Welcome to a world where poetry has the power to bring madness, death, wisdom or all three at once. Of all who dared to learn the magical art of poetry there is none more famed than the divine Irish hero, Finn mac Cumhaill. Yet all power comes with a price.    

 

Illumination Tales pierces through the misty veil of the past and shines a light upon three stories concerning Finn and his archaic appendage, the thumb of knowledge. The sources for these tales are found surviving in a scant few precious lines of text, housed in rare and extremely treasured manuscripts dating back to the 6th century.

 

These fragments only offer a tantalizing glimmer of what the 'whole' must have contained. A fleeting bit of dialogue here, an obscure topographical reference there and then a hopeful reference cut off mid sentence. In my own rendering of these stories, I have endeavored to find that missing 'whole' and breathe new life into the storytelling traditions of Finn.

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Part 1, The Druids Daughter. Tells of Finn's conception, birth and of his time as a young boy being raised by his Druid Aunties who taught him to compose poetry extemporaneously.

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Part 2, The Salmon of Knowledge. Tells the story from the perspective of the salmon, willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of spreading wisdom into the world.

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Part 3, The Faerie Fort. Finn, now grown into a man searches for the final qualification of becoming a poet and confronts his destiny whilst stuck between two worlds on Samhain night.​​​​​