Analecta Hiberniae, Fasciculus XIII
A Fragment on the Rites of the Outlaw Fianna, with a Note on the Vocabulary of Grievance in Late Cycle Texts
The present fragment occupies the outer margin of f. 47r of the Psalter of Knock Fierna, a psalter of disputed provenance associated with a monastic foundation in the territory of Luachair, held under accession number 18,334 at the National Library of Ireland. The text is among the more complete specimens recovered from the document's margins, though the lower third of the leaf has suffered water damage considerable enough to render three lines irrecoverable and two further lines conjectural. The fragment appears to describe one of the irregular fianna — outlaw warrior bands documented elsewhere in the cycle as operating in opposition to the sanctioned company of Fionn mac Cumhaill — and is of interest chiefly as a record of the rites by which such groups received new members — rites not without analogy in the classical sources, the present writer being reminded of Plutarch's description of the Lacedaemonian krypteia, wherein young men bound by shared hardship and a shared licence for violence served a social function the civic order found convenient not to examine too closely — and for a brief appearance of Fionn himself. The parentage assigned to the protagonist presents a difficulty: two figures of the name Fothad appear in the canonical sources, and the present text declines to specify which is intended, a lacuna that may reflect either textual corruption or deliberate ambiguity in an earlier redaction.
From the outer margin of f. 47r, Psalter of Knock Fierna (Psalterium de Cnocc Fhiarna), National Library of Ireland MS 18,334. The hand is consistent with the late ninth century and has been assigned to the primary scribe of this document, with a brief addition in a second hand noted below. The psalter is associated with a Luachair foundation, though the precise house is disputed. Three lines of the text are entirely lost; two further lines are conjectural reconstructions offered here without confidence.
Ruadhán mac Fothaid came out of the eastern hills in the deep of the year when the rivers were stone and the sky gave nothing. He had been three months without shelter. He had not spoken to a man since Samhain.
He heard the fire before he saw it. He heard voices.
He stood at the edge of the light and the men looked at him and did not drive him away. One handed him meat. He ate. No one asked him anything.
They were seven men. They had not named themselves as fianna but they had the look of the thing and tracked quarry and shared fire and contempt for walls. Their leader was a broad man with red hands who was called Mael Dúin though this was not his name. He said: you have the face of a man the world has passed over. Ruadhán said it had. Mael Dúin said: good. Sit down.
Ruadhán stayed through the winter.
The camp was in a cleft in the hillside above the Sruthán Dubh. Walls of stone and turves. Always fire. There were seven men through the cold months and then there were eight.
Their language was the language of what had been taken. The world had taken it. Women had taken it. Weakness had taken it. There were names for every taking and the names were precise and they were passed from man to man like a coal kept through rain. Ruadhán learned the names. He used them readily.
In spring they taught him what they hunted. It was not deer. He did not look away.
He came to Fionn's camp on the road above the Feale in the first thaw. Fionn was there with Caoilte and three others he did not know. Fionn looked at Ruadhán and was still for a moment. Then he turned his face to the road ahead and walked on.
Ruadhán stood in the mud of the road. He stood until the sound of them had gone. Then he stood there longer.
The place above the Feale where Fionn turned his face is called Béal an Fhuair, the mouth of the cold, from that day.
Suidid fer fuar fri teine bréige.
Ithid fer ocrach ní dlegar dó.
[...] bráthar [...] créacht [...]
Post completorium scripsi. Membrana tenuis hic.
Quaesivi et ego societatem in locis quae non nomino. Qui audit vocem quae verum se dicit, saepe non vera est, sed calida. Frater Ciarán me vidit semel et avertit se. Satis erat.
Domine, quid facis cum homine qui semel intravit in —
Intellego. Timeo.
Footnote: The marginal note, in a hand distinct from the primary scribe and identified by the present editor as probably a generation later, translates approximately as follows:
I wrote this after Compline. The parchment is thin here. I too sought fellowship in places I do not name. He who hears the voice that says it speaks truly — it is often not true, but it is warm. Brother Ciarán saw me once and turned away. It was enough. Lord, what do you do with a man who has once entered into —. I understand. I am afraid.
The sentence beginning Domine breaks off without completion; whether this reflects a deterioration in the exemplar or a decision by the scribe not to continue, the present writer cannot determine. The personal character of the remainder is familiar from the Irish marginal tradition and most likely reflects some private friction with a fellow member of the community; the precise referent is, of course, unrecoverable.
Regarding the rosc: the first two lines may be rendered approximately as the cold man sits by the false fire and the hungry man eats what is not his to eat. The third line is too damaged for confident reconstruction, though the word créacht, meaning wound, is legible. The archaic genitive formulation in the opening line is of some philological interest and may indicate a textual tradition predating the standard cycle redactions by some margin. Of independent interest is the passage cataloguing the group's internal terminology — the account of what had been taken, and the names given to each taking, constituting what one might term, with some license, a vocabulary of grievance. The repetition in this passage is not merely rhetorical; the present writer would suggest that the vocabulary is formulaic in character, a fixed lexical set transmitted within the group rather than improvised for this account, intelligible, as Meyer notes of comparable material in the Finn glosses, only to those already within the relevant practice. The present writer is not aware of a precise parallel to this particular semantic cluster elsewhere in the late cycle texts.
The appearance of Fionn at the fragment's conclusion, his characteristically wordless departure, is consistent with his function elsewhere in the cycle as an embodiment of the Fianna's standards of conduct; one may observe that Fionn is in several related passages presented as capable of recognising, by some faculty the texts decline to name, a man already given over to a course from which no appeal will draw him back.