#FairyTaleTuesday #Celtic: Milucra hoped to win over the legendary hero #Fionn mac Cumhaill, #Áine's lover. Knowing that her sister had sworn never to marry a man with gray hair, #Milucra secretly cast a spell on the lake near the summit of #SlieveGullion so that anyone who swam in it would grow old. One autumn day she tricked Fionn by asking him to fetch her golden ring from the lake, and he emerged as an old man with gray-white hair. His men, the Fianna, forced her to give him a healing potion from her cornucopia. Fionn became young again, but his hair did not regain its true color. This is said to be the origin of his name Fionn, which means "white". In some versions of the tale, Milucra turned out to be the Cailleach Bhéara (Calliagh Birra), an ancient goddess.
Source: Slieve Gullion - Wikipedia

#WyrdWednesday #LegendaryWednesday: `Miluchradh, daughter of Cuilinn, tricked #Fionn Mac Cumhaill into swimming in a bewitched lake near the summit of #SlieveGullion. Fionn emerged silver-haired as an ailing, downhearted old man, without leaping, without running, without walk, grey and sorrowful.
Fionn knew that Cuilinn of Cuailgne was the only that could give him his shape again. When the Fianna had found him, they raised him up gently on their shields, and brought him on their shoulders to the hill of the Sidhe in Cuailgne, but no one came out to meet them. Then the seven battalions began digging and rooting up the whole hill, and they went on digging through the length of three nights and three days. And at the end of that time Cuilinn of Cuailgne, that some say was Manannan, son of Lir, came out of the hill, holding in his hand a vessel of red gold, and he gave the vessel into Finn's hand. And no sooner did Finn drink what was in the vessel than his own shape and his appearance came back to him. But only his hair, that used to be so fair and so beautiful, like the hair of a woman, never got its own colour again, for the lake that Cuilinn's daughter had made for Finn would have turned all the men of the whole world grey if they had gone into it.
And when Finn had drunk all that was in the vessel it slipped from his hand into the earth, that was loosened with the digging, and he saw it no more. But in the place where it went into the earth, a tree grew up, and any one that would look at the branches of that tree in the morning, fasting, would have knowledge of all that was to happen on that day.
That, now, is the way Finn came by his grey hair, through the jealousy of Miluchradh of the Sidhe, because he had not given his love to her, but to her sister Aine.` #Celtic
Source: Gods and Fighting Men by Lady Gregory - Project Gutenberg eBook