The people's cycle: a warrior band living outside the settlements, hunting and fighting across a whole island, told by a poet who came back three hundred years late to find everyone he loved dead and Patrick preaching.
If the Ulster Cycle is aristocratic and grim, the Fenian Cycle is out of doors. Fionn mac Cumhaill leads the fianna — bands of young roving hunter-warriors, outside settled society by definition, living by hunting between Bealtaine and Samhain. Fionn is a warrior but also a seer and a poet: he burnt his thumb on the Salmon of Knowledge while cooking it for another man, and ever after had only to put his thumb in his mouth to know anything he needed to know.
The tales are hunts, quests, fights with giants, and above all the Pursuit. Gráinne, promised to the ageing Fionn, puts a geis on the young Diarmuid Ua Duibhne to take her away instead, and the two are chased across Ireland for sixteen years — which is why almost every county has a dolmen the local people call the bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne. It ends at Benbulben in Sligo, where Diarmuid is gored by a boar and Fionn, who could heal any man with water carried in his hands, lets it run through his fingers twice.
The frame of the whole cycle is the strangest and best thing in it. In Acallam na Senórach, the Colloquy of the Ancients (around 1200, eight thousand lines, the longest surviving work of medieval Irish literature), Caílte and Oisín have somehow outlived the fianna by centuries and meet St Patrick. They travel Ireland with him, and at each place they tell him what happened there, and Patrick's scribe writes it down. The old world explaining itself to the new one, courteously, and being recorded rather than condemned.
Oisín's own ending is the story every Irish child knows: away to Tír na nÓg with Niamh, three years that were three hundred, and a warning not to touch Irish ground. The saddle-girth breaks, he falls, and the years land on him all at once — an old man on a road, in a country of small people who have never heard of his father.
9 places on the atlas belong to this cycle. They are real: you can stand in every one of them.
The leader of the fianna, roving bands of hunter-warriors, and the central figure of the Fenian Cycle. He was a seer and poet as well as a warrior: he burnt his thumb on the Salmon of Knowledge and could afterwards learn anything by putting it in his mouth. Anglicised as Finn McCool.
In the folk tale, yes — as a road to Scotland to fight the giant Benandonner, escaping by having his wife disguise him as a baby. That story is later folklore rather than medieval literature; the Causeway is 60-million-year-old basalt, and the medieval Fionn is a hunter-warrior, not a giant.
The Land of the Young, an Otherworld across the western sea where nobody ages. Oisín went there with Niamh for what he thought were three years; three hundred had passed in Ireland, and when he touched the ground on his return they all caught him at once.
Because the pursuit lasted sixteen years and the couple were said never to sleep two nights in the same place. Folk tradition attached their name to megalithic tombs across the country — the tombs are Neolithic, thousands of years older than the story.
Christian monks, from about the eighth century onward — the only literate class in early medieval Ireland. They were recording an oral tradition that was already old and pagan, and they revised it to fit Christian learning, which is why the gods appear as an ancient people rather than as gods.
Is there a version your family tells? Half of this survived because somebody kept saying it out loud. If the story is different where you are from — a different ending, a different hill — we would like to hear it.
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