Fintan mac Bóchra: Irish Synthetic History Revisited
Grigory Bondarenko
Queen’s University, Belfast
Abstract
Fintan mac Bóchra is one of the characters in Early Irish tradition who act as the self-sufficient centre of their own mythological situation. He figures prominently as a plot-making protagonist in a number of Irish texts serving as a main character of a particular tale or a plot. Celtic scholars have extensively discussed Fintan, and have expressed many opposing views concerning him. Starting with the most influential opinions: he has been taken to be ‘the Otherworld god’ (not surprisingly: O’Rahilly 1946: 319), as a primordial human being of Irish tradition (Guyonvarc’h & Le Roux 2005: 322) or as a synthetic apocryphal being, the product of monastic learning (McCone 1991: 199). In my view it would not be sufficient merely to say that he combines all these features before a proper reassessment of this character.