Mother of Fionn
Muirne Muncháem — “Muirne of the White Neck” — was the mother of Fionn mac Cumhaill. Her father was the druid Tadg mac Nuadat, who opposed her marriage to Cumhall so fiercely that he went to the High King Conn of the Hundred Battles and asked him to stop it. Goll mac Morna led the Clan Morna against Cumhall at the Battle of Cnucha. Cumhall was killed.
Muirne was already pregnant.
Her father then tried to have her burned — to dispose of the daughter who had shamed him by carrying the dead rebel’s child. The High King refused to allow it. She was protected, carried the child to term, and then gave the baby into the keeping of her sister Bodhmall and the warrior-woman Liath Luachra to be raised in hiding. She could not keep him herself — the same circumstances that had made his survival necessary required her to give him up.
She later married Gleor Red-Hand, king of Kerry. The tradition gives her a quieter life on the far side of everything she had survived: her husband killed, her father’s betrayal, her son given away to strangers in the hills. She came through it and found something else on the other side.
Fionn’s full name — Fionn mac Cumhaill — means Fionn, son of Cumhall. His father’s name is in his. But without Muirne surviving what was done to her, there would have been no Fionn at all.
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