#fionn mac cumhaill
A whole bunch of Arturia sketches. Lately she’s my go-to when I reallywant to draw something, but have no idea what/who.
That sketch of Arturia with Diarmuid and Fionn is from when I rolled her right after getting Fionn. She came home to make sure he won’t bully Diarmuid.
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In January I followed an online lecture by celticist Dr. Nike Stam, who is working on a 16th century Irish manuscript that is anticlimactically called VLQ7, but that contains two veryexciting pieces of Irish Mythology:
- The only prose version of a Finn MacCool tale that was later called “Finn and the Phantoms”.
This is cool because we only have two manuscript versions of this story: the poetic version from the Book of Leister and this prose version. The beginning seems to be missing (the first page of the text is damaged), but it features Finn and his Fianna get their asses kicked by a household of strange figures who all disappear at sunrise. (There is a note at the end of the story by the scribe, saying: what a wondrous story this is.)
- A version of Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu ’s Feast), which is present in 5 other manuscripts.
Thisis cool because Fled Bricrenn is the first mention of “the beheading game” that the Green Knight plays with Gawain and because this particular version of the text might have an ending that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
This lost ending is primarily what they’re studying this manuscript for at the moment and it’s very tragic:
This manuscript used to have no cover, so the first and last pages got very worn and dirty. Fled Bricrenn is told at the end of the manuscript. It’s a whacky story about how Bricriu Poison Tongue makes fools out of the Lords and Ladies of Ulster by playing pranks and pitting them against each other.
All other known versions of the tale end rather abruptly, but in the 19th century a German scholar looked at this manuscript and made a note that even though the last page was too dirty to read properly, he suspected this version of Fled Bricrenn might actually continue there. (The celticist lamented that 19th century German in cursive is much harder to read than any medieval script.)
No one managed to decipher it however, and when an American scholar came to look at it in the 1990’s someone at the library of Leiden where it is held made the mistake of giving it to “a nun in the country who does these sorts of things”. She tried to washthe last page and thereby also washed away most of the ink, leaving the page clean, but completely illegible.
The researchers hope that they will be able to find remnants of the text using multi-spectral imaging. If all goes well they’ll be trying that this summer and I really really really hope it will turn up something interesting!
