Introduction

Introduction#

A great many tales are there to be told of Fionn MacCumhaill and the Fianna, the roving band of warriors who had sworn to protect all Ireland. The same characters appear across many of the stories, which means their characters must remain consistent across the tales. If, like me, you have not been brought up in the tradition of Fianna stories, this raises an interesting question: how do we come to have a sense of the characters and the connected stories that they repeatedly feature in. Where should we start?

This living unbook project[1] is intended to capture my own personal journey into, and through, the tales of the Fianna. As with other storynotes projects, the same tales may well appear multiple times, demonstrating different ways in which the same tale has been told and providing a way to triangulate towards the core story points, as well as providing alternative tellings with which to get started on a particular tale.

In some respects, then, this work will become something of a reference book for me to look up notes on stories I intend to tell, or have told and will hopefully tell again. The books referred to are, in the main, out of copyright works that date back one hundred years or more: as a teller of traditional tales, part of my aim is to retell stories that contemporary to a time before now, and one of doing that is to forego a reliance on more recent references.

This work will also provide a reference to help me keep things consistent, particularly if I tell several of the tales to the same audience over an extended period of time. The characters will have their own histories, and their own personalities, and if I am to keep referring them to the same audiences, truth will have to be maintained and the world and its characters will have to remain consistent.

My own tellings will remain unwritten. I may well end up with particular ways of telling the same story that essentially unchanged from a previous telling, but that will be as much an artefact of memory and momentum rather than having learned a particular telling from a written down gold master version.

–Tony Hirst, Isle of Wight, August, 2022 and thereafter…

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Source Books#

For the early tales, I have tended to rely on:

Many of the tellings are translations or retellings of the same, earlier works, and so there is a certain amount of duplication. This may be useful, however, when rying to find a telling that works as a good basis for my own telling, triangulating on common story points, and also discovering particular turns of phrase that add colour or help elucidate or move the story along in an interesting or engaging way.

A Note on the Irish Fenian Cycle Versus the Scottish Ossianic Versions of the Tales#

Source books of tales relating to Fionn Mac Cumhail come to us from both Irish and Scottish Gaelic traditions. I have tended to focus on the Irish tradition. The Scottish tradition incorporates a set of Gaelic Poems, the Ossian poems, supposedly discovered by James Macpherson in the 18th century. This was a literary fraud, as for example described in John Smart’s James Macpherson : an episode in literature, 1905.

TO DO

https://archive.org/details/ossianossianicli00nuttiala Ossian and the Ossianic literature, 2nd dition by Nutt, Alfred Trübner, 1856-1910

Publication date 1910 (first edition 1899)

In collecting the various tales together in thus unbook, my intention is to put together an Irish traditional collection that can act as a set of storynotes to support my own tellings. If any stories leak in from the Scottish Ossian tradition, perhaps because they are stories that I like so much I want to tell them, or that give me a hook or jigsaw piece I feel I can use to pull some of the other pieces together, please forgive — and let me know…

Contents