February 28, 2023 • 39 mins
The Irish mythological hero Finn MacCool is known for many exploits, from the slaying of a great fire monster to the creation of Giant's Causeway. However, he’s also known for his magical thumb, which he could suck on to gain knowledge. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe consider the thumb of knowledge and its relations to other myths and even a little bit of science. (originaly published 03/15/2022)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today
we've got a vault episode for you. This one originally
published March fifteenth, twenty twenty two. It's part one of
our series on Finn McCool. But hey, we should be
back with all new content for you starting tomorrow, but
for today, let's get right into the Finn McCool. Soaca,
(00:29):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it is the
week of Saint Patrick's Day. So I thought it would
be fun to turn our attention to Irish mythology once more.
(00:52):
And in this case we're going to be considering the
mythic hero Finn McCool, noted warrior, wonder worker. We're going
to get into all of that. But I guess what
I was especially interested in, what kind of pulled me
in initially, was his thumb, the thumb of knowledge, upon
which he was said to suck, or to at least
(01:14):
to place the thumb inside of his mouth in order
to receive great insight or perhaps even see into the future. Yeah, Rob,
I was going to ask, so this topic was your idea,
and I was wondering, did you come to it thumb
first or hero first? Was it like, you're reading about
Finn McCool and all the legends and then you come
across this thumb story and you're like, let's talk about that,
(01:35):
or were you reading about legends of thumbs I was
reading about. I was actually reading about some other mythological
figures and then I was like, oh, what am I doing.
It's Saint Patrick's day. Irish mythology is so rich. There's
got to be something we haven't talked about on the
show before. And then I started reading about Finn McCool,
and when I read about the thumb, which I somehow
(01:56):
either they had never read about before or forgotten about,
was instantly in now. Finn itself is a common Irish
hero name for characters of all genders related to finn
or meaning white or fair. I've read, but refers to
wisdom rather than skin tone, according to the Encyclopedia of
(02:17):
Celtic Mythology and Folklore by Patricia Monaghan. Yeah, I was
reading that Finn is a variant of the Irish name Fun,
spelled like f io n or f io n, which
means white or fair, but usually I think referring to
hair color. And there are some legends of Finn McCool
that say he had white hair from an early age,
possibly due to some kind of magical rapid aging and
(02:40):
d aging procedure. Huh, all right, well, I mean it
would make sense like the association between like white hair
and age, and age and wisdom, and therefore as someone
had prematurely white hair, there could perhaps be some air
of oh, they have the wisdom of an older man
or an older woman, despite the fact that they are
otherwise quite young. And speaking of the variant of the
(03:03):
name Finn versus Fion, I think it's worth saying at
the beginning that there are two different ways of spelling
the name that are essentially the same character, or slight
variations on the same character. One is commonly spelled in
the anglicized version, just like we're saying at Finn McCool,
but the other one is spelled more like fion. And
(03:23):
then the last name is mac cu m h a
i l or h a i l l, which from
what I understand. I know pronunciation a lot of these
of a lot of these Irish words is notoriously tricky
for English speakers like us. But I think that is
also pronounced pretty much just McCool. So Finn McCool. Great name,
(03:44):
by the way, it's one of these names that, especially today,
with connotations of cool and coolness. It's instantly interesting as
the hero's name, but if you're not familiar with them.
He stands alongside Cucullen as one of the two great
heroes of Irish mythology. He's a much later hero than
Colin Uh, and like any hero of myth there are
(04:05):
varying tales about him. It is interesting that both characters
are known for entering altered states of consciousness. Finn for
his prescient thumb state where he can you know his
well discuss can can place his thumb inside of his
mouth and uh and with with the you know some
other like chanting effects uh stare into the future, or
(04:28):
at least gain some sort of supernatural wisdom. And Cocolin,
as we discussed in our past episode on co Colin
was able to enter the warp spasm in battle where
he's in this altered state of of of a barbarian rage.
He sort of transforms into a semi monster. Yeah, kind
of like a hulk mode. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Finn McCool,
(04:48):
you know what's the origin story? Right, Every good hero
has an origin story. Well, we're told that his father
died when he was very young, either due to a
crime of his own doing or some conflict with a
val clan. There are different variations on that. Either way,
he ends up being raised by his mother and Monican
in the book that I referenced earlier, stresses the importance
(05:11):
of female energy in his raising, especially as his mother
mRNA claimed divine descent from Nuada of the Silver Hand,
the first king of the Tuatha Dudan and the Tuapha
Dudan and were the sort of fairy folk godlike beings
of Irish mythology, and I would say often having a
(05:32):
rather ambiguous character and relationship to humanity. They're not like
consistently either enemies or helpers. They can kind of be
either one. Yeah. You see a lot of their spirit
reflected in some of the modern ideas of elves in
fantasy settings. You know, they're they're superior to humans, but
they are of the previous age, there may be not
(05:53):
as invested in this world as they once were. That
sort of thing. Yeah, and according to some legends, like
they're they're strength in this world is waning. Like I know,
there's one story that involves Finn McCool and his band
of warriors, the Defenders of Ireland, who we'll talk about
more as we get on, but they in one story,
(06:13):
they end up going on a journey across the sea
to an island where they have been I think, sort
of lured by members of the Two author to dunn
And to come join them and sort of re energize
them or provide a supplemental strength to the waning strength
of these beings from a past age. By the way,
if you've seen the movie Hellboy Too, I believe the
(06:37):
antagonist in that film are supposed to be the Two
author to Dana, and I believe in fact that we're
supposed to see Nuada as the as the primary antagonist there.
That's the one that Hellboy has a big fight with. Anyway,
So Finn McCool, he's raised by his aunt and his
foster mother, the druid Bode Mall, and he's trained in
(06:58):
combat by the warrior woman Luthus Lurgan, and he accidentally
kills her in combat, and then the incident with the
salmon of Knowledge occurs around this time. We're going to
come back to that because it's it's it's it's quite
a tale. And also shortly after this he ends up
actually taking the name Finn after he defeats his first
(07:19):
enemy in combat, but then he goes on to study
his craft further under the warrior woman Buanan as well
as the male warrior Sethn mac fountain. Basically, he com
completes his Jedi training, he becomes this near perfect warrior
who also has this ability to tap into hidden wisdom
(07:40):
or see into the future, and then he assembles this
band of warriors to defend his province of Leinster, still
called that today in the southeast and east of Ireland,
and from the here on out. The story, you know,
includes various exploits and adventures, and we'll touch on some
of these, but he also engages in a number of
romantic conquests. They don't always go so well. His death
(08:02):
is told in various stories, and depending on where you're
hearing them or reading them, his death is said to
have taken place at different points at different places spread
across Ireland in Scotland. And there's also this idea that
he may have been reborn as the hero Mongan. Still,
other tales say that he did not die at all,
but that he and his fianna wait in a cave
(08:24):
to one day rise up and defend Ireland once more,
you know, very much in keeping with the tales of
King Arthur, how one day King Arthur will return and
rise up and protect England. Yeah, when I was reading
these stories of Finn McCool, I kept noticing other parallels
to King Arthur, because so not only is there this
(08:45):
idea that he's you know, resting somewhere maybe one day
to be called up to defend his nation again, but
there is also a similarity to the Lancelot and Guinevere
story in that there's a story where Finn McCool his
wife falls in love with one of his greatest warriors,
a man named Diarmid, who obviously it reminds me a
(09:08):
lot of Lancelot and Guinevere, and they ultimately come to
I think, not battle each other, but I believe the
legend goes that Darmid has to go fight a bore
and then the boar gravely wounds him, and that Finn
McCool could save him by offering up water from his
hands that would be healing because of his magic powers,
(09:29):
but he essentially denies that healing power to his rival
and he dies. Yeah, they's ry. One of the side
effects I guess of acquiring the Thumb of Knowledge is
that is that we're told that Finn McCool can can
form his hands into a cup collect water and that
water will have healing properties. Pretty great. Is even just
a second tier superpower if you asked me, well, it
(09:51):
feels like one of those pylon powers you know, where
you know, I really like a folk hero who has
one power and it's a pretty specific power. But but
I don't know. The legendary heroes just tend to accumulate
more and more powers over the you know, in the telling,
over the years. At least it seems that way. Yeah,
in the same way that sometimes you'll have a mad
(10:12):
scientist in a fictional tale where they seem to have
too many interests, too many technologies at their disposal, Like
you know, are you a time traveler or are you
a power armor guy? Are you are you building robots
or do you have an invisibility belt, like you need
to like really focus in on one and exploit that
because otherwise we really don't know what we're dealing with.
(10:33):
Seem to see, I just make giant scorpions. That's it.
There you go. It behooves you to specialize in the
realm of mad science or or or being a mythological hero.
That's right, you know those giant scorpions or quality. It
takes focus to make them. All right, Well, let's get
(10:56):
into the exploits of Finn McCool here, and we're going
to start with a with a big one one. That is,
if you're familiar with Finn McCool and you're otherwise not
that familiar with Irish mythology, you probably know this one. Yes,
though it's weird because I think this might be one
of the best known Finn McCool stories. But I think
it's also sort of an outlier in that it portrays
(11:16):
Finn McCool with different properties than he usually has. And
I think these legends probably also come later than a
lot of the other legends. But anyway, this one we're
going to talk about is a piece of geo mythology
a story created to explain geological features of the Earth. Now,
(11:36):
a lot of the geomiths we've looked at in previous
episodes explain big masses of rock or bodies of water
as some part of the body of a god, whether
living or dead. But this story is one of the
other common types, which is explaining natural formations as architecture
that was built by the demigods of old. And the
(11:56):
feature explained in this story is known as the Giants Causeway.
So to start with the plain observation of nature, there
is a stretch of coast along the north of Northern
Ireland in County Antrim that is covered with tens of
thousands of hexagonal columns of basalt. Now this is not
the only place in the world that has columns of
(12:18):
this type. You might have seen them at Devil's Tower
in Wyoming or other places around the world. I know
there's some in the Northwest in the United States, like
in Washington State, but you can find these in various places.
They're usually made of basalt, but sometimes other volcanic rocks
will take this form. And if you haven't ever seen
(12:39):
these things known as columnar basalt, you should look them
up because They're absolutely beautiful, and they're one of those
natural formations that just doesn't look natural at all. I
think many people who look at columnar basalt, they consult
their intuitions and they immediately come to think this is artificial.
(12:59):
Somebody built this, somebody carved these rocks. And it might
be an interesting question to ask why our intuitions work
this way while you look at these columns of rock
that mostly take the form of a hexagon and think
that this has got to be made by a person
or by a god instead of by nature. I guess
it looks so strange because we tend to assume that clean,
(13:21):
regular lines and angles like the kind we see in
polygons like like a hexagon, are just not to be
found in nature. Nature should have, i don't know more
more irregular, fractal kind of edges. Yeah. I think that's
a huge part of it, along with the rough uniformity
of everything. Like, it's not just oh, here's an interesting
(13:43):
rock that has these these properties. No, look at all
of them. It looks like there was some sort of
industrial scale, you know, alien brickmaking project here, right. They
look like they were extruded out of a machine. Yeah,
but anyway, there's been this stretch of the coast along
northern Ireland that has had these columns there for millions
(14:06):
of years, and over the centuries there arose some folk
tales in order to explain the origins of these columns. Yeah,
so the Giant's causeway again, this is the the Irish
side in question. It's composed of roughly forty thousand interlocking columns,
(14:26):
and again this is due to a volcanic fissure eruption.
No no alien brickmaking involved here. This all went down
roughly fifty to sixty million years ago. That's what we
know now. But according to Irish mythology, however, it was
built by Finn McCool and not just any Finn mcool,
not the regular sort of a superhero Finn McCool. This
(14:48):
is a giant Finn McCool. Yes, when you read accounts
of this, generally he's described as a giant, despite the
fact that he's not really described as a giant in
any other telling. Finn mccool's generally you as a you know,
a human hero or a hero with human proportions. It's
only in this case where he's he's gigantic. Now, one
(15:08):
thing I did read was that there's there's some thinking
that this formation may have originally been associated with other
mythological creators. There may have been different geomethology and play.
It might have been attributed to the monstrous Fomorians, which
were this these you know, giant race that were said
to be you know, previous occupiers of the territory who
(15:30):
were cast out at one point or another. So you know,
it could have been later on where someone's like, well,
the Fomorians are all right, but but Finn McCool is awesome. Uh,
let's let's adjust the story somewhat and Finn McCool becomes
the creator of the Giant's causeway. The basic idea with
Finn McCool and these formations as is that, okay, we
(15:52):
have these formations in Ireland, and then we also have
a very similar formations found at Fingal's Cave on the
Isle of Staffa in Scotland. And the idea here is
that well, on both sides here we must have the
remnants of a mythological bridge between these two lands. And
so the idea is that Finn is said to have
(16:14):
built the bridge as a means of reaching the other
side and battling a rival giant. Yes, and this is
the tale of the Giant's causeway. So there appeared to
be a lot of versions of this story. From what
I can tell, this is a folk tale that emerges
from oral tellings without a canonical original text, so I
think it's pointless to try to quest after the original here.
(16:37):
I'm just going to tell it as a kind of
synthesis of the multiple versions I have read. I have
no idea which form of this story is oldest or
could claim to be closest to the original, but here
it goes in my synthesized form. Once upon a time
there was a giant named Finn McCool who lived in
Ireland with his wife Una. And Finn McCool was brave
(16:59):
and strong, but he was also hot tempered and rash,
and far across the water in Scotland there was another giant.
This was a nasty brute named Ben and Donner, or
the Red Man, and Ben and Donner used to harass
Finn McCool and his neighbors, shouting vicious slander and hair
raising taunts across the water at them. You can imagine
(17:22):
the kind of the French taunter from monty Python and
the Holy Grail. Just brutal, brutal put downs. Your mother
was a hamster, all that kind of stuff. And Finn
became so furious at the other giant that he uprooted
an enormous boulder and hurled it at the Scottish ogre.
But he missed, and the boulder landed in the sea,
(17:43):
and this boulder became the Isle of Man. And so
Finn sat around stewing, thinking, I must destroy this fool,
But I don't want to get my feet wet by
swimming over there, So how can I reach him? And
then he came up with an idea. He would build
a bridge out of stone. So between the Irish shore
and the rocky coast of Scotland he put together a
(18:06):
stone causeway that would allow him to walk all the
way across. And this causeway was the origin of the
basalt pillars that we can still see today. But of
course the pillars don't go all the way across anymore.
So what happened there? Well, having completed his causeway, Finn,
you know, he gets his blood up and he decides
(18:27):
to run across the sea to the other side and
give Ben and Donner a good walloping to shut him up.
But unfortunately, as brave and strong as Finn McCool was,
once he got a look at the Scottish giant up close,
his blood ran cold because Ben and Donner was a monster,
a beast even bigger and stronger than Finn himself. And
(18:48):
Finn knew that he would not win a fair fight
with Ben and Donner, so bravely ran away away. When
danger reared its ugly head, he turned his yellowtail and fled,
and so he ran back home to hide. But unfortunately,
now that he had built a causeway, it could be
crossed in both directions, so Ben and Donner soon came
(19:11):
over the bridge to Ireland looking for Finn. Finn did
not know what to do, but fortunately his wife Una
was diabolically clever, much cleverer than her husband, and she
came up with a plan. And it goes like this.
Una dressed Finn up as a baby and made him
lay down inside a giant cradle. You with me? So far? Yeah?
(19:35):
So soon Ben and Donner came knocking at their door
and he said, open the door, Finn McCool, come out
and fight me and I'll give you a beating. You'll
never forget. Instead, Una opened the door and she welcomed
Ben and Donna inside and showed him hospitality. She said,
my husband is not home right now, but he'll be
glad to fight you when he gets back. In the meantime,
(19:56):
please sit down and help yourself to some bread. I
baked it just the way my husband likes it. So
Ben and Donner broke off a piece of the loaf
and bit into it, but immediately he spat it out,
and he shouted, this bread cracks my teeth. Because secretly
Una had baked bars of iron into the dough. And
so she feigned, you know, she feigned ignorance and said,
(20:19):
I'm sorry. I didn't think it would trouble such a
strong man as yourself. My husband loves that recipe. Even
our baby eats it that way. And this directed Ben
and Donner's attention to the baby, which was again Finn
himself in disguise as a baby in a crib. And
so when Ben and Donner went over and got a
look at the child, he said to himself, if the
(20:40):
baby is already an iron eating giant as he lies
in his crib, his father must be the size of
a mountain. I cannot beat this guy. So here at
this moment, Ben and Donner is seized with fears. He
is fully bought into Unna's trickery, and Ben and Donna
runs away, and as he flees, he destroyed is the
bridge of stone that Finn had built so that his
(21:03):
enemy can never come and find him. And all that's
left is the part of the bridge on the Irish
shore and the part on the Scottish side. Again that's
near the place called Fingal's Cave. And this is one
of my favorite showdown stories of all time. Now, defeating
your enemy by dressing as a baby, it is so good.
I love it. Yeah, you think you're going to get
just this giant battle throw down and instead you get
(21:24):
this comedic game of deception. I love it. Now. There
is another version that actually has a fight, though it
involves a lot of the same elements. So this other
version I was reading about. I was reading about it
in a book that I know you're going to reference later,
the one by James McKillop called Fian McCool Celtic Myth
(21:45):
in English Literature, published by Syracuse University Press in nineteen
eighty five, and McKillop draws attention to a version of
the story told in William Carlton's The Legend of Knockmany,
And this is from the Midnight eighteenth century, and the
variations in Carlton's version are that the other giant is
(22:06):
not named Ben and Donner, but is named ku Cullen. Interesting,
you know, that's the name of another Irish folk hero
that originally had nothing to do with this story. So
I don't know what's going on there. Maybe it's just
sort of blending together of strong man in folk stories,
or just realizing we've got to have these two characters
(22:26):
fight each other. This is like the Batman Superman of
the day. Well, so many elements of the story are
the same as the version I just told, but some
things are different. This version includes a detail that when
Finn returns home to Una, he says he's afraid that
he will be skivered like a rabbit if he has
to fight Kucullen. But Una knows that Kucullen's power is
(22:47):
contained in the middle finger of his right hand. He
has a magic middle finger, and she knows if you
can compromise the finger, you sap his beastly magic, and
he who loses strength, he won't be able to fight.
So it's kind of like I don't know Samson's hair
or something, except this is the middle finger of his
right hand. So like in the version I told, Cucullen
(23:10):
comes over and Una feeds him bread with metal or
I think in this case it's stones of granite inside,
and he breaks his teeth on the bread. Then when
he hears that even their baby eats this bread, Kucullen
is incredulous and he has to go feel the baby's
teeth again. The baby is actually Finn McCool in disguise,
and when cucullen reaches inside the baby's mouth to feel
(23:33):
its teeth, Finn bites off the magic middle finger, and
now the giant is as weak as immortal man, so
Finn beats him up very easily. All right, So it
started out like it was going to be like this
big throwdown, but again we have a comic game of
deception in play once more. Yes, and McKillop points out
that in this story it's interesting that Finn is victorious,
(23:55):
but only after both showing cowardice in running away from
the initial fight and resorting to trickery. Trickery that wasn't
even his idea. It's not even like he's a you know,
a cunning fox like Odysseus. Una is the real hero
of the story. She comes up with the whole idea
of how to Like she has the knowledge about the
magic middle finger, and she comes up with the whole plan.
(24:16):
So and he has to dress as a baby in
order to defeat his enemy. So it's a weird kind
of simultaneous victory and humiliation. He wins essentially by no
virtue of his own. But there are a couple of
things I kept thinking about with the story that are
going to tie into what you'll bring up in more
detail when you talk about the Thumb of Knowledge. Because
so first of all, it's a story in which Finn
(24:39):
McCool dresses up as a giant baby. And one thing
that we know Finn McCool did in other legends is
suck on his thumb in order to gain insight or knowledge,
which of course is associated with you know, that's what
babies do. But the other thing is that Finn McCool
has to bite off the magic middle finger of his
enemy in order to defeat him and steal his power.
(25:01):
So his enemy has a magic finger in this story,
just like Finn McCool does, though the magic thumb is
not really mentioned in this telling. Yeah, I mean, this
all has to be connected. I don't remember tales of
Cucullin's magic middle finger coming up when we researched the
hero previously, and clearly the idea of a Finn McCool
(25:22):
who has this thumb of knowledge, the idea of him
dressing up as a baby feels like, I mean, it
feels like a perfect creation, Like you can imagine that
just being you know, whatever the exact origins are, and
we'll get into that of the thumb of knowledge, it
just makes sense that somebody later would think of But
what if he also acted like a baby. You can't
help it go there, because, of course, babies putting fingers
(25:47):
into or their thumb in their mouth, sucking on their thumb.
It's it's a universal reality, and it's been you know,
you see it reflected in various myths and traditions around
the world, So you couldn't help it go in that direction. Now,
before we move on, I did want to come back
(26:08):
to the geological question of what actually causes hexagonal columns
to form in volcanic rock, like what is the actual
scientific origin of the rocks that were believed to be
part of the Giants Causeway? So that giants giants right.
So these columns are usually, but not always, found in
a type of rock called basalt, which is a type
(26:31):
of igneous rock that's created when lava flows out of
a volcano or out of a fissure in the earth
and then cools, and under certain conditions, the cooling process
of that liquid lava can give rise to columns like
the kind we see at the Giants Causeway. So when
molten lava settles and begins to cool, what happens is
(26:52):
its surface begins to set, turning from a glowing orange
liquid into this solid, dark shape. And this cooling happens
from the outside in so the part exposed to the atmosphere,
or especially I think when this occurs in water, that
the part that's exposed to either air or water that
cools the fastest, and then the parts underneath retain their
(27:14):
heat the longest. And as the surface cools, it also contracts,
it literally shrinks in volume. So this is something that's
common to all kinds of materials, are as their temperature
goes down, they shrink in volume. You can observe this
if you like you've ever seen videos rob of people
freezing balloons in liquid nitrogen. I feel like I have.
(27:37):
What happens when you freeze the balloon in liquid nitrogen.
It's really interesting. It shrinks. So you can take a
balloon that's inflated and kind of plunge it into liquid
nitrogen and then it shrinks down. It looks like it's
completely deflated. But then if you take it out of
the liquid nitrogen, sit it on a table or something,
it will gradually as it warms up, reinflate again. So
like what's going on. It's almost as if it's magic.
(27:58):
But what's happening is the cooling of the gas inside
the balloon causes that gas to contract, and it shrinks
down and down and down until the balloon is essentially deflated.
Then when it warms back up, it expands again. Oh okay,
maybe I haven't seen videos of this before. It's worth
looking up. It looks really cool. I bet you can
shrink a balloon by putting it in your freezer as well. Yeah,
(28:20):
maybe that's what I've seen before, but probably not as
fully shriveled. As the lipid nitrogeneral gets you. But anyway, so, yeah,
things tend to contract, they shrink as they cool, and
the same thing is true if this lava. So the
surface cools faster than the part down below, and as
the surface cools, it shrinks. But as this contraction is happening,
(28:46):
it's also setting up solid at the same time, So
the surface of the lava actually cracks as it shrinks,
and so especially if the cooling is happening in a
fairly evenly distributed way, what tends to happen is that
these cracks occur around evenly spaced centers of surface contraction
that occur at pretty fixed intervals. Sort of. You can
(29:07):
map them as a bunch of dots around the surface
of the lava formation, and they'll be pretty evenly spaced out.
And then the cracks form around those centers of cooling,
and they one of the easiest ways for those cracks
to form is roughly into hexagons around those centers. And
as the cracks form on the surface, the lava mass
(29:28):
continues cooling and the cracks propagate vertically down into the
center of the mass, forming these columns, and so eventually
the mass cools and solidifies entirely, and we're left with
columnar basalt like we find at the Giants Causeway. It
all started with cracks on the surface from the cooling,
and those cracks penetrated deeper and deeper as the mass
(29:49):
of lava cooled, and again the result is just quite impressive.
I've not been to one of these sites and seen
it in person, but researching this a little bit and
looking at some of these photog graphsh it makes me
want to go. I know I've seen some in person
at at a volcanic site in Oregon, and I can't
recall if I've seen any anywhere else. I know there
(30:11):
is it's either an elaborate set or a location that's
used in the TV series Raised by Wolves that looks
a lot like this, But it's my understanding that that
show is filmed in South Africa, so I don't know
if there's a South African location that has a similar
geography going on, or if that's all just you know,
(30:33):
a set or something. At any rate, it looks impressive
in that show as well. If we were only in
the office, I could just yell at Holly and ask her,
since she does the podcast for raised by wolves. Oh yeah,
she's got the hook up for all your basult information.
All right, So that's the giants causeway, that's a little geomethology,
but we all know that it takes a little more
than geo mythology to make a mythic hero. We also
(30:56):
need some sort of a monster battle. There has to
be a slaying of some sort. If not a monster battle,
then it led at least some sort of epic battled
against another you know, humanoid adversary. And in this case,
well we've we've got a we've got a pretty good one.
We have the sling of Aileen mcmidnah, aka the Burner.
(31:18):
So I apologize, but that makes me think of him
as a phone. Well my mind and instantly went to
the possibility that he's really into going to burning man
in various regional burns and in a way, I mean
he is a musician. So we're told that mcmidnah was
the fairy musician of the two Apha to Din and
again the powerful rulers of the other world. Now, Aileen
(31:42):
is often described in this case as a dark figure
with fiery breath, armed with both a supernatural harp that
could lull mortals to sleep, as well as a poisoned spear.
Now the spear in this in this case, it doesn't
seem again all of these things that kind of depends
on the tell and who's writing it down, But the
spear doesn't seem to be poisoned in the traditional sense,
(32:05):
though I it also does sound like it will still
poison you if you're stabbed with it, but more to
the point, it emits poisonous fume. So it's like, it's
pretty fabulous vision to have in your mind, this idea.
Here's this is a dark, fiery monster being and has
a harp in one hand and the other this this
spear that is just smoking with poison. I'll also point
(32:29):
out that if you start looking at illustrations of Aleen,
you'll find it's kind of all over the place, Like
there's there's a pretty famous one where Aileen looks like
this kind of monolithic dark giant that kind of looks
almost like a robot firing a blast of energy at
Finn McCool and I really love that image, and it
(32:50):
kind of keeps with this idea of sort of the
the elder superpowers of the two appad don and but
then I also found one where Alan mcminnot just looks
like a big grotesque, demonoid goblin creature shooting fire out
of his his pig like nostrils out of the nose,
like he's blowing his nose and fires coming out, and
he's got one big horn in the middle of his head. Yeah,
(33:14):
so I was reading a little bit more about In
Carol Rose's Fairy Spirits, leprecons and Goblins, she of course
has a section where she discusses this particular Aileen and
discusses how Ailin comes to play for the Palace of
Tara on the Festival of Solon, and he becomes irate
because he's playing this music on this magical harp, and
(33:37):
what does it do? It puts everyone to sleep. That
is kind of his or this harp's magical power. So,
I mean, really shame on him. He should be expecting this,
but he gets mad instead, So he's like, what are
you doing falling to sleep during my beautiful music. He
takes up his spear and he blasts three blasts of
fire from his nostrils and he destroys the entire palace.
(33:59):
The entire cast just completely destroyed. So what do you do? Well,
they rebuilt the castle, and then the same thing happened
again the following year. I don't know why they booked
Aileen again, the same gig that destroyed the castle. I
actually I don't think they booked him. I think the
ideas he keeps coming back, such as his rage at
this place, such as is lust for vengeance, and then
(34:20):
every time he destroys the place, they have to build
it back up, and this cycle repeats itself for more
than two decades. After twenty three years of this, Finn
McCool steps up and defeats the beast. He comes in
very much like it's very much like a Baowoff and
Grenville situation. You know, he is, here's the monster that
(34:40):
keeps attacking the center of culture and civilization. And then
eventually you need an outsider, a hero to step in
and really put the boots to the monster. Now, I'm
thinking a big challenge with fighting this monster is going
to be if he's got it like a like a
loot or a or a dulcimer or whatever, that when
he plays it everybody to sleep. Can't he lull any
(35:02):
conquering hero to sleep? Yeah? But luckily Finn McCool he's
a sneaky one. Uh uh. I read that one of
the tactics he employs here to make himself immune to
the magic. Uh He he huffs the fumes from the spear,
which are so One of the like the poisonous effects
of it is that it keeps you from falling asleep.
(35:24):
I'm not exactly sure how that would work, but in
the story that's that is what is said to have occurred.
So he's immune to the music, and then he's able
to get in close battle the Alan and then stab
the Alan with his own poisonous spear, thus killing him.
In some versions, he doesn't stab him with it, He
just like holds it close enough to where he has
(35:45):
to breathe in all of those poisonous fumes and then
dies of the poison. Now, he referenced that book by
James McKillop earlier, and mccullop points out that, yeah, this
is basically the same model found in Baowolf as well.
The oldest Allen tales date back in writing to the
twelfth century, but there are also other accounts, and mccaullut
(36:07):
goes into these a finding battle with other fire based creatures. Now,
according to a Monaghan. This Alan mcmigna is the most
famous Ailan, but there was another Ailen of note as well,
Ailen Tretchen, the triple headed Aileen, and it would attack
the Irish cities Tara and Domain Macha. And sometimes it's
(36:31):
described as male, sometimes it's described as female, and it's
said to live in a cave and may be associated
with the Morrigan. The difference between the two Aileen's is
quote difficult to discern. You know, this is not unique
to Irish legend and myth, but it does seem like
there's a lot of sort of mithime contagion, little elements
(36:53):
of one mythic figure or story just bleeding over into
the other. Yeah, yeah, Okay, Now, I know we've building
up the thumb. The whole time you at home are
thinking like, when are they going to get to the thumb.
We got to know about the thumb, so we are
going to talk about that, but I think we need
to save it for the next part in the series,
which is going to be all thumb. Yeah, all thumb
(37:14):
right in the mouths or in this case, in the ears,
because you'll be listening. Yeah, So next next episode we
will get into the story of Finn McCool and the
Thumb of Knowledge, the different versions of it, how into
what extent it bleeds over into other hero stories, and
you know, well, maybe get into it a little a
(37:35):
little bit of the potential science of the Thumb of
Knowledge as well. And hey, that episode is going to
come out on Saint Patrick's Day itself, so I think
that's perfect, brilliant all right. In the meantime, if you
would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, it publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed on Mondays.
(37:58):
We do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do an artifact
or monster Fact, and then on Fridays we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
(38:19):
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of iHeartRadio for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
(38:40):
your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today
we've got a vault episode for you. This one originally
published March fifteenth, twenty twenty two. It's part one of
our series on Finn McCool. But hey, we should be
back with all new content for you starting tomorrow, but
for today, let's get right into the Finn McCool. Soaca,
(00:29):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it is the
week of Saint Patrick's Day. So I thought it would
be fun to turn our attention to Irish mythology once more.
(00:52):
And in this case we're going to be considering the
mythic hero Finn McCool, noted warrior, wonder worker. We're going
to get into all of that. But I guess what
I was especially interested in, what kind of pulled me
in initially, was his thumb, the thumb of knowledge, upon
which he was said to suck, or to at least
(01:14):
to place the thumb inside of his mouth in order
to receive great insight or perhaps even see into the future. Yeah, Rob,
I was going to ask, so this topic was your idea,
and I was wondering, did you come to it thumb
first or hero first? Was it like, you're reading about
Finn McCool and all the legends and then you come
across this thumb story and you're like, let's talk about that,
(01:35):
or were you reading about legends of thumbs I was
reading about. I was actually reading about some other mythological
figures and then I was like, oh, what am I doing.
It's Saint Patrick's day. Irish mythology is so rich. There's
got to be something we haven't talked about on the
show before. And then I started reading about Finn McCool,
and when I read about the thumb, which I somehow
(01:56):
either they had never read about before or forgotten about,
was instantly in now. Finn itself is a common Irish
hero name for characters of all genders related to finn
or meaning white or fair. I've read, but refers to
wisdom rather than skin tone, according to the Encyclopedia of
(02:17):
Celtic Mythology and Folklore by Patricia Monaghan. Yeah, I was
reading that Finn is a variant of the Irish name Fun,
spelled like f io n or f io n, which
means white or fair, but usually I think referring to
hair color. And there are some legends of Finn McCool
that say he had white hair from an early age,
possibly due to some kind of magical rapid aging and
(02:40):
d aging procedure. Huh, all right, well, I mean it
would make sense like the association between like white hair
and age, and age and wisdom, and therefore as someone
had prematurely white hair, there could perhaps be some air
of oh, they have the wisdom of an older man
or an older woman, despite the fact that they are
otherwise quite young. And speaking of the variant of the
(03:03):
name Finn versus Fion, I think it's worth saying at
the beginning that there are two different ways of spelling
the name that are essentially the same character, or slight
variations on the same character. One is commonly spelled in
the anglicized version, just like we're saying at Finn McCool,
but the other one is spelled more like fion. And
(03:23):
then the last name is mac cu m h a
i l or h a i l l, which from
what I understand. I know pronunciation a lot of these
of a lot of these Irish words is notoriously tricky
for English speakers like us. But I think that is
also pronounced pretty much just McCool. So Finn McCool. Great name,
(03:44):
by the way, it's one of these names that, especially today,
with connotations of cool and coolness. It's instantly interesting as
the hero's name, but if you're not familiar with them.
He stands alongside Cucullen as one of the two great
heroes of Irish mythology. He's a much later hero than
Colin Uh, and like any hero of myth there are
(04:05):
varying tales about him. It is interesting that both characters
are known for entering altered states of consciousness. Finn for
his prescient thumb state where he can you know his
well discuss can can place his thumb inside of his
mouth and uh and with with the you know some
other like chanting effects uh stare into the future, or
(04:28):
at least gain some sort of supernatural wisdom. And Cocolin,
as we discussed in our past episode on co Colin
was able to enter the warp spasm in battle where
he's in this altered state of of of a barbarian rage.
He sort of transforms into a semi monster. Yeah, kind
of like a hulk mode. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Finn McCool,
(04:48):
you know what's the origin story? Right, Every good hero
has an origin story. Well, we're told that his father
died when he was very young, either due to a
crime of his own doing or some conflict with a
val clan. There are different variations on that. Either way,
he ends up being raised by his mother and Monican
in the book that I referenced earlier, stresses the importance
(05:11):
of female energy in his raising, especially as his mother
mRNA claimed divine descent from Nuada of the Silver Hand,
the first king of the Tuatha Dudan and the Tuapha
Dudan and were the sort of fairy folk godlike beings
of Irish mythology, and I would say often having a
(05:32):
rather ambiguous character and relationship to humanity. They're not like
consistently either enemies or helpers. They can kind of be
either one. Yeah. You see a lot of their spirit
reflected in some of the modern ideas of elves in
fantasy settings. You know, they're they're superior to humans, but
they are of the previous age, there may be not
(05:53):
as invested in this world as they once were. That
sort of thing. Yeah, and according to some legends, like
they're they're strength in this world is waning. Like I know,
there's one story that involves Finn McCool and his band
of warriors, the Defenders of Ireland, who we'll talk about
more as we get on, but they in one story,
(06:13):
they end up going on a journey across the sea
to an island where they have been I think, sort
of lured by members of the Two author to dunn
And to come join them and sort of re energize
them or provide a supplemental strength to the waning strength
of these beings from a past age. By the way,
if you've seen the movie Hellboy Too, I believe the
(06:37):
antagonist in that film are supposed to be the Two
author to Dana, and I believe in fact that we're
supposed to see Nuada as the as the primary antagonist there.
That's the one that Hellboy has a big fight with. Anyway,
So Finn McCool, he's raised by his aunt and his
foster mother, the druid Bode Mall, and he's trained in
(06:58):
combat by the warrior woman Luthus Lurgan, and he accidentally
kills her in combat, and then the incident with the
salmon of Knowledge occurs around this time. We're going to
come back to that because it's it's it's it's quite
a tale. And also shortly after this he ends up
actually taking the name Finn after he defeats his first
(07:19):
enemy in combat, but then he goes on to study
his craft further under the warrior woman Buanan as well
as the male warrior Sethn mac fountain. Basically, he com
completes his Jedi training, he becomes this near perfect warrior
who also has this ability to tap into hidden wisdom
(07:40):
or see into the future, and then he assembles this
band of warriors to defend his province of Leinster, still
called that today in the southeast and east of Ireland,
and from the here on out. The story, you know,
includes various exploits and adventures, and we'll touch on some
of these, but he also engages in a number of
romantic conquests. They don't always go so well. His death
(08:02):
is told in various stories, and depending on where you're
hearing them or reading them, his death is said to
have taken place at different points at different places spread
across Ireland in Scotland. And there's also this idea that
he may have been reborn as the hero Mongan. Still,
other tales say that he did not die at all,
but that he and his fianna wait in a cave
(08:24):
to one day rise up and defend Ireland once more,
you know, very much in keeping with the tales of
King Arthur, how one day King Arthur will return and
rise up and protect England. Yeah, when I was reading
these stories of Finn McCool, I kept noticing other parallels
to King Arthur, because so not only is there this
(08:45):
idea that he's you know, resting somewhere maybe one day
to be called up to defend his nation again, but
there is also a similarity to the Lancelot and Guinevere
story in that there's a story where Finn McCool his
wife falls in love with one of his greatest warriors,
a man named Diarmid, who obviously it reminds me a
(09:08):
lot of Lancelot and Guinevere, and they ultimately come to
I think, not battle each other, but I believe the
legend goes that Darmid has to go fight a bore
and then the boar gravely wounds him, and that Finn
McCool could save him by offering up water from his
hands that would be healing because of his magic powers,
(09:29):
but he essentially denies that healing power to his rival
and he dies. Yeah, they's ry. One of the side
effects I guess of acquiring the Thumb of Knowledge is
that is that we're told that Finn McCool can can
form his hands into a cup collect water and that
water will have healing properties. Pretty great. Is even just
a second tier superpower if you asked me, well, it
(09:51):
feels like one of those pylon powers you know, where
you know, I really like a folk hero who has
one power and it's a pretty specific power. But but
I don't know. The legendary heroes just tend to accumulate
more and more powers over the you know, in the telling,
over the years. At least it seems that way. Yeah,
in the same way that sometimes you'll have a mad
(10:12):
scientist in a fictional tale where they seem to have
too many interests, too many technologies at their disposal, Like
you know, are you a time traveler or are you
a power armor guy? Are you are you building robots
or do you have an invisibility belt, like you need
to like really focus in on one and exploit that
because otherwise we really don't know what we're dealing with.
(10:33):
Seem to see, I just make giant scorpions. That's it.
There you go. It behooves you to specialize in the
realm of mad science or or or being a mythological hero.
That's right, you know those giant scorpions or quality. It
takes focus to make them. All right, Well, let's get
(10:56):
into the exploits of Finn McCool here, and we're going
to start with a with a big one one. That is,
if you're familiar with Finn McCool and you're otherwise not
that familiar with Irish mythology, you probably know this one. Yes,
though it's weird because I think this might be one
of the best known Finn McCool stories. But I think
it's also sort of an outlier in that it portrays
(11:16):
Finn McCool with different properties than he usually has. And
I think these legends probably also come later than a
lot of the other legends. But anyway, this one we're
going to talk about is a piece of geo mythology
a story created to explain geological features of the Earth. Now,
(11:36):
a lot of the geomiths we've looked at in previous
episodes explain big masses of rock or bodies of water
as some part of the body of a god, whether
living or dead. But this story is one of the
other common types, which is explaining natural formations as architecture
that was built by the demigods of old. And the
(11:56):
feature explained in this story is known as the Giants Causeway.
So to start with the plain observation of nature, there
is a stretch of coast along the north of Northern
Ireland in County Antrim that is covered with tens of
thousands of hexagonal columns of basalt. Now this is not
the only place in the world that has columns of
(12:18):
this type. You might have seen them at Devil's Tower
in Wyoming or other places around the world. I know
there's some in the Northwest in the United States, like
in Washington State, but you can find these in various places.
They're usually made of basalt, but sometimes other volcanic rocks
will take this form. And if you haven't ever seen
(12:39):
these things known as columnar basalt, you should look them
up because They're absolutely beautiful, and they're one of those
natural formations that just doesn't look natural at all. I
think many people who look at columnar basalt, they consult
their intuitions and they immediately come to think this is artificial.
(12:59):
Somebody built this, somebody carved these rocks. And it might
be an interesting question to ask why our intuitions work
this way while you look at these columns of rock
that mostly take the form of a hexagon and think
that this has got to be made by a person
or by a god instead of by nature. I guess
it looks so strange because we tend to assume that clean,
(13:21):
regular lines and angles like the kind we see in
polygons like like a hexagon, are just not to be
found in nature. Nature should have, i don't know more
more irregular, fractal kind of edges. Yeah. I think that's
a huge part of it, along with the rough uniformity
of everything. Like, it's not just oh, here's an interesting
(13:43):
rock that has these these properties. No, look at all
of them. It looks like there was some sort of
industrial scale, you know, alien brickmaking project here, right. They
look like they were extruded out of a machine. Yeah,
but anyway, there's been this stretch of the coast along
northern Ireland that has had these columns there for millions
(14:06):
of years, and over the centuries there arose some folk
tales in order to explain the origins of these columns. Yeah,
so the Giant's causeway again, this is the the Irish
side in question. It's composed of roughly forty thousand interlocking columns,
(14:26):
and again this is due to a volcanic fissure eruption.
No no alien brickmaking involved here. This all went down
roughly fifty to sixty million years ago. That's what we
know now. But according to Irish mythology, however, it was
built by Finn McCool and not just any Finn mcool,
not the regular sort of a superhero Finn McCool. This
(14:48):
is a giant Finn McCool. Yes, when you read accounts
of this, generally he's described as a giant, despite the
fact that he's not really described as a giant in
any other telling. Finn mccool's generally you as a you know,
a human hero or a hero with human proportions. It's
only in this case where he's he's gigantic. Now, one
(15:08):
thing I did read was that there's there's some thinking
that this formation may have originally been associated with other
mythological creators. There may have been different geomethology and play.
It might have been attributed to the monstrous Fomorians, which
were this these you know, giant race that were said
to be you know, previous occupiers of the territory who
(15:30):
were cast out at one point or another. So you know,
it could have been later on where someone's like, well,
the Fomorians are all right, but but Finn McCool is awesome. Uh,
let's let's adjust the story somewhat and Finn McCool becomes
the creator of the Giant's causeway. The basic idea with
Finn McCool and these formations as is that, okay, we
(15:52):
have these formations in Ireland, and then we also have
a very similar formations found at Fingal's Cave on the
Isle of Staffa in Scotland. And the idea here is
that well, on both sides here we must have the
remnants of a mythological bridge between these two lands. And
so the idea is that Finn is said to have
(16:14):
built the bridge as a means of reaching the other
side and battling a rival giant. Yes, and this is
the tale of the Giant's causeway. So there appeared to
be a lot of versions of this story. From what
I can tell, this is a folk tale that emerges
from oral tellings without a canonical original text, so I
think it's pointless to try to quest after the original here.
(16:37):
I'm just going to tell it as a kind of
synthesis of the multiple versions I have read. I have
no idea which form of this story is oldest or
could claim to be closest to the original, but here
it goes in my synthesized form. Once upon a time
there was a giant named Finn McCool who lived in
Ireland with his wife Una. And Finn McCool was brave
(16:59):
and strong, but he was also hot tempered and rash,
and far across the water in Scotland there was another giant.
This was a nasty brute named Ben and Donner, or
the Red Man, and Ben and Donner used to harass
Finn McCool and his neighbors, shouting vicious slander and hair
raising taunts across the water at them. You can imagine
(17:22):
the kind of the French taunter from monty Python and
the Holy Grail. Just brutal, brutal put downs. Your mother
was a hamster, all that kind of stuff. And Finn
became so furious at the other giant that he uprooted
an enormous boulder and hurled it at the Scottish ogre.
But he missed, and the boulder landed in the sea,
(17:43):
and this boulder became the Isle of Man. And so
Finn sat around stewing, thinking, I must destroy this fool,
But I don't want to get my feet wet by
swimming over there, So how can I reach him? And
then he came up with an idea. He would build
a bridge out of stone. So between the Irish shore
and the rocky coast of Scotland he put together a
(18:06):
stone causeway that would allow him to walk all the
way across. And this causeway was the origin of the
basalt pillars that we can still see today. But of
course the pillars don't go all the way across anymore.
So what happened there? Well, having completed his causeway, Finn,
you know, he gets his blood up and he decides
(18:27):
to run across the sea to the other side and
give Ben and Donner a good walloping to shut him up.
But unfortunately, as brave and strong as Finn McCool was,
once he got a look at the Scottish giant up close,
his blood ran cold because Ben and Donner was a monster,
a beast even bigger and stronger than Finn himself. And
(18:48):
Finn knew that he would not win a fair fight
with Ben and Donner, so bravely ran away away. When
danger reared its ugly head, he turned his yellowtail and fled,
and so he ran back home to hide. But unfortunately,
now that he had built a causeway, it could be
crossed in both directions, so Ben and Donner soon came
(19:11):
over the bridge to Ireland looking for Finn. Finn did
not know what to do, but fortunately his wife Una
was diabolically clever, much cleverer than her husband, and she
came up with a plan. And it goes like this.
Una dressed Finn up as a baby and made him
lay down inside a giant cradle. You with me? So far? Yeah?
(19:35):
So soon Ben and Donner came knocking at their door
and he said, open the door, Finn McCool, come out
and fight me and I'll give you a beating. You'll
never forget. Instead, Una opened the door and she welcomed
Ben and Donna inside and showed him hospitality. She said,
my husband is not home right now, but he'll be
glad to fight you when he gets back. In the meantime,
(19:56):
please sit down and help yourself to some bread. I
baked it just the way my husband likes it. So
Ben and Donner broke off a piece of the loaf
and bit into it, but immediately he spat it out,
and he shouted, this bread cracks my teeth. Because secretly
Una had baked bars of iron into the dough. And
so she feigned, you know, she feigned ignorance and said,
(20:19):
I'm sorry. I didn't think it would trouble such a
strong man as yourself. My husband loves that recipe. Even
our baby eats it that way. And this directed Ben
and Donner's attention to the baby, which was again Finn
himself in disguise as a baby in a crib. And
so when Ben and Donner went over and got a
look at the child, he said to himself, if the
(20:40):
baby is already an iron eating giant as he lies
in his crib, his father must be the size of
a mountain. I cannot beat this guy. So here at
this moment, Ben and Donner is seized with fears. He
is fully bought into Unna's trickery, and Ben and Donna
runs away, and as he flees, he destroyed is the
bridge of stone that Finn had built so that his
(21:03):
enemy can never come and find him. And all that's
left is the part of the bridge on the Irish
shore and the part on the Scottish side. Again that's
near the place called Fingal's Cave. And this is one
of my favorite showdown stories of all time. Now, defeating
your enemy by dressing as a baby, it is so good.
I love it. Yeah, you think you're going to get
just this giant battle throw down and instead you get
(21:24):
this comedic game of deception. I love it. Now. There
is another version that actually has a fight, though it
involves a lot of the same elements. So this other
version I was reading about. I was reading about it
in a book that I know you're going to reference later,
the one by James McKillop called Fian McCool Celtic Myth
(21:45):
in English Literature, published by Syracuse University Press in nineteen
eighty five, and McKillop draws attention to a version of
the story told in William Carlton's The Legend of Knockmany,
And this is from the Midnight eighteenth century, and the
variations in Carlton's version are that the other giant is
(22:06):
not named Ben and Donner, but is named ku Cullen. Interesting,
you know, that's the name of another Irish folk hero
that originally had nothing to do with this story. So
I don't know what's going on there. Maybe it's just
sort of blending together of strong man in folk stories,
or just realizing we've got to have these two characters
(22:26):
fight each other. This is like the Batman Superman of
the day. Well, so many elements of the story are
the same as the version I just told, but some
things are different. This version includes a detail that when
Finn returns home to Una, he says he's afraid that
he will be skivered like a rabbit if he has
to fight Kucullen. But Una knows that Kucullen's power is
(22:47):
contained in the middle finger of his right hand. He
has a magic middle finger, and she knows if you
can compromise the finger, you sap his beastly magic, and
he who loses strength, he won't be able to fight.
So it's kind of like I don't know Samson's hair
or something, except this is the middle finger of his
right hand. So like in the version I told, Cucullen
(23:10):
comes over and Una feeds him bread with metal or
I think in this case it's stones of granite inside,
and he breaks his teeth on the bread. Then when
he hears that even their baby eats this bread, Kucullen
is incredulous and he has to go feel the baby's
teeth again. The baby is actually Finn McCool in disguise,
and when cucullen reaches inside the baby's mouth to feel
(23:33):
its teeth, Finn bites off the magic middle finger, and
now the giant is as weak as immortal man, so
Finn beats him up very easily. All right, So it
started out like it was going to be like this
big throwdown, but again we have a comic game of
deception in play once more. Yes, and McKillop points out
that in this story it's interesting that Finn is victorious,
(23:55):
but only after both showing cowardice in running away from
the initial fight and resorting to trickery. Trickery that wasn't
even his idea. It's not even like he's a you know,
a cunning fox like Odysseus. Una is the real hero
of the story. She comes up with the whole idea
of how to Like she has the knowledge about the
magic middle finger, and she comes up with the whole plan.
(24:16):
So and he has to dress as a baby in
order to defeat his enemy. So it's a weird kind
of simultaneous victory and humiliation. He wins essentially by no
virtue of his own. But there are a couple of
things I kept thinking about with the story that are
going to tie into what you'll bring up in more
detail when you talk about the Thumb of Knowledge. Because
so first of all, it's a story in which Finn
(24:39):
McCool dresses up as a giant baby. And one thing
that we know Finn McCool did in other legends is
suck on his thumb in order to gain insight or knowledge,
which of course is associated with you know, that's what
babies do. But the other thing is that Finn McCool
has to bite off the magic middle finger of his
enemy in order to defeat him and steal his power.
(25:01):
So his enemy has a magic finger in this story,
just like Finn McCool does, though the magic thumb is
not really mentioned in this telling. Yeah, I mean, this
all has to be connected. I don't remember tales of
Cucullin's magic middle finger coming up when we researched the
hero previously, and clearly the idea of a Finn McCool
(25:22):
who has this thumb of knowledge, the idea of him
dressing up as a baby feels like, I mean, it
feels like a perfect creation, Like you can imagine that
just being you know, whatever the exact origins are, and
we'll get into that of the thumb of knowledge, it
just makes sense that somebody later would think of But
what if he also acted like a baby. You can't
help it go there, because, of course, babies putting fingers
(25:47):
into or their thumb in their mouth, sucking on their thumb.
It's it's a universal reality, and it's been you know,
you see it reflected in various myths and traditions around
the world, So you couldn't help it go in that direction. Now,
before we move on, I did want to come back
(26:08):
to the geological question of what actually causes hexagonal columns
to form in volcanic rock, like what is the actual
scientific origin of the rocks that were believed to be
part of the Giants Causeway? So that giants giants right.
So these columns are usually, but not always, found in
a type of rock called basalt, which is a type
(26:31):
of igneous rock that's created when lava flows out of
a volcano or out of a fissure in the earth
and then cools, and under certain conditions, the cooling process
of that liquid lava can give rise to columns like
the kind we see at the Giants Causeway. So when
molten lava settles and begins to cool, what happens is
(26:52):
its surface begins to set, turning from a glowing orange
liquid into this solid, dark shape. And this cooling happens
from the outside in so the part exposed to the atmosphere,
or especially I think when this occurs in water, that
the part that's exposed to either air or water that
cools the fastest, and then the parts underneath retain their
(27:14):
heat the longest. And as the surface cools, it also contracts,
it literally shrinks in volume. So this is something that's
common to all kinds of materials, are as their temperature
goes down, they shrink in volume. You can observe this
if you like you've ever seen videos rob of people
freezing balloons in liquid nitrogen. I feel like I have.
(27:37):
What happens when you freeze the balloon in liquid nitrogen.
It's really interesting. It shrinks. So you can take a
balloon that's inflated and kind of plunge it into liquid
nitrogen and then it shrinks down. It looks like it's
completely deflated. But then if you take it out of
the liquid nitrogen, sit it on a table or something,
it will gradually as it warms up, reinflate again. So
like what's going on. It's almost as if it's magic.
(27:58):
But what's happening is the cooling of the gas inside
the balloon causes that gas to contract, and it shrinks
down and down and down until the balloon is essentially deflated.
Then when it warms back up, it expands again. Oh okay,
maybe I haven't seen videos of this before. It's worth
looking up. It looks really cool. I bet you can
shrink a balloon by putting it in your freezer as well. Yeah,
(28:20):
maybe that's what I've seen before, but probably not as
fully shriveled. As the lipid nitrogeneral gets you. But anyway, so, yeah,
things tend to contract, they shrink as they cool, and
the same thing is true if this lava. So the
surface cools faster than the part down below, and as
the surface cools, it shrinks. But as this contraction is happening,
(28:46):
it's also setting up solid at the same time, So
the surface of the lava actually cracks as it shrinks,
and so especially if the cooling is happening in a
fairly evenly distributed way, what tends to happen is that
these cracks occur around evenly spaced centers of surface contraction
that occur at pretty fixed intervals. Sort of. You can
(29:07):
map them as a bunch of dots around the surface
of the lava formation, and they'll be pretty evenly spaced out.
And then the cracks form around those centers of cooling,
and they one of the easiest ways for those cracks
to form is roughly into hexagons around those centers. And
as the cracks form on the surface, the lava mass
(29:28):
continues cooling and the cracks propagate vertically down into the
center of the mass, forming these columns, and so eventually
the mass cools and solidifies entirely, and we're left with
columnar basalt like we find at the Giants Causeway. It
all started with cracks on the surface from the cooling,
and those cracks penetrated deeper and deeper as the mass
(29:49):
of lava cooled, and again the result is just quite impressive.
I've not been to one of these sites and seen
it in person, but researching this a little bit and
looking at some of these photog graphsh it makes me
want to go. I know I've seen some in person
at at a volcanic site in Oregon, and I can't
recall if I've seen any anywhere else. I know there
(30:11):
is it's either an elaborate set or a location that's
used in the TV series Raised by Wolves that looks
a lot like this, But it's my understanding that that
show is filmed in South Africa, so I don't know
if there's a South African location that has a similar
geography going on, or if that's all just you know,
(30:33):
a set or something. At any rate, it looks impressive
in that show as well. If we were only in
the office, I could just yell at Holly and ask her,
since she does the podcast for raised by wolves. Oh yeah,
she's got the hook up for all your basult information.
All right, So that's the giants causeway, that's a little geomethology,
but we all know that it takes a little more
than geo mythology to make a mythic hero. We also
(30:56):
need some sort of a monster battle. There has to
be a slaying of some sort. If not a monster battle,
then it led at least some sort of epic battled
against another you know, humanoid adversary. And in this case,
well we've we've got a we've got a pretty good one.
We have the sling of Aileen mcmidnah, aka the Burner.
(31:18):
So I apologize, but that makes me think of him
as a phone. Well my mind and instantly went to
the possibility that he's really into going to burning man
in various regional burns and in a way, I mean
he is a musician. So we're told that mcmidnah was
the fairy musician of the two Apha to Din and
again the powerful rulers of the other world. Now, Aileen
(31:42):
is often described in this case as a dark figure
with fiery breath, armed with both a supernatural harp that
could lull mortals to sleep, as well as a poisoned spear.
Now the spear in this in this case, it doesn't
seem again all of these things that kind of depends
on the tell and who's writing it down, But the
spear doesn't seem to be poisoned in the traditional sense,
(32:05):
though I it also does sound like it will still
poison you if you're stabbed with it, but more to
the point, it emits poisonous fume. So it's like, it's
pretty fabulous vision to have in your mind, this idea.
Here's this is a dark, fiery monster being and has
a harp in one hand and the other this this
spear that is just smoking with poison. I'll also point
(32:29):
out that if you start looking at illustrations of Aleen,
you'll find it's kind of all over the place, Like
there's there's a pretty famous one where Aileen looks like
this kind of monolithic dark giant that kind of looks
almost like a robot firing a blast of energy at
Finn McCool and I really love that image, and it
(32:50):
kind of keeps with this idea of sort of the
the elder superpowers of the two appad don and but
then I also found one where Alan mcminnot just looks
like a big grotesque, demonoid goblin creature shooting fire out
of his his pig like nostrils out of the nose,
like he's blowing his nose and fires coming out, and
he's got one big horn in the middle of his head. Yeah,
(33:14):
so I was reading a little bit more about In
Carol Rose's Fairy Spirits, leprecons and Goblins, she of course
has a section where she discusses this particular Aileen and
discusses how Ailin comes to play for the Palace of
Tara on the Festival of Solon, and he becomes irate
because he's playing this music on this magical harp, and
(33:37):
what does it do? It puts everyone to sleep. That
is kind of his or this harp's magical power. So,
I mean, really shame on him. He should be expecting this,
but he gets mad instead, So he's like, what are
you doing falling to sleep during my beautiful music. He
takes up his spear and he blasts three blasts of
fire from his nostrils and he destroys the entire palace.
(33:59):
The entire cast just completely destroyed. So what do you do? Well,
they rebuilt the castle, and then the same thing happened
again the following year. I don't know why they booked
Aileen again, the same gig that destroyed the castle. I
actually I don't think they booked him. I think the
ideas he keeps coming back, such as his rage at
this place, such as is lust for vengeance, and then
(34:20):
every time he destroys the place, they have to build
it back up, and this cycle repeats itself for more
than two decades. After twenty three years of this, Finn
McCool steps up and defeats the beast. He comes in
very much like it's very much like a Baowoff and
Grenville situation. You know, he is, here's the monster that
(34:40):
keeps attacking the center of culture and civilization. And then
eventually you need an outsider, a hero to step in
and really put the boots to the monster. Now, I'm
thinking a big challenge with fighting this monster is going
to be if he's got it like a like a
loot or a or a dulcimer or whatever, that when
he plays it everybody to sleep. Can't he lull any
(35:02):
conquering hero to sleep? Yeah? But luckily Finn McCool he's
a sneaky one. Uh uh. I read that one of
the tactics he employs here to make himself immune to
the magic. Uh He he huffs the fumes from the spear,
which are so One of the like the poisonous effects
of it is that it keeps you from falling asleep.
(35:24):
I'm not exactly sure how that would work, but in
the story that's that is what is said to have occurred.
So he's immune to the music, and then he's able
to get in close battle the Alan and then stab
the Alan with his own poisonous spear, thus killing him.
In some versions, he doesn't stab him with it, He
just like holds it close enough to where he has
(35:45):
to breathe in all of those poisonous fumes and then
dies of the poison. Now, he referenced that book by
James McKillop earlier, and mccullop points out that, yeah, this
is basically the same model found in Baowolf as well.
The oldest Allen tales date back in writing to the
twelfth century, but there are also other accounts, and mccaullut
(36:07):
goes into these a finding battle with other fire based creatures. Now,
according to a Monaghan. This Alan mcmigna is the most
famous Ailan, but there was another Ailen of note as well,
Ailen Tretchen, the triple headed Aileen, and it would attack
the Irish cities Tara and Domain Macha. And sometimes it's
(36:31):
described as male, sometimes it's described as female, and it's
said to live in a cave and may be associated
with the Morrigan. The difference between the two Aileen's is
quote difficult to discern. You know, this is not unique
to Irish legend and myth, but it does seem like
there's a lot of sort of mithime contagion, little elements
(36:53):
of one mythic figure or story just bleeding over into
the other. Yeah, yeah, Okay, Now, I know we've building
up the thumb. The whole time you at home are
thinking like, when are they going to get to the thumb.
We got to know about the thumb, so we are
going to talk about that, but I think we need
to save it for the next part in the series,
which is going to be all thumb. Yeah, all thumb
(37:14):
right in the mouths or in this case, in the ears,
because you'll be listening. Yeah, So next next episode we
will get into the story of Finn McCool and the
Thumb of Knowledge, the different versions of it, how into
what extent it bleeds over into other hero stories, and
you know, well, maybe get into it a little a
(37:35):
little bit of the potential science of the Thumb of
Knowledge as well. And hey, that episode is going to
come out on Saint Patrick's Day itself, so I think
that's perfect, brilliant all right. In the meantime, if you
would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind, it publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed on Mondays.
(37:58):
We do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do an artifact
or monster Fact, and then on Fridays we do Weird
House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious
concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
(38:19):
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
of iHeartRadio for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to
(38:40):
your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.