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Updated: May 25, 2025
It would be hard to tell of the terror that was in Fionn's breast and in the hearts of the Fianna while they attended the conclusion of that race. They discussed it unendingly, and at some moment of the day a man upbraided Fionn because he had not found Caelte the son of Rona'n as had been agreed on. "There is no one can run like Caelte," one man averred. "He covers the ground," said another.
By that time some of the Fianna had returned to the mound to see why Bran and Sceo'lan were barking so outrageously. They saw the cave and went into it, but no sooner had they passed the holly branches than their strength went from them, and they were seized and bound by the vicious hags.
It was the memory of that darkness, you remember, that brought him back, years after, to convert Milcho. Patrick, three hundred years after the other 'Fianna' had vanished from the earth, the three centuries being passed in Tir-nan-og, the Land of Youth, where the great Oisin married the king's daughter, Niam of the Golden Hair.
The great heroes whose names have come down to us, such as Finn, son of Cumhal, and Cuchulainn, were reared in a school of arms. Bravery was the sign of true manhood. A law of chivalry moderated the excess of combat. A trained militia, the Fianna, gave character to an era; the Knights of the Red Branch were the distinguishing order of chevaliers.
But when we return the memory is quickly clouded, and we seem to have had a dream or seen a vision, although we have verily been in Faery. Fourteen battles, seven of the reserve and seven of the regular Fianna, had been taken by the Chief on a great march and manoeuvre.
There is, however, this to be added and remembered, that whenever Fionn was in a tight corner it was Goll that plucked him out of it; and, later on, when time did his worst on them all and the Fianna were sent to hell as unbelievers, it was Goll mac Morna who assaulted hell, with a chain in his great fist and three iron balls swinging from it, and it was he who attacked the hosts of great devils and brought Fionn and the Fianna-Finn out with him.
'Ossian after the Fianna' is a phrase which has become the synonym of all survivors' sorrow. Blinded by tears, broken by age, the hero bard when he returns to earth has no fellowship but with grief, and thus he sings: 'No hero now where heroes hurled, Long this night the clouds delay No man like me, in all the world, Alone with grief, and grey.
Men who had wives of their own grew moody and downcast because they could not hope to marry her, while the bachelors of the Fianna stared at each other with truculent, bloodshot eyes, and then they gazed on Tuiren so gently that she may have imagined she was being beamed on by the mild eyes of the dawn.
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