Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

58 STANDISH O'GRADY
None are inventions of individuals ; they mingle with
and are part of one great living tissue, having the same
life with it, and revealing only their meaning in relation
to the whole.
Amongst the mythological ideas of the ancient Irish,
one frequently occurring is, that there existed in the
Irish rivers, or in the seas around Erin, a salmon endowed
with all knowledge, and that to whoever might catch
and eat him that knowledge would be communicated.
Finn mac Cool, while he studied with the ancient bard
beside the pool of Linn-Fecc, upon the Boyne, caught
and ate, or tasted this fish. In the sacred wells at the
source of the Boyne and the Shannon, and at the time
that the m3rsterious hazel-tree shed its wisdom-giving
nuts, this salmon used to appear and devour the fruit,
lest any should meet them afterwards floating upon the
river. He is the salmon of knowledge, often referred
to by the bards, under a set formula, corresponding to
the Homeric :
—
Greece. " Had I an iron tongue and lungs of brass."
Goelici. " Even if I were the Salmon of Knowledge I could
not," &c.
Now, Fintann, the weird bard of the Ceasairian cycle,
is identified with the Salmon of Knowledge, and so,
naturally, the bardo-Christian story above told, was
determined to the form in which we find it. The idea
of the Noachic deluge intrudes into the pure ethnic
mythus.
The historian of the battle of Moy Lena quotes as
his authority for the incidents of the war this Ceas-