The Boyhood of Fionn

He was a king, a seer and a poet. He was a lord with manifold and great train. He was our magician, our knowledgeable one, our soothsayer. All that he did was sweet with him. And, however, ye deem my testimony of Fionn excessive, and although ye hold my praising overstrained, nevertheless, and by the King that is above me, he was three times better than all I say.

Saint Patrick

Fionn got his first training among women. There is no wonder in that, for it is the pup's mother teaches it to fight, and women know that fighting is a necessary art although men pretend there are others that are better. These were the women druids, Bovmall and Lia Luachra.
It will be wondered why his own mother did not train him in the first natural savageries of his existence, but she could not do it. She could not keep him with her for dread of the clann-Morna. The sons of Morna had been fighting and intruiging for a long time to oust her husband, Uail, from the captaincy of the Fianna of Ireland, and they had ousted him at last by killing him. It was the only way they could get rid of such a man; but it was not an easy way, for what Fionn's father did not know in arms could not be taught to him even by Morna. Still, the hound that can wait will catch a hare at last, and even Mannanánn sleeps.
Fionn's mother was beautiful, long-haired Muirne: so she is always referred to. She was the daughter of Teigue, the son of Nuada from Faery, and her mother was Ethlinn. That is, her brother wsa Lugh of the Long Hand himself, and with a god, and such a god, for brother we may marvel that she could have been in dread for Morna or his sons, or of anyone. But women have strange lovers, strange fears, and these are so bound up with one another that the thing which is presented to us is not often the thing that is to be seen.
However it may be, when Uail died, Muirne got married again to the king of Kerry. She gave the child to Bovmall and Lia Luachra to rear, and we may be sure she have injunctions with him, and many of them. The youngster was brought to the woods of Slieve Bloom and was nursed there in secret.
It is likely the women were fond of Fionn, for other than him there was no life about them. He would be their life; and their eyes may have seemed twin benedictions resting on the small fair head. He was fair-haired, and it was for his fairness that he ws afterwards called Fionn; but at this period he was known as Deimne. They saw the food they put into his little frame reproduce itself lengthways and sideways in tough inches, and in springs and energies that crawled at first, and then toddled, and than ran. He had birds for playmates, but all the creatures that live in the woods must have been his comrades. There would have been for little Fionn long hours of lonely sunshine, when the world seemed just sunshine and a sky. There would have been hours as long, when existence passed like a shade among shadows, in the multitudinous tappings of rain that dripped from leaf to leaf in the wood, and slipped so to the ground. He would have known little snaky paths, narrow enough to be filled by his own small feet, or a goat's; and he would have wondered where they went, and have marvelled again to find that, wherever thay went, they came at last, through loops and twists of the branchy wood, to his own door. He may have thought of his own door as the beginning and end of the world, whence all things went, and whither all things came.
Perhaps he did not see the lark for a long time, but he would have heard him, far out of sight in the endless sky, thrilling and thrilling until the world seemed to have no other sound but that clear sweetness; and what a world it was to make that sound! Whistles and chirps, cooes and caws and croaks, would have grown familiar to him. And he could at last have told which brother of te great brotherhood was making the noise he heard at any moment. The wind too: he would have listened to its thousand voices as it moved in all seasons and in all moods. Perhaps a horse would stray into the thick screen about his home, and would look as solemnly on Fionn as Fionn did on it. Or, coming suddenly on him, the horse might stare, all a-cock with eyes and ears and nose, one long-drawn facial extension, ere he turned and bounded away with manes all over him and hooves all under him and tails all round him. A solemn-nosed, stern-eyes cow would amble and stamp in his wood to find a flyless shadow; or a strayed sheep would poke its gentle muzzle through leaves.
'A boy,' he might think, as he stared on a staring horse, 'a boy cannot wag his tail to keep the flies of,'and that lack may have saddened him. He may have thought that a cow can snort and be dignified at tha same moment, and that timidity is comely in a sheep. He would have scolded tha jackdaw, and tried to outwhistle the throstle, and wondered why his pipe got tired when the blackbird's didn't.
There would be flies to be watched, slender atoms in yellow gauze that flew, and filmy specks that flittered, and sturdy, thick-ribbed brutes that pounces like cats and bit like dogs and flew like lightning. He may have mourned for the spider in bad-luck who caught that fly.
There would be much to see and remember and compare, and there would be, always, his two guardians. The flies change from second to second; one cannot tell if this bird is a visitor or an inhabitant, and a sheep is just a sister to a sheep; but the women were as rooted as the house itself.

Were his nurses comely or harsh-looking? Fionn would not know. This was the one who picked him up when he fell, and that was the one who patted the bruise. This one said:'Mind you do not tumble in the well!' And that one:'Mind the little knees among the nettles.'
But he did tumble and record that the only notable thing about a well is that it is wet. And as for nettles, if they hit him, he hit back. He slashed into them with a stick and brought them low.
There was nothing in wells or nettles, only women dreaded them. One patronised women, and instructed them and comforted them, for they were afraid about one.
They thought that one should not climb a tree!
'Next week,' they said at last, 'you may climb this one,' and next week lived at the end of the world!
But the tree that was climbed was not worthwile when it had been climbed twice. There was a bigger one nearby. There were trees that no one could climb, with a vast shadow on one side and vaster sunshine on the other. It took a long time to walk round them, and you could not see their tops.
It was pleasant to stand on a branch that swayed and sprang, and it was good to stare at an impenetrable roof of leaves and then climb into it. How wonderful the loneliness was up there! When he looked down there was an undulating floor of leaves, green and green and greener to a very blackness of greeniness; and when he looked up there were leaves again, green and less green and not green at all, up to a very snow and blindness of greeniness; and above and below and around there was sway and motion, the whisper of leaf on leaf, and the eternal silence to which one listened and at which one tried to look.
When he was six years of age, his mother, beautiful, long-haired Muirne, came to see him. She came secretly, for she feared the sons of Morna, and she had paced through lonely places in many counties before she reached the hut in the wood, and the cot where he lay with his fists shut and sleep gripped in them.
He awakened to be sure. He would have one ear that would catch an unusual voice, one eye that would open, however sleepy the other one was. She took him in her arms and kissed him, and she sang a sleepy song until the small boy slept again.
we may be sure that the eye that could stay open stayed open that night as long as it could, and that the one ear listened to the sleepy song until the song got too low to be heard, until it was too tender to be felt vibrating among those soft arms, until Fionn was asleep again, with a new picture in his little head and a new notion to ponder on.
The mother of himself! His own mother!
But when he awakened she was gone.
She was going back secretly, in dread of the sons of Morna, slipping through the gloomy woods, keeping away from habitations, getting by desolate and lonely ways to her lord in Kerry.
Perhaps it was he who was afraid of the sons of Morna and perhaps she loved him.

The women druids, his guardians, belonged to his father's people. Bovmall was Uail's sister, and, consequently Fionn's aunt. Only such a blood-tie could have bound them to the clann-Baiscne, for it is not easy, having moved in the world of court and camp, to go hide with a baby in the wood; and to live, as they must have lived, in terror.
What stories they would have told the child of the sons of Morna. Of Morna himself, the huge-shouldered, stern-eyed, violent Connachtman; and of his sons - young Goll Mor mac Morna in particular, as huge-shouldered as his father, as fierce in the onset, but merry-eyed when the other was grim, and bubbling with a laughter that made men forgive even his butcheries. Of Conán Mael mac Morna his brother, gruff as a badger, bearded like a boar, bald as a crow, and with a togue that could manage an insult where another man would not find even a stammer. His boast was that when he saw a closed door he went into it. When he saw a peaceful man he insulted him, and when he met a man who was not peaceful he insulted him. There was Garra Duv mac Morna, and savage Art Og, who cared as little for their own skins as they did for the next man's, and Garra must have been rough indeed to have earned in that clan the name of the Rough mac Morna. There were others: wild Connachtman all, as untamable, as unaccountable as their own wonderful countryside.
Fionn would have heard much of them, and it is likely that he practised on a nettle at taking the head of Goll, and that he hunted a sheep from cover in the implacable manner he intended later on for Conán the Swearer.
But it is of Uail mac Baiscne he would have heard most.
With what a dilation of spirit the ladies would have told tales of him, Fionn's father. How their voices would have become a chant as feat was added to feat, glory piled on glory. The most famous of men en women and the most beautiful; the hardest fighter; the easiest giver; the kingly champion; the chief of the Fianna na h-Eirinn. Tales of how he had been waylaid and got free; of how he had been generous and got free; of how he had been angry and went marching with the speed of an eagle and the direct onfall of a storm; while in front and at the sides, angled from the prow of his terrific advance, were fleeing multitudes who did not dare to wait and scarce had time to run. And of how, at last, when the time came to quell him, nothing less than the whole might of Ireland was sufficient for that great downfall.
We may be sure that on these adventures Fionn was with his father, going step for step with the long-striding hero, and heartening him mightily.

He was given good training by the women in running and leaping and swimming. One of them would take a thorn switch in her hand, and Fionn would take a thorn switch in his hand, and each would try to strike the other running round a tree. You had to go fast to keep away from the switch behind, and a small boy feels a switch. Fionn would run his best to get away from that prickly stinger, but how he would run when it was his turn to deal the strokes!
With reason too, for his nurses had suddenly grown implacable. They pursued him with a savagery which he could not distinguish from hatred, and they swished him well whenever they got hte chance.
Fionn learned to run. After a while he could buzz around a tree like a maddened fly, and oh, the joy, when he felt himself drawing from the switch and gaining from behind on its bearer! How he strained and panted to catch on that pursuing person and pursue her and get his own switch into action.
He learned to jump by chasing hares in a bumpy field. Up went the hare and up went Fionn, and away with the two of them, hopping and popping across the field. If the hare turned while Fionn was after her, it was switch for Fionn; so that in a while it did not matter which way the hare jumped, for he could jump that way too. Long-ways, side-ways, or baw-ways, Fionn hopped where the hare hopped, and at last he was the owner of a hop that any hare would give an ear for.
He was taught to swim, and it may be that his heart sank when he fronted the lesson. The water was cold. It was deep. One could see the bottom, leagues below, millions of miles below. A small boy might shiver as he stared into that wink and blink and twink of brown pebbles and murder. And these implacable women threw him in!
It was a leg and an arm gripped then; a swing for Fionn, and out and away with him; plop and flop for him; down into chill deep death for him, and up with a splutter; with a sob, with a grasp at everything that caught nothing; with a wild flurry; with a raging despair; with a bubble and snort as he was hauled again down, and down, and down, and found as suddenly that he had been hauled out.
Fionn learned how to swim until he could pop into the water like an otter and slide through it like an eel. He used to try to chase a fish in the way he chased hares in the bumpy field - but there are terrible spurts in a fish. It may be that a fish cannot hop, but he gets there in a flash, and he isn't there in another. Up or down, sideways or endways, it is all one to a fish. He goes and is gone. He twists this way and disappears the other way. He is over you when he ought to be under you., and he is biting your toe when you thought you were biting his tail.
You cannot catch a fish by swimming, but you can try, and Fionn tried. He got a grudging commendation from the terrible women when he was able to slip noiselessly in the tide, swim under water to where a wild duck was floating, and grip it by the leg.
'Qu-,' said the duck, and he disappeared before he had time to get the '-ack' out of him.
So the time went, and Fionn grew long and straight and tough like a sapling; limber as a willow, and with the flirt and spring of a young bird. One of the ladies might have said, 'He is shaping very well my dear,' and the other replied, as is the morose privilege of an aunt, 'He will never ne as good as his father,' but their hearts must have overflowed in the night, in the silence, in the darkness, when they thought of the living swiftness they had fashioned, and that dear fair head.

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