Fianna, the royal bodyguard, during their adventures under Fionn Mac Cumhail. Several tales are associated with him, including a trip to the Otherworld. His son Cairbre succeeded him and destroyed the Fianna.

Cornish

(Kernewek) The language of Cornwall, deriving from British Celtic (Brythonic), was the ancestor tongue also of Welsh and Breton. Cornish died as a generally spoken community language in Cornwall in the late eighteenth century, although a native knowledge of it was retained by some individuals until the start of the twentieth century, when a language revival was started by enthusiasts. Earliest forms of it as a distinct language occur from ninth century texts. The Vocabularium Cornicum is a twelfth century Latin/Cornish lexicon, also known as the “Cottonian Vocabulary.” The main corpus of early Cornish literature is contained in a number of medieval religious plays, such as Buenans Meriasek, the life of St. Meriasek, the Ordinalia cycle of three dramas, plus the Pascon agan Arluth (Passion Poem).

While tradition has placed the provenance of the Arthurian legends and the romance of Tristan and Iseult to a Cornish setting, there are no surviving Cornish manuscripts that record any of the stories. Yet there is an intriguing indication that such sources might have existed. [Some works on the Cornish provenance of the Arthur saga are contained in Henry Jenner’s “The Arthurian Legend,” Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, vol. LVII, and P. A. Lanyon Orgill’s “Cornwall and the Arthurian Legends,” Cornish Review, No. 6, Winter, 1950.]

The second great romantic saga connected specifically with Cornwall is Tristan and Iseult. Again, no early Cornish manuscripts survive with the tale. Indeed, the earliest full-length version in a Celtic language is the sixteenth century Welsh Ystoria Trystan, now in Cardiff Library. However, Joseph Bédlier [Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, Paris 1902–1905] was the first scholar to demonstrate that all the stories of Tristan and Iseult could be traced back to a single poem—one written by Thomas, a French poet of the twelfth century. Professor Joseph Loth believed that Thomas had acquired the poem from a Cornish source. [Joseph Loth, Revue Celtique, vol. XXXIII, 1912, and also Des Nouvelles Théories sur l’origine des Roman Arthurian, Paris, 1892. For a further exposition, see also