Cooked in the Otherworld Hostel: Fionn, the Bruidhean and the Shaman’s Ordeal

They were invited to a feast in a hostel among rowan trees, and they went, because the Fianna never refused hospitality. The hall was fine, the fire was bright, and the walls smelled of every sweet-scented wood. But when Fionn and his companions sat down, they found that the fire had died, the scent had turned foul, the walls had opened to the wind, and they could not rise. The floor had been spread with enchanted earth, and their seats held them fast. Their hosts meant them to die there. The tale is Bruidhean Chaorthainn, the Hostel of the Quicken Trees, and it is one of a family of stories in which Fionn and his men enter an Otherworld dwelling as guests and very nearly do not leave.

The Outlaw Seer

Fionn is the strangest of the great Irish heroes. Cú Chulainn defends a kingdom; Fionn lives outside one. He was raised in hiding in the forest by two foster-mothers, the druidess Bodbmall and the warrior-woman Liath Luachra, who taught him to hunt and to fight. He became a fénnid, a member of a fian, one of the bands of young men who lived in the wild beyond the borders of the settled túath, hunting through the summer and quartered on the people in winter, half mercenaries, half outlaws. And he became a file. Cooking the Salmon of Knowledge for his master by the Boyne, he burned his thumb on its skin and put the thumb in his mouth, and knowledge came to him. The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn says that it was then he learned the three things that make a poet: teinm laída, imbas forosnai and díchetal do chennaib. For the rest of his life, when he needed to know something hidden, he chewed his thumb.

The folklorist Joseph Falaky Nagy, in The Wisdom of the Outlaw, argues that this double identity is the key to Fionn. He is both inside and outside: a poet of the highest rank and a man of the margins, at home in neither the court nor the wild, and therefore able to pass between them. That in-betweenness, liminality in the anthropologists’ word, is exactly the condition of the shaman, who stands at the edge of the community in order to serve it.

The Otherworld Hostel

The word bruidhean means a hostel, a hall of hospitality, and in both Fenian and older tales the bruidhne are, in Nagy’s words, “explicitly or implicitly otherworldly.” Fionn and his men stumble into them while hunting, are lured into them by strangers, or find that the house they are sheltering in for the night belongs to someone who is not human. Often they do not quite know when they have crossed the line. Inside, the rules are the host’s. In some tales they are honoured and feasted. In others they are bound, mocked, threatened, and very nearly eaten. In tellings from Scottish Gaelic oral tradition Fionn is laid on a griddle until his legs are burned; elsewhere a giant host threatens to strip the flesh from the fénnidi with pincers and feed it to his dogs, while his wife would rather eat them raw.

Corby Ingold, drawing on Nagy, observes how strikingly this resembles what shamans in many cultures report of their initiation: being taken by spirits, cut up, cooked or devoured, and then reassembled, restored to greater wholeness and often with new powers. Eliade gathered many such accounts from Siberia, where the future shaman, in a long sickness, dreams of being boiled in a cauldron and having his bones counted. And in every bruidhean story where Fionn is cooked or dismembered, he is restored, and frequently he brings something back.

Nagy also notes that in the hostel Fionn “alternates radically between being a victimized guest and an aggressive intruder.” Sometimes the Otherworld does things to him; sometimes he does things to it. Every practitioner who has journeyed for a while will recognise both experiences. Sometimes one is shown, held, even overwhelmed. Sometimes one is sent to bargain, retrieve or confront. The tales do not pretend either is safe.

The Price

The Otherworld does not give for nothing. In one tale a woman of the sí tricks Fionn into diving into a lake on Sliabh gCuilinn to find her ring, and he comes out a withered old man. His men dig into the mound of her father, who gives Fionn a drink that restores his strength. But Fionn’s hair stays grey, and when he is offered its colour back he refuses. He keeps the mark of where he has been.

The same law runs through the other Otherworld voyages. In the Welsh poem Preiddeu Annwn, Arthur sails to the Otherworld in his ship Prydwen to seize a cauldron, with three shiploads of men, and the refrain tolls after every stanza: “except seven, none returned.” Máel Dúin loses his foster-brothers one by one on the islands of his voyage. The seer-poets paid for their visions in darkness and hunger. Shamans the world over speak of an ordeal that sets them apart from ordinary life, and the tradition is honest that some do not come back from it.

The Border Guard

Fionn’s journeys are not idle adventures. Again and again his Otherworld knowledge protects the human world from it. Every Samhain for twenty-three years, the tale goes, Aillén mac Midgna came out of the sídh, lulled the defenders of Tara to sleep with his music, and burned the hall. The young Fionn stood watch with the point of a magic spear pressed against his own forehead, so that the pain kept him awake through the sleep-strain, and when Aillén came he killed him. It was this deed that won him the leadership of the Fianna. Elsewhere his men guard the coasts against a creature Fionn has detected by his thumb, and he recovers the corrbolg, the crane-skin bag of Manannán that held the treasures of Ireland.

This is the shaman’s other face. The one who knows the Otherworld best is the one who keeps its dangers at the border. Fionn and his men live at the edge of the human world because someone has to.

What the Tales Teach a Practitioner

The Otherworld is not a spa. It is generous and dangerous, and it has its own rules of hospitality. Courtesy matters; so does knowing when to leave.
Ordeal is part of the path, not a sign of failure. Practitioners sometimes meet images of being taken apart in the journey. In the shamanic literature these are widely reported and usually understood as renewal. If one frightens you, return, ground yourself, and talk it through with an experienced teacher.
Do not go looking for it. Fionn never sought the hostel. The ordeal finds you; your task is to come back.
Keep the mark. Fionn kept his grey hair. What the journey costs you is part of what it gives you.
Bring something back for someone. The crane bag, the salmon’s knowledge and the safety of Tara were all for others.

A Practice: Reading a Tale From the Inside

The tales are records of Otherworld experience. One way to learn from them is to enter them, carefully, as a witness.

Choose a tale. A bruidhean tale, a voyage, an echtra. Read it aloud, slowly, twice.
Find the threshold. Mark the moment where the hero crosses into the Otherworld: the hostel door, the lake, the mist.
Set your intention. “I am going to the threshold of this story as a witness, to learn what it teaches.” Not as the hero, and not to change anything.
Journey. To the drum or in silence, go to the threshold you marked and wait there. See what comes. If a figure from the tale appears, ask one question: “What is the price, and what is the gift?”
Return by the same way. Come back to the threshold, step out of the story, and open your eyes.
Write it down, and then read the tale again. Note where your journey and the text agree, and where they part.

Over a year of this, the tales stop being stories about other people and become maps you know from the inside. That, perhaps, is what they were always for. The Fianna told them around the fire at night, at the edge of the forest, to men who would be going back into it in the morning.