Finn McCool, Part 2: The Thumb of Knowledge

But at the end of the last episode, we promised you that this episode would be the one that's all thumb, because, of course, one of the great legends about Finn McCool is the so called thumb of knowledge. We teased it a few times in the previous episode. But but now we're finally here. We're finally to the thumb factory. That's all right. Finn is not merely a warrior and a hunter and in a in a defender of his people.

He also has the gift of divination. His prescience puts him in keeping with the likes of Paula Trades, but he doesn't take spice or enter a Prana Bindu trance in order to see the future, or is it sometimes described to gain wisdom. Instead, he puts his thumb in his mouth is the most heroic thing I can picture. I mean, imagine the movie poster. It's like your your action movie hero. They've got the sword, their hair is blowing in the wind, maybe their armor is splattered with

blood and mud. And also he's just got his thumb in his mouth. Now. In the last part of the series, we referenced a few works by a scholar named James McKillop, who has written extensively on Finn McCool and on Irish

smith and legend. For example, I cited him when I was talking about the version of the Giants Causeways story that involves uh, that involves the the Ben and Donner Giant, the rival Giant being replaced with one named Kukullen, which is totally confusing because that's the name of a different Irish folk hero. But this was also the version of the story where Finn McCool bites off the rival giant's finger when the giant is tricked into putting the finger

into his mouth. But I think you were also reading something by James McKillop on the on the origins of this thumb story, right, yeah, yeah. According to McKillop. The The details on how the thumb is utilized very according to the you know, the different tellings. Sometimes it's described as a sucking of the thumb, much like an infant

would would suck on a thumber fingers. Other Times it's described as a chewing of the thumb, and sometimes it's specifically said that the thumb is placed behind the upper teeth, which I guess is something that is is more or less happening with any kind of infantile sucking of the thumb anyway, but that they seem to make us sometimes the point is made that is like the thumb is coming into contact with the palette and pressing. All right.

So as amusing as the image of an action hero sucking his thumb might be, uh, the idea of an action hero biting his thumb, that's pretty close, but that seems a little more maybe on the money, especially when you take into account some historical considerations, because the idea of biting his thumb immediately made me think of the classically confusing scene from Shakespeare the Infamous do you bite your thumbatus serve the scene from Romeo and Juliet rob

do you remember coming across this in in school and having no idea what to make of it. Yes, I distinctly remember this, probably when we were watching at an adaptation of it um and uh, yeah, there's the whole scene with I by my thumb at you, and I remember everyone getting a real kick out of that. Yeah, it's like it's one of those where you know what it means, but you don't know what it means, Like you get the gist, but you don't understand what they're

talking about. Because so the scene, for anybody who hasn't read it, it's in Romeo and Juliet, Act one, Scene one. We get servants of the two rival houses, the Montague in the Capulets. They run into each other in the street and they're they're trying to stir things up there. They're trying to to provoke a fight because they hate each other. And so a character from one house says, do you bite your thumbat us, sir? And the guy from the other house says, I do bite my thumb, sir.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? And then he uh. The guy who's biting his thumb lead leans aside to his friend and he says is the law on our side. If I say I and his friend says no, it is not. So he says, no, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir. But I bite my thumb sir. So it's it's sort of like, I'm just punching the air. And if you happen to walk into the air that I'm punching, you know, so

be it. I think the implication is that if he says outright that he is biting his thumb at the other guy, then if a fight breaks out, it will be considered his fault because he provoked it. So he's just saying no, I'm just biting my thumb in general, all right, makes sense, makes sense. It's kind of like if here is, if there's a difference between flashing the middle thing or and making a middle finger and scratching your face, you have plausible deniability and saying I know

I wasn't flipping you off. I was. I just on the side of my face itches and I needed to relieve it. And my see, my middle finger is my longest finger, and therefore it is the ideal finger to use for scratching. Said notes right, Oh, oh, it's itching again. Oh, here I go again. Oh now both sides are itching. Yeah. Uh so yeah, that that is clearly what's going on

in the scene. But it is interesting to ponder, like, what is what is the origin of this thumb biting thing, because of course this was localized to specific cultures, but it's clear what it means in context. It seems to bite one's thumb at someone was a gesture of disrespect or contempt. It was kind of like giving the finger. It was. It was a way of saying you stink.

And in trying to find something about the origins of this gesture, I found an exerpt from a book called How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan, England by a British story named Ruth Goodman. And uh she writes as follows quote. In modern sicily, you can still see a form of this gesture and use an upright thumb held so that the pad points outwards, is tucked behind the top front teeth, and then flicked forwards out of the mouth towards the

intended insulte. Okay, so are you picturing that It's not the thumb going straight into the mouth as you might think with like when a child is sucking their thumb instead. It's like the thumb kind of goes upward into the mouth behind the top teeth, and then you kind of

flick the thumb out pad out. But then Goodman also writes, I've also seen a version in action on the outskirts of Venice, although I don't know if it was a native Venetian performing it, where the pad of the thumb was placed horizontally between the top and bottom teeth in a bite, and then flicked out, rotating as it went

so that the bitten pad was thrust forwards. And so because of the the the Finn McCool biting the thumb thing, I started to wonder if there were any in tristing connections between this gesture we see in Shakespeare that appears to have mostly gone out of style today, though maybe you might still see it in isolated cases here or there, such as in Sicily or somewhere in Italy. But I'm gonna have to say that for me, this investigation was

a failure. I couldn't find any evidence of a connection between these two story elements, though it did raise interesting questions on its own, like where would this type of thumb biting gesture come from and uh from what I turned up. Like many obscene gestures, its origins are unknown, but I did find a book that had some interesting informed guesses, and this was in an academic book called Historical Social Psychology by Kenneth Gurgin and Mary Gurgan published

by Taylor and Francis. And so, first of all, they dispense with a few alternatives. They say, well, you know, maybe the thumb biting uh insult gesture has something to do with thumb sucking, but that doesn't really fit what's described in the Shakespearean usage. And they say the same goes for the act of biting the knuckle of your thumb, which is a gesture that sometimes people still used today,

but it seems to to mean something different. Biting the knuckle of your thumb seems to denote someone desperately trying to contain rage, and that also it also just doesn't fit what's described in these sources. So instead they argued that the thumb biting described by Shakespeare is something that has generally fallen out of fashion today, it's mostly not used anymore, and that in order to understand it we would need to look to the historical context. So what's

the context. Well, I thought their answer was pretty interesting. They write quote. The clue, it seems, is to be found in the fact that during the latter half of the sixteenth century, men were in the habit of wearing gloves, and these were usually removed prior to any confrontation, not unlike the present day Irish habit of taking off one's

jacket to show that one means business. In fact, the practice of removing and throwing down glove had become ritualized as a challenge long before Shakespeare's time, and it is common knowledge that medieval knights use this device to invite each other into the lists. It seems likely that the medieval convention, or some version of it, was still around in a stylized form during Shakespeare's time, but it had become abbreviated to the point where an intention movement of

removing one's gloves would suffice. So how does an early modern hater remove a glove? Well, one way would be to remove it with the opposite hand, but another way would be to bite at one of the fingers of the glove with your teeth and then pull the hand away from inside. You've probably seen people take gloves off this way. The latter method, they claim, is well attested, and it was not unusual to remove a glove this way by by biting the thumb and pulling the hand out.

Though when I was trying to imagine doing this myself, to just sort of give it a quick thought experiment check, I think you probably can do it. Though it seems to me be easier to get get your hand out of the glove by biting one of the long fingers than by biting the thumb. But I'm no no glove expert. Well this makes sense. Yeah, the gloves are off. This is the classic challenge, and I had to We had to check this with seth Um, whose Simpsons knowledge knows

no bounds. But on on the Simpsons we had the episode where we had the glove slap where Homer is challenging everyone to a duel in town by slapping them with his glove, which he has removed. Right, So in this case, the authors suggest their hypothesis is that over time, this familiar, highly salient activity of taking off a glove to demand a duel could be abbreviated to a simple gesture of just biting your thumb to show scorn or

disrespect whether or not you're actually wearing a glove. They do say they could find no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, though it does fit well with the observation that the gesture mostly fell into disuse when dueling disappeared as a legitimate way settling beef. So anyway, I think interesting question on its own, but I couldn't really find that this

much informs Finn McCool right right. I think that's one of the things that makes the Thumb of Knowledge here so fascinating is that it does, to a certain extent, feel like kind of an island in mythology, Like it's something that it's not like there's something universal about heroes um biting or sucking their thumb or placing their thumb in their mouth. But but we'll get into some of the connections that that are in place in a bit here.

The next question is, of course, well, why, what's the story. There's gotta be a story. There's always a story behind why something is the way it is in mythology, and the main origin story for the miraculous thumb of Finn McCool is the salmon of knowledge. Salmon is in the the fish, the delicious fish where we're familiar with and uh.

McKillop points out that, okay um. In addition to this, the salmon has plenty of mystical connotations, uh, in part due to uh it's observed leaping out of the water. So it wasn't a stretch to think there might be something magical about a salmon. Uh. It's not like an inherently secular animal or mundane animal. It is one that that that already has all these various mystical connotations and uh, and so it makes sense that it might play into

such a story. Rob can I reveal though, when I was trying to say, okay, are there are other magical salmon out there? So I google the phrase magical salmon and the first result is, of course, Chef Paul Prudom's salmon Magic Seasoning Blend. There you go. I'm sure it was a magical um recipe that that he he earned by catching a magical fish. Um. Because that's that's that's

basically what we have going on here. So the stories goes, do you have a druid by the name of Finnegus who lives on the banks of a river and he has long waited for and and and intends to catch the salmon of knowledge. There are other versions of the story that say that he's he's camping out at a waterfall, or that there's some sort of a you know, some sort of an underground UH reservoir sort of situation going on.

But the idea is that at some point this uh, this marvelous salmon is going to present itself and if the druid can catch it, he can eat it and he can gain all of that wonderful wisdom for himself. Now is it ever explained how he knows that the salmon, the salmon of knowledge, will give him all this wisdom? Or is that just he is just something he knows? Well, there are a few different um there's at least one really good UH story beyond behind this, and this is account.

This is an account mentioned by Patricia Monaghan in uh Celtic Mythology and Folklore. According to this author, the fish is sometimes identified is Fenton, a bard who lived many lifetimes and many incarnations. Us he has all of this accumulated knowledge and in this incarnation he just happens to be a salmon. And so I guess you know, through the druid I arts. This particular druid knows hey, I can catch him this time, and if I eat him,

and I'll gain all of that knowledge. So it's it's literally that I'm gonna eat your brains and gain your knowledge, right well, you know, but not maybe not the brains, maybe just all that delicious. Uh maybe I don't know. I don't I'm not sure if you have to eat like absolutely all of the fish, or you have to eat the brain, but you're already cooking a salmon, so you might as well make a meal out of it.

I don't know. Well, I actually I guess as as well as we're about to learn it's not just the brains, and in fact that it may be a little more subtle than that, because what what apparently happens is, uh the druid finally succeeded in catching it after waiting for it for seven years, which incidentally, it's been seven years since Finn McCool was born. And seven year old Finn McCool is hanging out there at the druid camp with him, and you know he's shadowing him, uh you know, as

you do. And so Finnegus he's caught the salmon. He's overjoyed, so he starts cooking the salm, puts it on a spit. It's roasting there, and Finns trying to help out, and he accidentally burns his thumb on the cooking fish. And what does he do? What do you do in your your thumb is is burnt while you immediately seek to soothe that pain by thrusting your thumb into your mouth. And Finn does just this, and when he does, he inherits the power of the salmon before the old druid

even gets a shot at it. So it's the oil from the salmon that contains the knowledge you. It's not eat your brains and gain your knowledge. It's eat your omega threes and gain your knowledge right right now. In some variations, however, he gains he said to gain the power of divination by eating magical hazel nuts, or he gains it from the salmon because the salmon ate magical hazel nuts. Uh. There's also one version in which he

enters a fairy mound. Uh. Fairy mounds are these sircular ancient dwellings uh you know from from from ancient Ireland that were later associated with supernatural tales and you know, stuff like the to authora done and uh So. Anyway, he enters a fairy ground, he gains the magical ability from three fairy women he encounters there, but then as he's leaving, he accidentally smashes his thumb in the door

of the fairy mound. But it seems like the fish version of the story, the Salmon of Knowledge is the primary tale. It's the most popular now. It's It's often stated that it's not just putting the thumb in his mouth that sets off the divination trance, but that Finn also has to recite a kind of poetic chanting incantation um called the I think probably pronouncing this wrong, but the teenem latia laeda uh and uh. This also may have some connection to hazel nuts, according to McKellop in

the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. McKellop adds that the thumb allowed him to enter quote and I love this an altered visionary state in which he could see past, present, and future, in which he could see present. Wow, I mean that that is a real Well maybe maybe it means he could see all of the present, like things that are not present with him at the present or to see the present clearly. I don't know. There's another

interesting wrinkle here. Uh. The Celtic Languages and Literature professor Patrick k Ford suggests that one connection here may be that the old Irish word for thumb was order, which may also signify a morsel, particularly a morsel of meat that you would you know, consume, And McKillop points out that that the consumption of a morsel of magical flesh

is a common folkloric more motif. So if I'm to understand this correctly, uh, the interpretation would mean that fins morsel slash thumb becomes the sacred flesh by coming into burning contact with the cooking sacred fish of the salmon

of wisdom. But is it also suggesting that there may possibly have been the kind of semantic contagion in the evolution of this story where originally the story was about eating a magical morsel of meat, but because you can use the same word for morsel of meat and thumb, that it came to represent a thumb in later tellings. Yeah, that's absolutely the sense I'm getting from this. Yeah, so we have, you know, sanantics and linguistic shift going on here in addition to just you know, a cool story

of of magic fish consumption. Oh, this is great because I'm imagining other variations of of that kind of evolution of a story like the the the thumb slash morsel makes sense because like a little morsel of meat that might be about the size of your thumb. But there are other ways that we use body parts to measure quantities in reality. Like I'm thinking of people who would say, hey, I want two fingers of whiskey in the glass. So you could have a story about somebody who drinks a

magical draft of something. They get two fingers of it, but then in later tellings it gets confused and it's like, well, yeah, they drank their own fingers and then they gained this power. Yeah, you could have like a sort of a Popeye esque character if he has if he's six two fingers in his in his mouth, then he gets all riled up and is ready to fight, puts him into a drunken brawling spade. So as we'll discuss, the thumb pops up in a few other places. Um, but it's largely thought

to be quite emblematic of Finn McCool. His only real defining feature in iconography. I think sometimes there are hounds or dogs that are associated with Finn McCool. Uh. But but the thumb especially is something where you know, historians and art historians are looking at at various images. If they see the thumb being, you know, poked towards the mouth, they can they can generally say, with some certain data,

this must be Finn McCool. And I haven't found an example of this online or in the books I was looking at, But apparently many Celtic crosses have various figures in the design and sometimes you'll see uh this, uh, this thumb brandishing Finn McCool. Characters pop up, or it's assumed that it's Finn mcool because who else would it be. Um. So, if if you, if you've never if you can't imagine what a Celtic cross tends will look like. They tend

to be to be a cruciform shape. But then with all these kind of compartments for further illustrations and symbols, Now, how is it the thumb is usually emphasized in the psychography. Is it like glowing or something? Or is he sucking it? Is it in his mouth? Um? Like I said, I couldn't find a direct example of this that stood out to me, But I I just they're they're they're gonna be smaller figures and they're I don't think they're gonna it's gonna be necessarily obvious that like the thumb is

glowing or anything. But just by by virtue of having some sort of emphasis on the thumb and a visible thumb or even a thumb in the mouth, it's gonna be pretty obvious that it's Finn McCool. Now this is not related to the thumb, but just as a quick side note on you mentioned that some stories of Finn McCool emphasizes dogs. I was reading a few of those.

They are actually some really great dog buddy uh legends of Finn, And one of them is about how he how he gains a wife who is a person who or I think she's like a fairy, but in any case, she's transformed into a fawn by an evil wizard and uh, and he finds her by by virtue of the fact that he's out with his hunting dogs and when he comes across this fawn, his dogs don't go after the fond and like attack it, but instead settle down and cuddle with it. And so then he brings the fawn

back with him to his to his castle. And once they arrived there, the fawn turns into this woman who becomes his wife. But then unfortunately she is she is

tricked and stolen away by the evil wizard. Again interesting interesting. Uh. Now, in terms of other accounts of thumbs in uh in in in Celtic mythology, I did run across another interesting example, and this was this is from the or ninety three Nordic Celtic Legends Symposium, an article by Rhea knock Ogan titled Music Learned from the Fairies, and according to the author here that there are many tales of mortals learning the music of fairy folk music from beyond our world,

and usually they learn it by hearing it in just the right place at just the right time, uh you know, something like ancient ruin strange rocks in the woods, you know, the sort of place that fairies might appear or hang out. Um. And such was also around the time of Solon, like this is the time of the year when the veil is thin between our world and the next. And there's at least one account uh in in Celtic tradition of

a man hearing fairy music. He's, uh, you know, he hears it in the woods or wherever, and does he do He sticks his thumb in his mouth whilst hearing the music, and as a result he remembered the music. And of course this this calls to mind Finn McCool interesting.

I mean, what does that suggest about our intuitions about the power of sucking a thumb that it like, I don't know what that means, that that it it has some kind of uh grounding power that it can cause you to, uh to sort of like hold fast against uh maybe currents of magic or forgetfulness that would otherwise

wash away the memory. Well, yeah, this is a great question because I guess, on one hand, let's let's start by let's go ahead and assume that that sticking your thumb in your mouth actually doesn't have any effect on uh, you know, your your your memory or your your your your stress level or anything like that. Um, it does make you wonder if there is if there's something culturally in place where, uh where just the idea of sticking your thumb in your mouth is like a novel thing

that is done that that is associated with insight. Um. I wonder if it is the kind of thing where you could stick your thumb in your mouth thinking about this tradition and it would actually help you remember something better, because it's also like that thing I heard while I was sticking my thumb in my mouth. Oh, that's interesting.

In fact, that even connects to a mnemonic device I've I've heard of before, which is uh, basically like if if suddenly something happens and you want to remember it very well, you should do something really weird immediately so that you like form a link in your mind between that weird memorable thing you did and uh, and and whatever thing it is you're trying to remember. Interesting now, of course that the thing is with when it comes with thumb sucking, Uh, it doesn't seem to be just

a a completely neutral um just here if you will. Uh. And we actually have quite a lot of research out there on thumb sucking, particularly as it relates to children. Right. So I was actually reading a brief article in a pediatric medicine journal reviewing the existing literature on thumbs sucking as of two thousand eight. So this article was called Thumb and Finger Sucking by Lynn Davidson in the Journal

Pediatrics in Review. Again, this was the year two thousand eight, and a few major takeaways from this brief right up. Number one is that different studies across time have found some some different rates of the prevalence of thumb sucking or finger sucking. A lot of times these studies just lump thumb and finger sucking in together, so you're not necessarily getting a breakdown by which finger it is. But I think it is clear that thumbs are the most

most common finger for infants to suck. But older studies found rates in the range of seventy to nine percent of children showing a thumb or finger sucking behaviors, and more recent studies have found rates more like thirty percent by the end of the first year after birth. Along with using a pacifier. That with that thirty four percent. I don't know if that's an either or situation or an and situation to some children suck thumb and to pacifier,

I'm not sure. I don't I don't have a lot of direct experience with that, but I mean, I guess in some cases you're gonna have a situation where the child is gravitating towards sucking on on digits and you want to get a pacifier in there instead, and you're like, here, here, use this instead. Anyway. There's some variations on these rates, uh with the within the first few years of life, but Davidson writes that by the time most children reached the age of four, these rates have gone way down.

On average, only twelve percent of children in one study sucked a finger, including a thumb, by the age of four, and pacifier use had gone down to four percent by that time. Now here's something I thought was interesting. Apparently, during the first few months of life, infants are most likely to suck their thumbs during sleep, but by the end of the first year more infants do it while awake. There were no differ princes in rates of thumb sucking

prevalence by sex. And oh and I thought this was interesting. Up to fifty percent of children who suck their thumbs or fingers also tend to hold a special object while doing so. M hmm. This is yeah, sort of the classic I I have sudden my my my thumb or my fingers, and I have to hold onto a special blanket or a special stuff. He that sort of thing. Yeah, now, there have been a number of historical explanations for thumb

sucking UH. One that must be cited, unfortunately, as Freud Freud being Freud believed it to be an expression of what he called quote infantile sexuality, and that when it persisted beyond infancy, it was a symptom of emotional disturbance. UH. Obviously, Freudian is um held a lot of sway for a while, despite it being profoundly weird and not actually being subject

to empirical testing. But there are some more recent theories that seem better grounded and experimental research, and they generally suggest that UM thumb sucking grows out of instinctual behaviors in infants, that sucking behaviors are a universal instinctual behavior in newborns that they use for breastfeeding or bottle feeding, and that after that, for some reason, in some children, this instinctual behavior continues beyond the point of nutritional relevance,

and the instinctual behavior might be reinforced through conditioning, and in some cases it just continues with a substitute such as a thumb or a finger. I don't know if there is a good agreed upon answer as to why this reinforced behavior would be continued in some children but

not others, Like what makes the difference? I'm not sure. However, it might be informative to note that some studies have found that thumb sucking appears to be especially common when children are board tired or anxious, and this suggests that it plays some kind of self soothing role. Yeah, and I was finding some some evidence to back this up

as well. There's a two thousand fifteen article published in Minerva PEDIATRICAU that concluded that quote, a thumbsucking subject puts the thumb in the mouth to stimulate the nasal palatal receptors of trigeminists and obtain muscular balance and a release of physical and psychological tension. Now that's also interesting when you when you think about the Okay, we have Finn McCool doing this as an adult. You can certainly find adult thumbsuckers who speak to the calming effects of the practice.

Um So, I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to imagine an Irish warrior of old who you know, just you know, he's this wonderful hunter and warrior and all this, but he needs to calm down every now and then, and this stressful role in society, and if you're going to ponder an important decision, you

need to reach a place of relative peace. And perhaps placing his thumb inside of his mouth allows him to do so, and and and maybe you end up seeing the creation of magical explanations for what's going on here, as opposed to just saying, well, he never quite stopped sucking his thumb when he's nervous or stressed. Oh man, that would be an amazing origin story. Yes, so it begins with this beast of a warrior, great hunter, you know, blow the hunting horn. I will defend the shores of Ireland.

But I also suck my thumb and uh. And people are like, why is he sucking his thumb? And somebody else is like, well, it's what he does when he needs to, you know, see into the future. Yeah. Thank now, another possible connection. I was thinking about a related connection anyway. Sometimes there's more stress placed on the idea that Finn is placing his thumb behind his upper teeth, and of

course thumb sucking itself impacts the palette. I was reminded of traditions in meditation that you encounter in which one is asked to hold the tip of one's tongue to the roof of the mouth. Sometimes this is described in terms of you know, of course, bodily energy flow. Other times it's just being a way of of altering the flow of saliva in the mouth. Though it is sometimes described as a way of eliminating negative thoughts or even

a way of sort of weeding out speech based thoughts. Well, and I'd wonder if you know, any kind of meditative practice that involves unusual activities with the body is essentially just trying to trying to direct your concentration away from the sort of default mode flow of of thoughts that are that arise. Uh. Normally, if if you're thinking about doing a sort of strange repetitive action with your body, you're probably less inclined to start thinking about, oh man,

next Thursday. I really yeah, yeah exactly. Um So I feel like that is I couldn't find any like real research on this, and perhaps I'm missing something, but um, this seems plausible to me, like if there was some sort of like ritual uh we see in meditation, this is a ritual touching of something to the roof of your mouth. That is then associated with um with some degree of anxiety relief and some degree of relaxation. Uh. We we see some evidence to support the idea that

that thumb sucking itself can reduce anxiety. Uh. And then we have this idea too that just sort of novel behaviors and rituals of relaxation, rituals of grounding can can very much be be helpful. I'm not advising anybody to take up sucking of the thumb as a as a as a way to try and uh, you know, find balance or to see into the future, but I feel like there's some there's some interesting leads here to potentially pull on to sort of try and make sense of

of where this may come from. And uh and and how such a either at the very least such a myth comes together, but but also the possibility that this is something that could have been practiced to some limited degree uh uh you know, in in Ireland of old. Yeah. Also another note, Yes, so we were not encouraging thumb sucking for adults, especially because that can cause dental problems if if you're doing chronic thumb sucking after the baby

teeth have been replaced. Yeah, that's the that's of course, the the prime reason that the adults discourage the act and want to to wean kids away from the sucking of fingers and thumbs, because yeah, once the baby teeth are going, you've got the adult teeth going in. You can you can jack up those adult teeth by continually

pre pressing the thumb up there into the palette. It seems like the methods used to discourage thumb sucking and and train children not to do it have become more humane over time, because I was reading about some of the older methods people used to try to, you know, get their kid to get the thumb out of the mouth, and it was brutal, like one was about these ideas of having the sharp implements put on the backs of the teeth that would like cause pain in the thumb.

Have you read about this, Yeah, yeah, I think I've heard about that before. Um, yeah, obviously that does not sound good, or of course putting putting noxious chemicals or something on the thumb. Yeah, I think I think people have better methods now. Yeah, Now, one of the interesting that we talked about, this idea of the thumb sucking being you know, the thumb in the mouth being kind of an island for this mythology of Finn McCool, and certainly again it is a defining one of the defining

factors of this this particular hero. But you do see thumbs sucking, thumb in the mouth motifs popping up with some other heroes, particularly A few examples that have come to mind include um Ciggurd, the hero there. Actually I saw an image of him that it's like a carving, and you see him with thumb in the mouth, So that seems to be very much related to what we're

looking at here. Another hero that we see lined up with the thumb is tal Yesen, So there seems to be some connection Betwe Queen, Finn McCool and these heroes as well. Yeah. McKillop notes in his book that there was a controversial suggestion by Robert Graves that that Heracles or Hercules, the Greek hero, was associated with the thumb in the same way that Achilles is associated with the heel, kind of these body parts that are emblematic of the person.

But McKillip brings that association up specifically in the context of it of it being kind of kind of doubtful. Now, outside of these these three heroes, I wasn't really really finding much that that that even resembled Finn McCool. But there is an interesting thumbsucking bit of myth making that

pop pops up in Hindu traditions. In the Hindu epic the Mahabarata, there's the story of King van Ashva, who apparently has trouble conceiving a child with any of his concubines, and so he winds up drinking a magic potion that makes him pregnant. So when this occurs, his you know, he realizes, well, there's some some additional problems now that I have to deal with. So he turns to the divine physicians and they cut open his thigh so that he can actually give birth to the baby. But then

how is he to nourish the child? Well, then we have Indra, the King of Davis, to cut open his thumb and this allows milk to leak forth from the thumb so that he can nurse his infant son in this manner, And this is why the story goes, did babies sometimes suck their thumbs? Wow? Interesting? Yeah, no direct connection between this and Finn McCool, but just another kind

of cool thumbsucking mythology to to reference here. The more I think about the idea of a of a thumbsucking warrior action hero, the more I love it, Like I want to see a movie like this, or it doesn't have to be thumbsucking. It could also be, Um, you know you're you're great warrior, great swinger of the sword,

like has a blankie. Yeah, yeah, I mean we had, uh see who's the telling of all his character that does a kolchak uh ko jack that that had the the sucker like that was his whole thing, right, lollipops the lollipop. Yeah, uh, that's not too far removed from it. I cannot do detective until I get my lolly. Yes, well, Rob, I have greatly enjoyed this journey into Finn McCool. Yeah,

this one has been a lot of fun. Like I say, I wasn't super familiar with Finn McCool prior to this, and I certainly had had somehow skipped over or forgotten anything about the thumb of knowledge. So this was this

was a fun journey into Irish mythology. Always fun to do that around this time of year, you know, um previous episodes of the show, we have talked about our love for the Time Life Enchanted World books that were fabulously advertised on TV commercials with Vincent Price where you know he's I love to carrl up with a good book. Did his eyes glow green in those commercials? I think so? Um,

they may have. Well, a couple of the volumes of the Time Life Enchanted World have stories of Finn McCool and there you know what I gotta say, By and large, those books are really good. They're good syntheses of their sources and uh and pretty well written, much better than you would expect for something that was advertised on TV

that way. Oh absolutely, yeah. I'm I'm actually reading through the Dragon volume from that collection right now with my son, and uh, there's some sections of it that I feel like we're a little a little wordier than they need to be, but we're having a lot of fun with it. You have the longer sections, the shorter sections. You have this wonderful mix of original artwork as well as traditional artwork to uh, to illustrate these tales. Uh. So, yeah, they're there are a lot of fun. Do you do

you have them? Al Ja? It was a wonderful gift from my wife Rachel got me the complete Time Life Enchanted World collection. Oh nice. It's something like twenty something volumes, all told. Right. Uh, that might about right. I haven't read them all yet. So the stories about Finn McCool are in the ones called Acts of Valor or maybe Tales of Valor. That's the one with Valor and the title, and then the one called Fabled Lands. Yeah, okay, I have one of those, but not the other. I uh.

For the longest I just I kind of assumed that I had the full collection that had been gifted to me from an aunt when I was a child. But I've come to realize, oh, I don't have them all, so um. Like, just the other day, as we were recording this, I was looking at oh which I was looking at, like, Okay, which ones do I not have that I really should have? And I noticed that I had two of the Black Books, but not the third.

So I immediately had to order that one up. One of the great things about these books is that I guess they were just so mass produced. You can pick these volumes up for you know, for reasonable sums. Uh. You know, sometimes you'll find one's even like dirt cheap. Uh. So there there are plenty. There's plenty of Enchanted World to go around, if anyone's interested. I'm incredibly proud of my Enchanted World collection. It's a it's a treasure m all right. Where we're gonna go ahead and close it

out here. And and I guess I wish everybody the St. Patrick's Day while we're at it. But we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We'd love to hear from uh Irish folk and non Irish folk alike. Um regarding these uh these myths, these these tales, uh, you know, thumbs in the mouth, thumbsucking in general, or even just an Enchanted World book chat, what's your favorite volume? Did you have these growing up or did you just want them?

Have you have you rectified this in your adult life, etcetera? Uh, just let us know we'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, you can find core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. On Monday's, we do listener mail. On Wednesday's, we do an artifact or a monster fact. The one we did this week is is also Irish themed. And then on Friday's we set most serious matters aside and we just talked about a

strange film, Huge things. As always to our excellent audio producer set Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.