killed at the battle of Cnucha, fighting for the leadership of the fian of Ireland, and it was Goll mac Morna who took his head and his treasure-bag, and it was Goll who had lost an eye in the same fight and gained the name that means one-eyed. Cumall left a pregnant wife. When the child was born, his mother did not dare keep him. Two women took him instead, Bodbmall the druidess and the Grey One of Luachair, and carried him into the forest of Slieve Bloom, and reared him there in a hunting-booth in the trees while the sons of Morna quartered the country looking for a boy to kill.

He grew up outdoors and unwatched. His first kill was a duck on a lake, the shot cutting away wing and feather so that the bird dropped stunned into the water and he waded out and carried it home. Later, out on the ridge with his two guardians, a herd of wild deer went over the mountain, and one of the old women said it was a pity they could not lay hands on one. He said he could. He ran the herd down, took two bucks alive, and brought them back to the booth, and after that he did the hunting.

The name came from strangers. On the plain of the Liffey he found boys playing hurling on a green, and joined them, and beat them, and beat a quarter of them together, and then a third, and then all of them at once. They asked his name and he told them, and their lord asked what he looked like, and they said a shapely fair youth. Then let Demne be called Finn, said the lord, the fair. He came back the next week and the boys challenged him to drown them in a lake, and he did. He drowned nine of them, and went back into the forest, and the name stuck.

That is the man the earliest text gives, and he is not what the tourist trade sells. There is no giant here. No basalt road across the sea to Scotland, no rival flung across the water, no cradle and no borrowed baby clothes. Those are late tales, folk stories grown up around a coastline, and they are not in the medieval record at all. What is in the record is a fénnid, a young man living by hunting outside the walls of the settled kingdoms, taking service with one king and then another under a false name, killing a wild sow on a Munster road for a smith’s daughter, learning the three arts that make a poet and composing a lay about May-day that has more blackbirds and bog-cotton in it than blood. The harp of the forest sounds music, he sang, and the water-flag is gold beneath the shaft of light. Ireland’s most famous warrior first proved himself with a nature poem.

The Fenian world thickened around him for a thousand years afterwards. Around 1200 someone wrote the Acallam na Senórach, the longest thing to survive from medieval Ireland, in which two survivors of the fianna, Finn’s son Oisín and his kinsman Caílte, have outlived everyone and are still walking the roads when Patrick arrives with the new religion. They travel the country with him. At every ford and hill Caílte stops and tells the saint what happened there, and the whole vast catalogue of hunts and quarrels and drownings is delivered by an old man pointing at scenery. The hounds Bran and Sceólang, the deer-wife Sadb, the elopement of Diarmuid and Gráinne, most of what a reader today thinks of as the Finn story, belongs to that swelling later tradition and to the lays gathered up in books like the Duanaire Finn. And in 1761 a Scottish schoolmaster named James Macpherson published Fingal, an epic he claimed to have translated from a third-century bard called Ossian, which was largely his own composition. Fionn became Fingal, Oisín became Ossian, and Europe wept over both. Napoleon carried a copy.

The end, when the old texts get to it, is unusually bleak. Age came on Finn and his men noticed it, and one by one they drifted off to serve the king of Tara instead, until only a single man was left with him. He decided to test himself. His Leap was on the Boyne, so he went east along the river to the place where he had cleared it as a young man, and an old woman making curds on the way reminded him of a prophecy about a horn and poison, and he gave her his brooch and went on. He jumped. He fell between two rocks, struck his forehead, and his brains were dashed about him, and he died there in the gap. Fishermen found the body. One of them cut off his head and the others killed him for it, and then they carried the head into an empty house and boiled their fish and tried to divide it between them, and the fish would not divide. Three times it came out in three portions. From the hearth the severed head explained, politely, that it wanted its share.

Everything he could do came out of that one gift and out of the running. Knowledge on demand, poetry, prophecy, speed enough to keep pace with a champion who wore lead weights to slow himself down. What he could not do was stay young, and no thumb in the world tells a man how to hold a war-band together once his legs are going. The annalists, who treated him as a real king’s officer rather than a legend, put his death at Áth Brea on the Boyne in the year 283, killed by Aiclech son of Dubdriu and the sons of Urgriu of the Luaigni of Tara. The year after that, they record, the fianna were broken at the battle of Gabhair. He does not sleep under a hill in these pages, waiting for Ireland to need him. He is simply dead, and his men are scattered, and somebody is arguing about the fish.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Finn mac Cumhal?

Finn mac Cumhal was the leader of the fianna, the roving bands of hunter-warriors of Irish legend, and a poet and seer as well as a fighter. He was born Demne, the son of Cumall, who was killed before his birth at the battle of Cnucha. He is the central figure of the Fenian Cycle, the largest body of story in medieval Irish literature.

How did Finn mac Cumhal get his knowledge?

He got it by accident, from a salmon he was told not to eat. The poet Finnéces had watched the Boyne for seven years for the salmon of Fec’s Pool, and gave it to the boy to cook. Finn burned his thumb on it and put the thumb in his mouth, and from then on, whenever he set that thumb between his teeth and chanted, whatever he did not know was revealed to him.

Was Finn mac Cumhal a giant?

No. The giant who builds the Giant’s Causeway and hides in a cradle from a Scottish rival belongs to later popular folklore and to the tourist story of the Antrim coast. In the medieval Irish texts Finn is a mortal hunter-warrior and poet, described only as fair, and he dies an ordinary and rather grim death.

How did Finn mac Cumhal die?

In old age his men deserted him for the king of Tara, and he went to the Boyne to test his strength by leaping the river as he had in his youth. He fell between two rocks and was killed. Fishermen found the body, one of them cut off his head, and the Irish annals date the killing to the year 283 at Áth Brea on the Boyne.

Who were Oisín and Diarmuid?

Oisín was Finn’s son and Diarmuid Ua Duibhne one of his best warriors, and both belong to the wider Fenian tradition that grew up around Finn after the earliest texts. Oisín survives the fianna and tells their stories to Saint Patrick in the Acallam na Senórach. Diarmuid elopes with Gráinne, who had been promised to the ageing Finn, in the most famous of the later tales.