Preface

If you ever listen to a professional storyteller, amongst the “standalone” stories they will often tell, you are also likely to come across tales that are part of a cycle, or that are situated in a particular mythological or legendary context (a coherent and self-consistent “universe”, in other words). You know you’re in such a world when the storyteller suggests that “there are many other tales I could you about X, but they will have to wait for another day…”.

The Fenian Cycle, tales told of Fionn MacCumhaill (aka Finn Macool) and the Fianna, loyal defenders of Ireland, is one such cycle. As a novice storyteller, it has provided me with a doorway into the first set of connected tales that I have tried to tell from. This set of storynotes will document my journey through the tales. The collection will be a living one, subject to change at any point, which means that the order in which the sections appear in the table of contents may not be the order in which I first came across the stories associated with them, nor follow my emerging understanding of the connections between them.

That said, to try to preserve a further sense of the historical path I followed (which is also to say, the path I am still following), I will attempt to keep a record of the order in which I first told each of the tales, as well as notes on how I attempted to integrate them into, or make sense of them in the context of, my developing understanding of the world of the Fianna.

— Tony “Monty” Hirst, https://tistales.org.uk/about/monty/