Fionn, Taliesin, Balor and the Celtic Rudra(s)
[This article builds on our "The Climactic Spear-Throwing Scenes of Celtic Myth: Lugh as Yudhishthira-Mitra and Balor as one of the Rudras," in which we demonstrated a mythic parallel between Irish Balor and Indian Ashwatthama, an incarnation of one of the Rudras.]
One possible etymology of Balor's name is “the deadly one,” from Common Celtic *Baleros. This would make it cognate with Old Irish at-baill, “to die,” and Welsh ball, “death, plague.” This etymology seems more likely when we look at the comparative evidence related to Vedic Rudra. Based on the earliest Rig Vedic material, Rudra is especially the god of the destructive power of nature and the terror it causes (Chakravarti, The Concept of Rudra-Siva Through the Ages, 8), and is a bringer of both disease and death. His attendant gods known as “Rudras” or “Maruts”* are destructive gods of storm, and of wind or rain more specifically. It is important to note how much Rudra and the Rudras are depicted as gods of destruction and struck absolute terror into the hearts of people in the earliest evidence: he is “regarded with a kind of cringing fear, as a deity whose wrath is to be deprecated” says Mahadev Chakravarty (8). According to R.N. Dandekar, "Rudra's name is never directly mentioned. According to the Aitareya Brahmana 34.7, a particular Rgvedic mantra must be recited to avoid the evil consequences of such a mention" (Dandekar, Rudra in the Veda, 95), and he notes that Rudra was referred to as “that god.” Kris Kershaw explains, "According to the Aitareya Brahmana ... Rudra is the compound of all terrible substances, while the Satapatha Brahmana tells us ... that even gods are afraid of him" (Kershaw, 353). Chakravarti holds that Rudra's beneficent, healing aspect became emphasized over time as, due to his immense destructive power, he was propitiated in the belief that he would have the power also to do the opposite of destroying, that he would heal the people or spare them his destruction. The whole basis of the Indo-European mythic war-of-the-gods cycle, as we have described it, boils down to the struggle of the gods of society against the destructive forces of nature, or more exactly against the “impersonal” gods of fate, decay and destruction. Balor can be interpreted in this line as a god of some destructive force of nature or the spirit world. If he is an embodiment of the force of destructive flood waters struck down by the god of light, Lugh, this would put him directly in line with the torrential rain-associated Rudras/Maruts. If he is a more generalized force of destruction and death, then Lugh is the bringer of order and life against chaos, perhaps the ensurer of the harvest against blight and disease.
*“The most important rudras are the Maruts ... The Maruts are a subset of the rudras; they are always together as gana, mahagrama, vrata or sardha", They are often called rudras in the RV and sometimes Rudriyas. They are Rudra's sons; Rudra is invoked as "Father of the Maruts" at the opening of RV 2.33 and 1.114.6&9, and they are invoked with him in 1.114.11 and alone in 2.33.13” (Kris Kershaw, The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-) Germanic Männerbünde, 357-358).
Of the Rudras, Kris Kershaw describes their variety and particular natures, noting that “There are 'countless thousands' of rudras (Satarudriya 10); like their leader they have bows and arrows and "attack man and beast with disease and death" (VM 76)” (Kershaw, 356), saying that “At the end (64-66) the SR actually accounts for 150 rudras in three divisions of 5x10" (356). She explains that: “The tenth stanza of the Satarudriya is a litany for warding off every conceivable sort of rudra” (357). She also gives insight into the common confusion between Rudra and Rudras that we also have dealt with: “Since Rudra himself is ubiquitous it is not always clear whether one has to do with a rudra or with the god himself. They seem to be pictured thus, spooking singly, but also as a troop, gana, sardha” (356). She calls Rudra “leader of the daemonic host, and 'master of the entire demon-world,'” and paraphrases Dandekar saying that because he is “Inherently associated with the demon-world,” he "is thereby clearly isolated from other major Vedic gods” (355), which could explain why Balor seems isolated and opposed to many of the other deities.
Kershaw notes a further characteristic that links Rudra with the world of demons and spirits: “A striking difference between the Maruts and their father is that they partake of the Soma-sacrifice, together with Indra or Agni, an honor from which Rudra is excluded. They also, however, receive sacrifices which are appropriate only for demons: when the cow for the MitraVaruna sacrifice is pregnant, for example, the raw foetus is offered to the Maruts. Arbman notes, too, that the Maruts are often pictured as birds, and that otherwise only the Pitaras (manes) or demons are pictured in this form" (360). In the later recensions of the Lebor Gabala Erenn (R. A. Stewart Macalister (ed. & trans.), Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland Part III, Irish Texts Society Vol. 39, 1940, pp. 2-15, 72-75, 85), as well as material from the Lebor na nUidre, the Fomorians, for whom Balor fights, are described as having one arm and one leg each, or even as having the heads of goats, and this combined with Balor's strange eye seems to have lead them to be seen as grotesque and disfigured on average. As for Rudra's host, a similar image emerges. Chakrabarty notes that “in the Epics and the Puranas, the Parisadas or associates of Rudra-Siva have become increasingly repugnant and obnoxious and are said to be his manifold forms. They are now dwarfish, pot-bellied, cock-faced, long-necked, big-eared, with deformed organ of sex, fiercely energetic, gigantic in size and outlandishly dressed” (Chakrabarty, The Conception of Rudra-Siva Through the Ages, 53).
Why is this terrible and destructive deity sometimes depicted so negatively, and at other times praised so vehemently in the Veda, along with his Rudra or Marut host? Kershaw gives insight here once again: over time, “Rudra's host has been split. The Rudras must originally have been both wild and dangerous and benevolent and bountiful, just like their human counterparts [the sacred, ecstatic warband of youths], but when these disappeared from the religious and social structure, the Furious Host became goblins, while the kindly weather-spirits were worshiped with affection-despite the traces of their dangerous ancestry” (389). We hypothesize that a division may have occurred between the positive and negative, the beneficent and destructive, sides of this deity type as manifested in the Irish sources. Balor would then be the negative aspect, while, as Kershaw, citing Piggott, suggests*, and as we will discuss later on, Fionn mac Cumhaill would embody the positive side of the same general deity type. As Kershaw elucidates, Fionn is Rudra because he is the männerbünde god, and the life of his Fianna in the woods resembles the pattern found in other known männerbündes. To phrase their opposition in another way, Balor is one of these many Rudras, essentially distinguished from Fionn but related in some sense, ultimately overlapping with the world of demons generally, almost the demon of death itself. We already have seen that although both Rudra and his Rudras/Maruts are praised in the Rig Veda, the incarnation of the Rudraic deity, Ashvatthama, nonetheless fights on the side of the Kauravas and even kills the children of the divine heroes of society. Thus Balor, a terrifying figure, could fight against Lugh and be a Rudraic deity without his necessarily being reducible to pure evil. His opposition to Lugh in battle simply is not enough to brand him as solely evil in an Indo-European context, just as we have seen in the case of the Sun god Bres. Instead, Balor is a force of deadly destruction, aligned with indifferent Nature and the ambivalent spirit world, and thus he is an obstacle, a force that must be neutralized and put in its place by the gods of society, almost as if they were (temporarily) defeating death itself.
*“The god or gods of the Celtic Mannerbunde are unknown, though Stuart Piggott remarked, back in 1949, on the resemblance between Rudra leading the Maruts and Finn and the Fianna” (Kershaw, 314).
Remarkably, there is a possible trace of this suggested link between Fionn mac Cumhaill and Balor as positive and negative “sides” of one deity type, or stemming from a single family of deities, and this example solidifies the counterintuitive idea that Fionn and Balor are indeed two sides of one divine coin. A figure said to be a member of the Fianna [see: Rudras/Maruts] and a paternal uncle of Fionn, by the name of Goll “one-eyed” mac Morna, kills the father of Fionn and becomes the leader of the Fianna. As Kershaw and Piggot suggest, the Fianna warband would be the parallel of the Vedic Maruts or Rudras. Goll then becomes an ambivalent ally to Fionn, eventually allowing Fionn to take control of the Fianna when he has grown. Goll even marries Fionn's daughter for an act of bravery (killing the witch Irnan) in which he specifically takes Fionn's place. In another tale, Goll betrays Fionn and fights with Cairbre against him (“The Battle of Gabhra”). Goll, then, is in a close but uneasy relation to Fionn. In folk variants of the Battle of Maigh Tuiredh tale (William Copeland Borlase, The Dolmens of Ireland, 807) this Goll is said to be the main opponent of Lugh or “Lughaidh Lamhfada” in this battle, and is said to be blinded in one eye by him in the fight. This places Goll in the same position as Balor, as if he is a localized folk variant of the same figure which became closely associated with the local Fianna tradition specifically, as scholars have long recognized (Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí. Fionn Mac Cumhaill: Images of the Gaelic Hero. Gill & MacMillan, 1988. pp. 10-11). An acknowledged doublet of Balor is one of the main Fianna, the Irish parallels of the Rudras, and thus the mythic parallel between Balor and the Indian Ashwatthama (the incarnation of a Rudra), which we demonstrated previously, makes perfect sense.
Thus while Rudra is “the destroyer” who brings plague and other forms of death, Balor is “the deadly,” and his eye is said in The Second Battle of Magh Tuiredh to have “poisonous power” imparted to it by the “venomous power” of a druidic brew. In a folktale version of Balor's story recorded by John O'Donovan, the eye is called venomous, and also said to petrify those it looks upon like a basilisk: “by its foul distorted glances, and its beams and dyes of venom, like that of the Basilisk, would strike people dead” (O'Donovan, Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, Volume 1, 18). Another variant, from County Mayo, says he had a “venomous fiery eye” (Daithi O Hogain, Myth, Legend & Romance, 43). The eye is there called “piercing,” and it is said that it takes the strength from men: “The host which looked at that eye, even if they were many thousands in number, would offer no resistance to warriors.” In a similar vein, Kershaw compares the one-eyed Rudraic god Oðinn's power of taking the strength of men in battle to that of the Rudras. As she puts it, Oðinn sometimes “blinds, deafens, or paralyses the enemy troops” (368). In Ynglingasaga we read that he even has the power to make his enemies become like stones: "He could make his enemies blind and deaf, or like stones with fear, and their weapons could no more cut than sticks. . . ."(Ynglingasaga, 6). Though it may simply refer to the sun as one of his eyes, one of Oðinn's names is Báleygr, “flaming or shifty eyed” (Grimnismal 47).
Fionn, Gwynn, and Taliesin: The Celtic Rudra
As we have delineated, among the leaders of the Fianna is Fionn's uncle Goll, the one-eyed, who embodies the destructive aspect of the Rudraic deity type and is a double of Balor. Furthermore, the Fianna themselves are sometimes described as supernatural forces of the Otherworld and are even specifically placed next to the Fomorians, among whom we of course find Balor. As John Carey summarizes, “Some Middle Irish sources suggest that the fiana were themselves supernatural inhabitants of the wilderness: in the dindshenchas poem on Slige Dala they are paired with the Fomoire (TLS 10. 280. 49); and in Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (ed.J.H.Todd, London 1867,114) with the troops of the sid [burial mounds]” (Carey, "Nodons in Britain and Ireland," 20). Thus the Fianna have a side that clearly merges with the domain more usually associated with Balor. Finally, as Rudra has healing powers which are the flipside to his destructive powers, so Fionn is also a healer, able to heal with water (The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne).
As for Gwynn, like the Rudras, divinities of storm and rain, Gwynn and his host are closely connected to clouds. In a poem of the medieval poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, clouds are “the family of Gwyn (tylwyth Gwyri)” and are “the moor of the headland” of Gwynn and his family. The Wild Hunt is alternately called in Welsh Own y Wybr, “Hounds of the Clouds,” while Gwynn's dog is said to wander “upon Cloud mountain (gruidir ar Wibirwinit),” yielding an image of the Wild Hunt racing through the upper air. He is followed by the ellyllon, “bogeys, sprites, elves, phantoms,” and is even said to be one of the lords of Annwn, the Otherworld, where the souls of the dead are taken during his hunt*. “God put the vigor of the devils of Annwn into him to prevent the ruin of the present world: he will not be spared thence” says a description of him in Culhwch and Olwen. Compare this narrative to that of the Norse Wild Hunter, Oðinn, who faces the forces of destruction to prevent the world's ruin, and is not spared in the end. Like Rudra, Gwynn is a god of war generally, called “the hope of armies” and “the hero of hosts” (The Dialogue of Gwynn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir). He declares in this poem, “I come from battle and conflict.” Carey notes how he “goes on to describe having been present at so many battles of all periods that Rhys suggested that he is really some kind of war-spirit” (Carey, 14). Balor/Goll fighting Lugh at Magh Tuireadh also has a slight similarity to the arc of Gwynn's own destructive campaign: abducting Creiddylad from her beloved, making Cyledr eat his father's heart, and then climactically fighting Gwythr every May Day for Creiddylad's hand, which can be seen as a battle between seasonal forces, winter and summer, related to the holiday. The one-eyed giant Ysbaddaden, who also appears centrally in Culhwch and Olwen, the hand of his daughter being sought after as Balor's daughter's is, and who is in general a relatively obvious Balor analog, would then carry the remainder of the destructive side of the Welsh Rudraic mythos.
*Gwaith Dafydd ap Gwilym (GDG), ed. Thomas Parry, Caerdydd 1952, 127.29-30, 150, 52; 26.40; 68.32, cf. Line 40;127.32.
The theme of the waters of ecstatic illumination also seems to be a Rudraic theme common to the Celtic parallels. Kershaw notes that “Rudra is the god from whose cup the kesin, the long-haired ecstatic of RV 10. 136, drinks the drug,” and that he is connected with various ecstatic practices, particularly in relation to the Vratyas (outsider ascetics) and other manifestations of the ecstatic youthful männerbünde. She notes that the youths who were members of the sacred warband were also trained to be poets, and spent half of their year studying this art. Thus, it would make perfect sense if one of the core Rudraic myths involved gaining an ecstatic poetic enlightenment.
Irish Fionn and Welsh Gwion do exactly this. Fionn is minding the cooking of the Salmon of Knowledge, which has eaten the hazelnuts from the waters of the well of wisdom, Segais, and which has been caught by his teacher, the poet Finn Eces (another poet Finn, and so possibly the teacher aspect of the Rudraic deity type*). Fionn has been instructed not to taste of the salmon as he cooks it, as Finn Eces intends the wisdom for himself. Testing the fish with his thumb to see if it is done, Fionn burns his finger, and presently places it in his mouth to soothe the pain. He is suddenly imparted all of the knowledge stored up in the salmon, and his eyes now glow with illumination. Thus the poet Finn has imparted the wisdom to the young apprentice via the tasting of a fish that has the waters of wisdom within it.
*However, Fionn's grandfather (or ancestor of ambiguous distance) Nuada is also occasionally called Finn-Eces, which either shows the overlap of the two deities or the general closeness of Nuada to Fionn. Welsh Gwynn is son of Nudd (parallel of Nuada) rather than grandson (or "descendant"). Eces translates as “seer.”
It has long been recognized that the story of Welsh Gwion Bach, aka Taliesin, matches Fionn's in large part. Gwion is merely another form of the name Gwynn, name of the frightening Wild Hunt spectre Gwynn ap Nudd. These names in turn are the Welsh forms of the Irish Fionn, the interchange of G for F being common between the two languages. Fionn/Gwynn/Gwion mean “white, bright, blessed, holy”* and come from Proto-Celtic *Windos, likely from PIE *weyd- “to know, to see,” emphasizing how central the role of seer is to this deity. He is “The Knower.” Note as well Eber Fionn, one of the Sons of Mil, from the pseudohistorical layer of the Lebor Gabala Erenn, suggesting that this may be a deeply established divine name. John Rhys points out that Finn ua Nuadat and Gwynn fab/ap Nudd are linguistic cognates (Rhys, Hibbert Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, 179). Finn ua Nuadat, the grandson of Nuada (Nuadu mac Achi**), is then the parallel of the Wild Hunter Gwynn ap Nudd, the son of Nudd, and in another aspect is parallel of Gwynn's linguistic double Gwion.
*The Rudras “are shining, brilliant, golden; they are fires, or they are bright like Agni. They wear golden mantles and ornaments of gold, and they travel in war-chariots. In all this they resemble their father in his brighter moments” (Kershaw, 358).
**Also Nuadu Necht in the poem “Slan seiss a Brigit.” Furthermore, Carey notes that “An ancient genealogical poem edited by Meyer traces three paternal lines of Nuadu Necht's descendants, two ending in Finn File and Finn mac Umaul” (“Nodons in Britain and Ireland”).
As told in the Hanes Taliesin of the Mabinogion, Gwion, in a similar manner to Fionn, is made to tend the cooking of another special meal, another comestible that grants knowledge. This is a potion of poetic inspiration being prepared by the enchantress or goddess Cerridwen and intended for her son. As such, Gwion has of course been instructed not to taste the potion as it cooks. However, three drops of the potion leap out of the hot cauldron and land on Gwion's finger, burning him. He quickly puts his finger into his mouth to soothe the pain, as had Fionn. He instantly gains all the wisdom and poetic inspiration of the potion, the rest of the cauldron suddenly becoming poisonous and useless. A chase ensues during which Gwion uses his newfound wisdom to change into a series of animals to escape the enraged Cerridwen. She mirrors him by transforming into animals well-suited to catch him in each form. He changes into a hare, so she becomes a greyhound; he changes into a fish, so she becomes an otter; he changes into a bird, so she becomes a hawk. Finally, he transforms into a grain of wheat. Cerridwen turns herself into a hen and eats him. Instead of dying, however, he gestates in her womb, and is reborn to her as Taliesin (the name Taliesin could be a variation on the theme of shining brightness common to the names of Fionn and Gwion and means “radiant brow”)*. Cerridwen, unable to kill the beautiful child, casts him into the waters. He washes up in the fish-weir of Elffin ap Gwyddno, who raises him to become the most famous of Welsh bards.
*Compare also a Rig Vedic description of Rudra: “He shines in splendour like the Sun, refulgent as bright gold is he” (RV 1.43.3).
Just as Fionn's teacher and cooking master had carried a version of the name Finn, so Gwion is likewise surrounded by figures with variations of this name in their names. Cerridwen has the adjective wen in her name, which, if it does not derive instead as a corruption of -ven, “woman,” usually is derived from gwyn/gwen, the same name we have had to deal with so far. Cooking master Finn Eces would then make a curious parallel with cooking master Cerridwen. And again, when Taliesin washes up and is discovered, his discoverer is Elffin, which may come from the Irish ail “rock” and fion “white/bright,” the second portion being the same name we have been tracking. Thus the man who raises and presumably teaches Gwion-Taliesin bears a variant of the name Fin(n), as does the teacher of Fionn, Finn Eces. Meanwhile, even the potion of inspiration is in Welsh named Awen, connected once again to the same root -wen, which emphasizes its central role in the seer's vocation.
One last Fin needs to be mentioned here, and that is the Irish Fintan or Fionntan mac Bocra. With the multiplication of this general name, which we have traced so far, and with the multiplicity of the Rudras and Maruts in Vedic tradition, there is little reason to exclude the possibility that Fintan too may reflect one of the Rudraic/Fenian deities. He is called “the wise,” and is known as a seer. He has lived for several millennia and has used his power of transformation to live as a series of different animals. While Taliesin changes into a hare, a fish, and a bird, Fintan changes into a salmon, an eagle, and a hawk. Fionn gains the sum of the world's knowledge from a salmon while Fintan carries in himself the world's knowledge and lives in the form of a salmon, leading to a common confusion between these two salmon. Due to his great age and the wisdom he has gained over so many generations, Fintan becomes known as the storehouse of all Ireland's knowledge. He even meets up with Fionn at the end of their lives to share their knowledge together, perhaps signalling the deeper connection between the two.
Taliesin comes to be considered The Prime Bard, the Chief of Bards in the Welsh tradition, and his name becomes synonymous with poetry. A similar thing happens in the Irish case, but this role seems to be focused into Fionn's son, Oisin. As Gwion had transformed by a rebirth into Taliesin, Oisin is instead born as son to Fionn. We note again a similarity between the last portions of each of these names, -sin. Due to the general similarities of these two poets, Louis Herbert Gray suggested that Oisin could speculatively be equivalent to -essin or -eisin in Taliesin. In truth, Oisin seems to come from os, “deer,” and the diminutive suffix -ín, making the etymologies outwardly incompatible. Still, surface similarities should be duly noted. Oisin then becomes one of the great representative names of the Irish poetic tradition, as Taliesin does for the Welsh, and the tales of the Fianna are attributed to him as their author and narrator.
We see that the Rudraic mythos, so mulitple in its manifestation, is divided in different ways even between these two closely situated insular Celtic cultures. Fionn, Goll, Oisin and Fintan reflect different Rudraic roles that are mirrored in Gwynn, Gwion, Ysbaddaden (parallel of Goll/Balor), and Taliesin in Wales. Fionn specifically matches aspects of Gwynn (Wild Hunter), Gwion (waters of illumination), and Fintan (transformations, storehouse of wisdom) while Taliesin matches Fintan in part as well as Oisin (national poet), but all of these figures overlap in more complex ways than such a reduction can sum up. When we compare the Celtic case once more to the Norse case of the Rudraic god Oðinn, the elements are again divided differently. Oðinn has one eye, like the ambivalent and destructive Goll, but he is not fully a god of destruction as we see in the form manifested by Balor, who loses an eye as well, even though he shares some of his specific paralytic powers. Instead, Oðinn brings the dangerous Rudraic element within bounds and directs it toward the project of order and societal benefit. He parallels the myth of the tasting of the liquid (or fish) of inspiration when he drinks of Mimir's well and in this myth his one-eyedness also comes about. As such, he combines something of the Goll/Balor element with the Fionn/Gwynn element, as leader of the Wild Hunt and of the warrior bands, ecstatic poet and seer, keeping in reserve the destructive power connected to the frightening spirit world. These deities all overlap because they are all of one type, they all share the same general powers and potentialities but directed toward different roles and ends – they are all “Rudras.”
Varuna-Rudra and the Oðinnic Question
When Nuada is understood as Varunian (as we have suggested) and the above Celtic figures as Rudraic, we are able to shed some light on the great mystery of how the Norse god Oðinn can seem to “combine” the Rudraic divinity with the Varunian in himself. The Varunian god Nuada being grandfather of Fionn and his cognate Nudd being father of Gwynn may hint at a deeper connection between the two deity types. Carey submits that “Insofar as the meagerness of the Welsh evidence allows us to judge, therefore, Nuadu/Ludd [aka Nudd] and Finn/Gwynn represent different aspects of Nodons … The overlapping attributes of Nuadu and Finn, and the identification of Nodons with Mars, suggest that the divine ancestor in fact comprises all of these functions and that his offspring reflect facets of his character” (21-22). He then expands upon this theory that the British Nodons may combine in himself both the “Nudd” and the “Gwynn” deities in one figure (though this theory is difficult to prove due to the stated overlap), that is, the Varunian and the Rudraic, similarly to what we see with Oðinn, concluding: “Nodons thus appears as a god of multifaceted but consistent character: a shining royal warrior presiding over the chaotic in nature, society and the Otherworld (water, war, the devils of Annwn). It is of further interest that such a figure should appear as a dynastic ancestor, and the eventual victim of the forces which he dominated” (22).
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