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Welcome everybody to my special Samhain episode of the IrishMyths StoryTime podcast.
Today’s story has got everything you want in an Irish myth. Or any myth, for that matter.
A fire-breathing monster.
Mayhem.
A hero—Fionn mac Cumhaill—arguably the most popular hero in all of Irish mythology.
And of course, we have the spooky setting of Samhain, the Gaelic harvest festival that would ultimately pave the way for our modern holiday of Halloween.
Now, this story comes from the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology, and belongs to a narrative, known as Macgnímartha Finn or The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn, which was first recorded in the twelfth century.
But as I always like to point out, Irish storytelling was predominantly an oral tradition prior to Christianization, so the story of Aillén Mac Midgna a.k.a. the Burner, who repeatedly wreaks havoc on Tara, Ireland’s royal seat of power, is likely centuries older.
The story is known by many titles, including “The Enchantment of Tara,” as author Violet Russell rendered it in her 1914 book Heroes of the Dawn.
And I’d be remiss not to mention tha Beatrice Elvery, the aforementioned book’s illustrator, gave us one of the best illustrations ever of the Fionn versus Aillén showdown.
That being said, I’ll be presenting a different retelling of this tale, the one that appears in Lady Gregory’s 1902 work Gods and Fighting Men under the chapter title “The Coming of Finn.”
Full disclosure, for the sake of brevity, I’ll be reading an excerpt from that chapter.
Basically, I’m skipping Fionn’s backstory and jumping right into the action of the Burner’s attacks on Tara.
And while I’m tempted to go into exhausting detail about how this myth harkens back to a chronologically earlier myth, “The Coming of Lugh,” from the Mythological Cycle, and how it also fits rather nicely into the Celtic dragon storytelling motif, which often sees fire-breathing beasts crawling (or flying) out of caves on important feast days, that’s not what I do here on this podcast.
If you want to journey down rabbit holes (dragon holes?), go check out my YouTube explainer video on dragons from Irish myth & legend.
This is StoryTime. And now, your story:
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