From the Vault: Finn McCool, Part 2

Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our series about the legendary Irish hero Finn McCool. If you haven't heard part one, you should go back and listen to that one first. This one will make a lot more sense if you do. 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 now we're finally here. We're finally to the thumb factory. That's right, Finn is not merely a warrior and a hunter and a defender of his people. He also has the gift of divination. His prescience puts him in keeping with the likes of Paula Treads, 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 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 extendly on Finn

McCool and on Irish smith and legend. For example, I cited him when I was talking about the version of the Giant's Causeway story that involves that involves the the Ben and Donner Giant, the rival giant being replaced with one named Kucullen, 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 on the origins of this thumb story, right, yeah, yeah. According to McKillop, the details on how the thumb is utilized vary 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 thumb or fingers.

Other Times it's described as a chewing of the thumb, And sometimes it's specifically that the thumb is placed behind the upper teeth, which I guess is something that is as more or less happening with any kind of infantile sucking of the thumb anyway, but they seem to make it. Sometimes the point is made that it's 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 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 thumb

at us, sir? The scene from Romeo and Juliet, rob Do you remember coming across this in school and having no idea what to make of it? Yes, I distinctly remember this, probably when we were watching an adaptation of it, and yeah, there's the whole scene with I bite 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 Montagues and 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 provoke a fight because they hate each other. And so a character from one house says, do you bite your thumb at 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 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'll 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 finger and making a middle finger and scratching your face, you have plausible deniability and saying I know, I wasn't

floping you off, I was. I just the side of my face itches and I needed to relieve it. And 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. So yeah, 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 a way of

saying you stink. And in trying to find something about the origins of this gesture, I found an excerpt from a book called How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan, England by a British historian named Ruth Goodman, and 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 insultee. 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. Yeah.

But then DMan 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 Finn McCool biting the thumbthing, I started to wonder if there were any interesting 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 going to 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 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 Gurgen and Mary Gurgan,

published by Taylor and Francis, twenty fourteen. And so, first of all, they dispense with a few alternatives. They say, well, you know, maybe the thumb biting 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

use today, but it seems demean 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 argue 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 one's 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 to get your hand out of the glove by biting one of the long fingers than by biting the thumb. But I'm 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 whose Simpsons knowledge knows no bounds.

But on the Simpsons we had the episode where we had the glove slap, where our 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 of 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 biting or sucking their thumb or placing their thumb in their mouth. But but we'll get into some of the connections that are in place in a bit here. The next question is, of course, well, why what's the story

There's got to 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 fish, the delicious fish, where we're familiar with, and McKillop points out that, Okay, in addition to this, the salmon has plenty of mystical connotations, in part due to it's observed leaping out of the water. So it wasn't a stretch to think there might be something magical about

a salmon. It's not like an inherently secular animal or mundane animal. It is one that already has all these various mystical connotations, and so it makes sense that it might play into such a story. Rob Can I reveal though, when I was trying to see, okay, are there 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 recipe that that he earned by catching a magical fish, because that's that's that's basically what we have going on here. So the stories goes that you have a druid by the name of Phinegus who lives on the banks of a river, and he has long waited for 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 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 There's at least one really good uh story behind this, and this is account. This is an account mentioned by Patricia Monigan in Celtic Mythology and Folklore. According to this author, the fish is sometimes identified is Finton a bard who lived many lifetimes in many incarnations. Thus 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 druidic 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 going to eat your brains and gain your knowledge logic, right, well, you know, but not maybe not. The brains may 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 Wills, 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 apparently happens is the druid finally succeeds 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,

you know, as you do. And so Finnegus he's caught the salmon. He's overjoyed. So he starts cooking the salmon, puts it on a spit. It's roasting there, and Finn's 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 thumb 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. 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. There's also one version in which he

enters a fairy mound. Fairy mounds are these circular ancient dwellings, uh, you know, from from ancient Ireland that were later associated with supernatural tales, and you know, stuff like the two author to done and 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 called the I think probably pronouncing this wrong, but the teinem latia lata. And this also may have some connection to hazel nuts, according to

mccellop 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. The Celtic languages and literature professional Patrick k Ford suggests that one connection here may be that the Old Irish word for thumb was ordu, which may also signify a morsel, particularly a morsel of meat, that you would you consume. And McKellop points out that that the consumption of a morsel of magical flesh is

a common folkloric motif. So if I'm to understand this correctly, the interpretation would mean that Finns 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, a semantics and linguistic shift going on here in addition to just a you know, a cool story of magic fish consumption. Oh this is great because I'm imagining other variations of that kind of evolution of a story. Like 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 Asque character if he has if he's sticks two fingers 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, but it's largely thought to be quite emblematic of Finn McCool his only real defining feature in iconography. I think sometimes they're our hounds or dogs that are

associated with Finn McCool. But but the thumb especially is something where you know, historians and art historians are looking at various images. If they see the thumb being, you know, poked towards the mouth, they can they can generally say with some certainty that 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 this thumb brandishing Finn McCool. Characters pop up, or it's assumed that it's Finn McCool because who else would it be. So if you've if you've never, if you can't imagine what a Celtic cross tense will look like, they tend to be 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 psychonography. Is it like glowing or something? Or is he sucking it?

Is it in his mouth. Um. Well, 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 going to be smaller figures and they're I don't think they're gonna's going to 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 going to 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. There are actually some really great dog buddy uh legends of of Finn, and one of them is about how he how he gains a wife who is a person who 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 fawn and like attack it,

but instead settle down and cuddle with it. And so then he brings the fawn back with him to his castle. And once they arrive 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. Now, in terms of other accounts of thumbs in Celtic mythology, I did run across another interesting example, and this was this is from the ninety two or ninety three Nordic Celtic Legends Imposium, an article by Rannock Ogan titled music Learn from the Fairies, And according to the author here 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, you know, something like an ancient ruin strange rocks in the world woods, you know, the sort of place that fairies might appear or hang out, and such was also around the time of Solin, 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 in in Celtic tradition of a man hearing fairy music. He's you know, he hears it in the woods or wherever, and what 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 caused 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 it has some kind of grounding power that it can like cause you to uh, sort of like hold fast against 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 you know, your your your memory, or your your your your stress level or anything like that.

It does make you wonder if there is, if there's something culturally in place where where just the idea of sticking your thumb in your mouth is like a novel thing that is done 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 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 memory bol thing you did, and whatever thing it is

you're trying to remember. Interesting now, of course, the thing is when it comes with thumb sucking, it doesn't seem to be just a completely neutral gesture, if you will. 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 and 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 and eight, and a few major takeaways from this brief ride up. Number one is that different studies across time have found 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 ninety 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 forty percent using a pacifier. Though with that thirty to forty percent, I don't know if that's an either or situation or an and situation to some children

suck thumb and a 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 going to 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, you use this instead. Anyway. There's some variations on these rates with the within the first few years of life, but Davidson writes that by the time most children reach 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 differences 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. This is, yeah, sort of the classic I suck my thumb or my fingers and I have to hold on to a special blanket or a special stuffy that sort of thing. Yeah. Now, there have been a number of

historical explanations for thumb sucking. 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. Obviously, Freudianism 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 thumbsucking 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 bored, tired, or anxious, and this suggests that it plays some kind of self soothing role. Yeah, and I was finding some evidence to back this up as well.

There's a twenty fifteen article published in Minerva Pediatrica that concluded that quote, a thumbsucking subject puts the thumb in the mouth to stimulate the nasal pilatal receptors of trigeminists and obtain muscular balance and a release of physical and psychological tension. Now that's also interesting 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. So I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to imagine an Irish warrior of old who you know, you know, he's his wonderful hunter and warrior in 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 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 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, 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 as just being a way 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 thoughts that arise 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. So I feel like that is I couldn't find any like real research on this, and perhaps I'm missing something, but this seems plausible to me, like if there was some sort of like ritual we see in meditation. This is a ritual touching of something to the roof of your mouth that is then associated with some degree of anxiety relief and

some degree of relaxation. We see some evidence to support the idea that that thumb sucking itself can reduce anxiety, 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 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 had could have been practiced to some

limited degree in uh, you know, 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 that 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

pressing the thumb up there into the palette. It's seems like the methods used to discourage thumbsucking 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. 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 thing we talked about, this idea of the thumbsucking 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 particular hero. But you do see thumb sucking, thumb in the mouth motifs popping up with some other heroes, particularly. A few examples that have come to mind include um Sigurd, 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 Taliesin, So there seems to

be some connection between Finn McCool and these heroes as well. Yeah, McKillop notes in his book that there was a controversial suggestion by Robert Graves 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 McKillop brings that association up specifically in the context of it being

kind of kind of doubtful. Now, outside of these these three heroes, I wasn't really really finding much that that even resembled Finn McCool. But there is an interesting thumb sucking bit of myth making that pops up in Hindu traditions. In the Hindu Epic, the Mahabarata. There's the story of King yuvan 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 he realizes, well, there's 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 that 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 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, your your great warrior, great swinger of the sword,

like has a blankie. Yeah yeah, I mean we had let's see, who's the tell us of all his character? That does it? Kolchak uh Kojack that that had the sucker like that was his whole thing, right, Oh, 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. On 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 carl up with a good book. Did his eyes glow green in those commercials? I think so? They may have, well, a couple of the volumes of the Time Life Enchanted World have stories of Finn McCool, and they're you know what I got to say, By

and large, those books are really good. They're good syntheses of their sources and pretty well written, much better than you would expect for something that was advertised on TV that way. Oh absolutely, yeah. I'm actually reading through the Dragon volume from that collection right now with my son, and 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 short order sections, you have this wonderful mix of original artwork as well as traditional artwork to illustrate these tales. So yeah, there there are a lot of fun do you do? You have them all? Joe? 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 be 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. This 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. 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, 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, 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 all right, where we're going to go ahead and close it out here. And and I guess I wish everybody to Saint 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 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, etc. 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 Mondays, we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do an artifact or a monster fact. The one we did this week is also Irish themed. And then on Fridays we set most serious matters aside and we just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth

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 iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.