Penny Wagers

James Hart
  • 0.0 (0)
  • DRAMA
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

I write narrative poetry that leans more mythopoetic than personal. Also essays about perambulations, coffee's effect on memory and other cool stuff. Come on in. The water's nice, so feel free to take your shoes and socks off. pennywagers.substack.com

  1. 3D AGO

    The Gospel Written for the Mead-Hall

    Hey, happy Good Friday! I have something I’d like to read for you that I think you might find interesting. Let me know if anything here sounds familiar... Definitely not a version of the Gospel most folks would be familiar with today, is it? This is the Heliand, sometimes referred to as “The Saxon Gospel.” There are two versions I’d recommend: The prose translation by G. Ronald Murphy I’d pick up for the commntary. For a poetic translation that has some hiccups but is still excellent, check out Mariana Scott’s version through the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages program. So what in the world is this, and why does it exist? Here’s a part of Murphy’s introduction that helps shed some light on this... Other than this version being tons of fun to read and experience, there’s something I’d like to delicately suggest here. In many churches in 2026 America, “hearing the Gospel” would entail attending Sunday services, and perhaps also breaking out the fold-out chairs in the church basement on weekdays to do Bible study. There, you might sit in a circle and read the Bible through the specific lenses of cultural scholarship, theology and personal reflection. Nothing at all wrong with that, but is that kind of thing religious, or cultural? The Wikipedia article for the Heliand suggests that it was probably written at the request of the emperor “around AD 830 to combat Saxon ambivalence toward Christianity.” Well, what’s to stop someone today from writing their take on the Gospel in poetic form and sharing that at an open mic night? Why can’t someone act out scenes on TikTok using top-down stop-motion? I’m not even on the thing and still I’d give it a like. Anyway, that’s my idle thought for the day. Hope you’re having a good Holy Week. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min

  2. MAR 30

    Fionn Meets Scathach, the Shadowy One

    The fun thing about myths is that they’re great for visual thinkers. You aren’t to narrow them down and flatten them into any lesson or actionable takeaway. In their dreamlike narratives, the images are the thing. In this story, I find myself sitting with the last few scenes the most. It seems we have a tendency to personalize iron string music these days. It’s often all we listen to. We watch overseas tragedies, domestic troubles and political outrage and take everything very seriously. Fair enough, because we live among serious circumstances. But we don’t do that when it comes to laughter, levity and comedy, do we? Stand-up specials and comedies are never taken as personally or internalized like the news. As for that silver string, we don’t even recognize the music anymore. I often wonder to what extent that can even be rectified. I’ve heard it said that there’s a reason we find ourselves in such a reductive, quantified and abstract reality: those are tools that facilitate commodifying and using the world to serve our purposes. Resource exploitation is far more efficient when slinging numbers, not sitting with more empathy. Well, fie on that. As is often the case, I’m with Fionn on this one. I’m not going to ignore today’s iron-string lamentations, but I’m also not going to forget the other two. I’m going to try to remember that all kinds of shadows walk. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    12 min

  3. MAR 23

    Simon Greene and External Imagination

    My daughter’s got this chart in her classroom. It’s a two-column thing that teaches kids the difference between fiction and non-fiction. According to the chart, fiction is anything that isn’t factual. It’s made up, and its purpose is entertainment. Non-fiction, on the other hand, is truthful. Look, you gotta start somewhere, I get that. But there’s a reason that my daughter at second grade feels far more confident discussing “author intent” than she does whether or not she even likes a story. I’m doing my best to help her learn to have fun with what she reads, though, so let’s get back to that chart for a moment. One place I might start updating the material is to add another column and label it “myth.” Then, I’d start to write down some bullet points that would definitely get me in front of a school board, were I a teacher in our district: We’d be here all day if I started going off on every point made here, so maybe we’ll just chip away at it a little. Let’s focus on the last one. (We can do the others later on if there seems to be enough interest.) For my money, one of the best voices to listen to regarding external imagination is the Mariner’s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And the man to help us understand Coleridge’s place in our world today is Rev. Dr. Malcom Guite. We’ll start with what Coleridge calls “primary imagination” at the end of his Biographia Literaria. He calls it “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM,” which is about as wild a claim as you can make before someone might lock you up. Malcolm has spoken and written several times and at length on this topic, so I can only hope to respond to his scholarship on this. Nonetheless, let’s unpack a few implications here. For starters, this means that imagination is not fantasy. Despite what my daughter’s classroom chart might have you believe, imagination is not about making stuff up. It’s the very tool we use to perceive reality itself. It’s not that we miss out on understanding the world meaningfully or in a fun way without an imagination—it’s that we can’t understand it at all. Wanna know something fun? Cognitive science proves this out rather nicely. Simons and Chabris’s famous gorilla experiment will give you proof enough. We think that we see objectively with our eyes. We don’t. In a physical sense, our eyes fetch what our imagination tells them to. Anyway, if you aren’t a Coleridge fan, Blake was on the same page when he said that “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.” And according to Owen Barfield, “Figuration is not a mental process… but a participation in the world’s meaning.” Coleridge wasn’t an island regarding this idea. As a practical example, there are several ways you can look at a fox in the forest. You can see a sack of meat, sinew and bones roaming atop dead plant cells, I suppose. Or you can see the fox as a wild animal, a possible threat to your dog and a reason to call animal control. But you could also see glow-eyed Cunning, once again taking his careful steps along the moonlight. The ocean is a jostling mix of H2O molecules with a little bit of Na+ and Cl- thrown in, sure. It’s also a calm place to get a tan or get away from it all, or a place to meet the warrior, the mysterious stranger or the old man, depending on the conditions. As Malcolm put it, the sea can be something you understand personally. Perception doesn’t just foster knowledge. It can foster relationships, too. What this means for myth—if you ask me, anyway—is that there’s a difference between a myth and fiction. I like watching Lord of the Rings as much as the next dad of a certain age. And at regular intervals, I will say stuff like, “A day may come when the courage of this kettle fails, when it forsakes its duty and no longer provides temperature control—but it is not this day!” (I’m a dad, after all, and this sort of thing is outlined in the manual.) But I can spot Perceval among a crowd of other dads during a school trip. It’s possible to hear Daireann’s whispers when a certain kind of trouble darkens a friendly barbeque. And Mars can easily be found lurking behind today’s headlines. There’s much more to say on this, but I wouldn’t want to keep you. Go and give Malcolm’s talk a watch if you haven’t already; his investigations are a lot more thorough. Take it seriously enough, though, and you may just see the moon a little differently the next time you’re out at night. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    11 min

  4. MAR 17

    Ireland's First Satire

    To commemorate the feast day of the Shamrock Saint, I figured I’d share this story with you. Please do send it to the poets you know if they haven’t heard it already (and may it also serve as a reminder to be nice to people during job interviews). Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  5. MAR 16

    Fionn mac Cumhaill and Aillèn Mac Midgna

    It was a bad line from the start, that much was obvious. We had been good about setting the raft square into the rapids, but this approach looked bad, this looked dangerous. Expletives started rising. There’s a huge gap in my memory. But I do remember that at the bottom, our raft started taking in hundreds of gallons per second from the falls. Everyone was gone and my side rising up, up, up, out of the water. I slid backwards, head-first, into the drink. I swirled around down there for a good long time. My life jacket finally brought me up, but that’s when I learned we had only just started. I managed to be nearest to the raft, which had now flipped entirely upside down. Our guide stood on top of it now. He unwrapped the cable from his waist, clipped it to the base of the boat, then looked at me. “Help me pull in the others,” he said. Help you pull in the others? The raft is flipped and no one’s in it! He jumped off the raft while tethered to it, using his weight to flip the raft and right it. He climbed that same cable to log-roll himself in and then didn’t so much pull as threw me in behind him. It was now just the two of us in a raft that seats eight, and we were leaving the rapids for greater falls that he warned us would probably take us out if we couldn’t get to the cove in time. There was no swimming for it; we needed the oars. So, there was work we had to do. Pro tip: don’t ever pull anyone into a raft with your arms. The angle is awkward and they’re entirely too heavy. What you do instead is grab on to their life vest, set your elbows into your chest and then do your best to fall backwards. Your leverage is what will pull them out. I did this with Mike first. He floundered in the boat a bit, so I raised myself and saw my roommate on the other side of the raft. I got him in, too. Then I got Jared, then Stephen. We were way late getting to the shore, but proved to be safe enough. On the beach, no one said anything. We pulled the raft up and out of the water but kept silent. On the portage trip down, Jared started screaming at Stephen, his little brother. It was his way of letting Stephen know he was terrified for him. Our guide finally broke the ice. “Y’all look a little gun-shy, eh? But you ain’t gun-shy, are ye?” He was smiling. He did it on purpose, y’see. And we all knew he did it on purpose because he told us he was going to, right before we approached the rapids. When he did, he was smiling like Gornemant. This was not an initiation, although I suppose it could have been. It remained demoted as an orchestrated crisis because I didn’t know the steps to initiation. No one told me the steps. Not my parents, not my grandparents. Almost none of us know the steps anymore. In School of Lost Borders parlance, the first step is what they call Severance. There’s something that nudges you off the well-trod road into town and gets you bushwhackin’ it through the wilds. This could be a formalized thing with a vision quest group, or someone could simply walk into your living room and quietly say, “I’m pregnant.” Either way, you’ve left the road. Next comes crossing the Threshold. You’re going to do or experience something that brings the whole of you—body, psyche, mind, spirit, soul, whatever you’ve got—out into some kind of in-between. You’re no longer with the revelers at Tara anymore; you’re out there in the lone dark, cooly holding that spear tip up to your forehead. Prepare as you might, remember what Iron Mike said: “everyone’s got a plan until they’ve been hit.” You’re going to be in over your head, you won’t know for how long and it’s going to be gnarly. If initiation or rites of passage are talked about at all, these two tend to monopolize the conversation. A lot of bragging goes on about Severance and Thresholds via dry fasts and pilgrimages, or retreats and missionary work if that’s more your crowd. But believe it or not, these two are the easy part. I must admit that the rafting trip went differently for me after the rapids disaster. Before the trip, before I started college and before I even left high school, I was the group screw-up. Well, that’s not the right terminology. “You were a screw-off,” my high school physics teacher told my parents and me. “You were all, ‘hey, man, I’m here I guess, I don’t have to take any of this seriously.’” He was exactly right. I wasn’t a great athlete, I did decent on exams, but who cares about those? In social settings, I never had much to offer, except it seemed I could come up with jokes better than most. This fit, because it happened to be all I wanted to do. So, before my physics teacher laid into me, I had already considered “screw-off” my professional title. Some of the laughter was at my expense, but so what? I never took it seriously; it was all in service to the joke, whatever it was. But the folks around me sure took it seriously. No one really respected me much. I saw a change in this after the raft flipped over. Screw-off or no, I single-handedly pulled half our group back in the boat and everyone knew it. This wrapped a kind of Teflon around me. Some who were blind to it started to use me as collateral for jokes again, but the blows didn’t land, either with me or anyone else. Unfortunately, it ended there. What I didn’t do was Reintegrate. I didn’t take the lesson home with me, and I didn’t share it with anyone. After the rafting trip, things went back to how they were. Used to be, the hardest step in an initiation was the doing of the thing. Now, it’s figuring out how to share what you’ve learned with a culture that doesn’t want to hear it. Words of soul and spirit fall on deaf ears in a culture obsessed with work and entertainment. But they need to hear it, and you need to share it. It’s part of the great exchange: that which has value should never be withheld or hoarded. When they are, both sides wither. If you don’t figure out how to share, your initiation remains a temporary crisis. You’ll stay in exactly in the same pit you thought your hardship pulled you out of. On the other hand, an interesting thing happens if you do reintegrate. People start to believe you. It’s all well and good to be impressed by culture’s bad boys, but we’ll listen to Danny Trejo ten times out of ten because he lived what Joni Mitchell called “Both Sides Now.” The same is true of Jocko Willink, Oprah Winfrey, Louis Zamperini, Aretha Franklin and countless others. What the gurus and thought leaders don’t understand is that charisma comes from walking the road you’re describing for far longer than would be considered decent or necessary. Everything else is persona. Fionn teaches us a lot here about returning gracefully; what matters and what’s worth discarding. But let me for a moment share another example; one I think Fionn would well understand. It’s been nearly a thousand years since St. Francis walked among us, and he still remains the most popular saint after Mary. Not a bad position to maintain, considering the ten thousand others we have to choose from. His religious order enjoys hundreds of thousands of followers, and with a population of about 28 thousand, Assisi receives millions of visitors per year. (I’m sure the Pizzeria da Andrea is amazing, but I’m pretty sure the crowd is mostly gathered around the basilica.) Ever wonder about his persistence? It ain’t his marketing. He doesn’t really do that. As a kid, Francis was a rich kid who joined a local war with knightly delusions leading him to his destiny. That’s right, the Brown-Robed Monk is also a war veteran. After the fighting, he had capture, captivity and illness to look forward to. He also kissed lepers, publicly renounced his father and took up the wandering beggar lifestyle, stirring his begged-for food into a paste to choke it down. He lived off scraps, wore scraps, and committed himself to hanging with birds and repairing abandoned churches. He was the living embodiment of Joni’s folk ballad. After all of these experiences, what was his leadership seminar takeaway, his “one big idea” for his TED talk? It wasn’t to find your Why, adopt a growth mindset, prioritize slow living or take up Deep Work. Not because those are bad advice, but because they’re implicit in what he states in his writings a dozen times: “Blessed is the servant.” Say what you want about Father Francis, but he got the exchange absolutely right. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    19 min

  6. MAR 9

    Fionn Meets The Tooth

    I knew two twins growing up: Hank and Mr. Weatherby. Mr. Weatherby was my high school Computer Applications teacher. He always wore a bowtie, a pocket protector and what can only be described as NASA glasses. He also founded and ran the school’s Robotics & A/V club. I’m sure Mr. Weatherby had a first name, but by his students, his family and everyone who ever knew him, he was always and forever known as Mr. Weatherby. Hank was his twin brother. He lived in the apartment complex owned by my uncle. Hank wore cowboy boots, a handlebar mustache and kept a softpack of Marlboro Reds rolled up in his sleeve. On the weekends, he shot pistols and worked on his motorcycle in the apartment parking lot. No one called him anything but Hank. In school, Mr. Weatherby taught me how to code in BASIC. In his apartment, Hank taught me how to check the specific gravity of a saltwater tank. Mr. Weatherby got us to understand the principles of robotics. Hank and my uncle taught me how to draw a bead with a revolver. Mr. Weatherby gave seminars on logging in to the internet. Hank shared stories about his MC in the 70s. The two never spoke as far I was aware. If we’re lucky, we get a mix of chthonic and ouranic teachers in our lives. We surely need both. As well-meaning as our chaplains, guidance counselors and track coaches are, they can’t teach you what you can learn from the ex-con who works your late shift, the subsistence fisherman at the end of town or the street mechanic who takes cash only for PDR. I was the kind of kid who tended to side-eye society. Sure, I understood that the ship more or less stayed the course, but all those cracks in the yardarms bothered me. Not the problems themselves, but the handwaving most adults would perform when I’d ask about them. The denial they were even there. So, I tended to believe the chthonic types more than I would any straight society leadership. They knew about the cracks because they lived in them. In order to have a chthonic education, however, one has to have the freedom required to be found by its mentors. Fionn learned from The Tooth because his aunties maintained a loose hand on his upbringing. Gawain learned exactly who he was in the Green Chapel because Arthur intuited that Camelot would never provide that for him. Jim Hawkins wizened up with Long John Silver in ways he never would had he stayed an innkeeper’s son. And Harry’s most profound lessons came after class, when the Hogwarts candles went out and he was supposed to be in bed. This is getting harder to do in the days of Ring cameras, child tracking apps and organized play dates. Americans trust each other less now than at any time in the past half century. It’s getting so bad that there are now festivals devoted to educating adults on the very concept of public trust. About a decade ago, had you seen me out in the world, chances were none that you and I would have had a conversation. I would have had my headphones on, I would have used self-checkout and I would have ordered via app wherever and whenever possible. I do none of these things now. Charity was easier to come by in the Middle Ages for the simple reason that most feared not that a wandering beggar might hold them up, but that he could be Jesus in disguise. Courage is knowing what you ought to fear. We all want a little peace and quiet, a little safety. Of course we do. But only sometimes is safety what we need. These days, more often than not, it’s just another way we deprive ourselves the opportunity to meet the mentor we need the most. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min

  7. MAR 2

    Fionn's Madness and the Nature of Friendship

    “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods,” C.S. Lewis told us. “Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’” We may read that today as Lewis being cute with hyperbole. But that’s because we aren’t talking about the same things anymore. Friendship today sets rather low and shallow bar. We feel called to join our compatriots on the couch for game day and maybe even part-take in their recent barbecue experiments. We take on the responsibility of sharing memes back and forth, talking about old times and attending milestones. When it comes time to do the hard work of lending an ear, we do so by agreeing with everything being said and reminding our friend that yes of course, they’re once again right in all things. It’s no wonder we feel so unfulfilled in our relationships. I don’t know if we’ve forgotten how to be good friends, or if we’ve constructed a society in which good friendship seldom has opportunity to be exercised. But modern practices barely scratch the surface. We once defended our friends not just socially but physically, and happily threw ourselves once more into the breach. (Forgive me if you already knew this, but I hear it the other way around so many times that I can’t help but bring it up: the phrase “blood is thicker than water” isn’t a defense of family ties. How could it? Water isn’t defined when reading it in that way; the whole thing becomes half a metaphor. The cliché only makes sense in its full version: “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” It places what we’ve chosen to stand for ahead of our birth circumstances.) It once meant that we shared resources without keeping score. One of my favorite historical figures is Earnest Shackleton—not just because of his Antarctica story but because of the other parts of his life that are so impossible to reconcile. He repeatedly left his family teetering on the financial brink. He had an extended affair with Rosalind Chetwynd. While raising funds for his expeditions, he was a serial liar and confidence man. And yet he also knew to do things like this: During his ill-fated Antarctica expedition, Shackleton took some of his men on a last-ditch, do-or-die rescue mission in a repurposed boat to try to find help for the remaining crew still stuck on Elephant Island. The conditions surpassed dangerous and moved well within the realm of the strange. (The wind was so cold for example that it would freeze the water on their oars like beeswax sticking to a wick when making candles. They constantly had to work to break the ice off of every surface.) But whenever he saw someone—anyone—faltering a bit, he’d issue one of his famous “Hoosh!” orders: without exception, every member of the crew was commanded to drink from their improvised mixture of seal meat, fat and biscuits. This allowed the cold or tired comrade to save face, the breaks held their morale up and the camaraderie kept everyone working together. It’s not all fun stuff, though. We also used to know how to have difficult conversations with our friends. We get this incredible piece of advice from the Hagakure: “To give a person an opinion one must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. One must become close with him and make sure that he continually trusts one’s word. Approaching subjects that are dear to him, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood. Judge the occasion, and determine whether it is better by letter or at the time of leavetaking. Praise his good points and use every device to encourage him, perhaps by talking about one’s own faults without touching on his, but so that they will occur to him. Have him receive this in the way that a man would drink water when his throat is dry, and it will be an opinion that will correct faults.” Know many people today that possess this level of tact and awareness? I’m afraid that I do not, and I can also hardly count myself. Above all else, friendship means forgiveness. We have a bit of a cognitive dissonance going on between our insistence on choice and our desire for depth. What that means when it comes to friendship is that we don’t get to have enriching relationships when we ghost people for challenging our worldview. Yes, toxicity exists and yes, social vampires do prowl among the living, but not every heated discussion is proof of narcissism. And even when our friends take that one step too far, when they cross the line that cannot be crossed and we walk away with the intention of doing so forever, it’s to our own benefit that we leave the door open for awhile. Maybe even return to the place of separation when the time is right. We may be surprised by what’s waiting there. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    13 min

  8. FEB 23

    Fionn mac Cumhaill goes to Loughlin

    Y’know, I wasn’t going to start this. The plan wasn’t to record and put these on Substack; I was just going to share ‘em at in-person venues here and there. But three things have been nagging on me and got me to change my mind. * It would be dishonest, in a way. These stories continue to take up a great deal of my time and attention. I can’t treat this here Substack as some kind of curated persona in which I only share what would scale well; I don’t have the energy for that. This is what I’m into, so this is what I’m sharing. * The difficulty presented a problem. I pride myself on what I’ve been able to track down in terms of old and new recordings of these stories. I’m not half bad at finding pre-modern texts, either. But I was looking past the obvious here: recordings and older texts are hard to track down because there aren’t that many. That’s a bit of a tragedy. But it’s also one I can try to do something about. * I keep thinking about a piece of advice from Gary Snyder, who in turn got his from old myths and fables: never be stingy. So okay, let’s get into it then. Let’s dip our toes into the Fenian Cycle. But let’s do it with some care and consideration, eh? We can do better than CEOs, can’t we? Unlike the fine fiction and historical writing here on Substack, it’s my opinion that these stories aren’t best suited as reading material. In the context of myth, I see books as temporal transports; a kind of train across the centuries. Sure, they’re quite handy for taking a story from the sixth century to our time and place, but it’d be ludicrous to expect them to live on the thing that brought them here. So, oral storytelling it is, and while source material is paramount to what we’re going to be up to, this isn’t going to be recitation. We have some further work to do. Oral storytelling is in a strange place today. There are few venues in which it’s still done, and I have to say, most aren’t too flattering. God bless the librarians who gather the kids around for Story Time at the library, but as important as that is, I think that’s a separate activity. Outside of folk festivals and story swaps, I can only think of a few places in which live, unscripted storytelling is likely to be experienced in our daily routines. You’ll see it sometimes at weddings, but you’re also just as likely to watch the best man reading from note cards. Ever think about why he’s reading from note cards? Because he wants to do his buddy a solid, yet he’s terrified at screwing up. He’s terrified because like the rest of us, he hates what he’d refer to as “public speaking.” Like the rest of us, he doesn’t swap jokes or family stories around the dinner table anymore. He doesn’t shoot the breeze with the guys in the factory because there is no factory and just as likely today, there are no guys; phones and remote work have seen to that. Outside of that wedding, he may never speak in public again. It’s another tragedy that doesn’t have to happen. Everybody can participate in this. On the other hand, there’s another group who practices this sort of thing all the time. They have no inhibitions whatsoever, despite being terrible at it. I’m talking of course about CEOs and, if you’ll allow me the double misnomer, “thought leaders.” They have the benefit of speaking to a captive audience in a literal sense. I once watched a CEO spend twenty minutes explain the plot of Frozen to a group of adults who, unlike the CEO, had kids of their own and could (and did) act out entire scenes of the movie during every morning carpool. He was using his patronizing summary as a metaphor for open and honest communication, and the need for employee feedback. Some of the folks who gave it were subsequently laid off. Management had to restructure, you know how it is. Aside from weddings, retirement parties and CEO absurdist performance art, you also have icebreakers at workshop retreats, unplanned digressions behind the lectern in Business 101, open mic nights and folk festivals. That’s about it. That’s where you’re most likely to encounter oral storytelling today. An ancient technology to bring us together and orient ourselves to the land, our ancestry and each other has been downgraded to begrudged social custom, entertainment or corporate allegory. Now is no time to wait for ideal conditions. We need stories like this now. I’m crazy enough to think that some great things would happen for ourselves and for the stories if we started getting reacquainted again. Myths, fables and folklore shared through a community of oral telling allow you to sit with ideas at a depth that description and mere “talking it out” can’t do. The practice reinforces cultural identity while at the same time keeps it alive in the present. It anchors stories to a community instead of keeping them stuck within a text. And they get us to use our imagination in the service of navigating the world instead of providing mere entertainment. This isn’t an ideal format because you aren’t here in the room with me, but we’re not going to let that stop us. Maybe we’ll pretend that after sunset, we have a fire going in the back yard. We’re circling around the big red glow like we used to at camp, but unlike before, we’re preparing to do something very old, occasionally profound and always terribly good fun. Silver stags and hazel wands The Fenian Cycle is one of four great mythological cycles of Ireland. The other three are the Invasion Tales, the Ulster Cycle and the Cycle of Kings. The Fenian Cycle is about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his captaincy of the Fianna, the fighting men of Ireland. The events trace as far back as the third century and unlike the Ulster Cycle, the stories of Fionn have always been more vernacular than that of Cú Chulainn. And unlike Greek mythology, Fenian stories have a much more tangled timeline to them. They’re tied to their place, but the stories were shared and preserved by different tellers and communities, never fully consolidating into anything resembling an official canon. Each town, region or area had their own versions. Fionn wasn’t a king as we might understand it. He led his group of warrior-hunter volunteers who’d hunt, move camp to follow the seasons, and work as needed in service to Conn the Hundred Fighter, the high king of Ireland. Joining the Fianna was no easy business. You had to be able to leap over a branch as tall as your forehead and pass under one as low as your knee—without breaking your stride. You had to know the twelve books of poetry. They’d stick you waist-deep in a pit, and you had to be able to defend yourself against nine warriors with only a shield and a hazel staff. The deer and the wolf were both symbols they would self-apply. And once you were in, buddy, you were in. Your previous status outside in the broader world was put on hold for awhile. None of the baggage or obligation you brought with you mattered; you had to show who you were through your skills and conduct. Fionn’s rules were very clear. Among other requirements, the Fianna were expected at all times to defend women. Protect children. Shield poets and non-combatants. Share and be always generous, especially to those who have less. And never, ever refuse anyone hospitality. (Not even wily granddaughters of the Gentry.) Make no mistake: they’re strange, these stories. There’s no Ragnarok to work against, no Mount Olympus calling the shots, no chasing of the Grail. They were some of Yeats’s all-time favorite tales, and I can understand why. He was inclined to put it this way: “Whatever they do, whether they listen to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake of joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement; and even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a good fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live always as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any deliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen and be worthy of the songs of poets.” It’s part of the circular and wheeling nature of the Fenian Cycle that each story relates to all of the others, so the more we go through these, the clearer their picture is going to be. Let’s see how far we get, eh? We’ll start right in the middle of things. Get full access to Penny Wagers at pennywagers.substack.com/subscribe

    21 min
See All (95)

About

I write narrative poetry that leans more mythopoetic than personal. Also essays about perambulations, coffee's effect on memory and other cool stuff. Come on in. The water's nice, so feel free to take your shoes and socks off. pennywagers.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    James Hart
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    95
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © James Hart
  • Show Website
    Penny Wagers