Finn

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  • I finn: white, pale, fair (e.g. fair hair); pure, true, blessed → Finnegan = fairheaded
  • G root Finn-: designates moist-swampy places and rotten smell
  • G Finne: pimple; blotch
  • Tim Finnegan: the Dublin hod-carrier who fell drunk from his ladder and apparently died in the popular Irish-American street ballad from the 1850s Finnegan's Wake. At his wake, a bottle of whiskey broke on his coffin and he "came back to life". Much of the text of the ballad is echoed in the first chapter of FW.
    • Finnegan's Wake → "Finn again is awake" → a reference to the common legend that great heroes of the past are not dead but merely asleep, ready to return in their country's hour of greatest need (e.g. King Arthur)
  • Fionn mac Cumhail: (earlier Finn or Find mac Cumail or mac Umaill, pronounced roughly "Finn m'Cool") a legendary hunter-warrior of Irish mythology, also known in Scotland and the Isle of Man as Fingal. The stories of Fionn and his followers, the Fianna, form the Fenian cycle, much of it supposedly narrated by Fionn's son, the poet Oisín. The Fenian Brotherhood took their name from these legends.
    • Finn Mac Cumhail is often portrayed as a giant; Joyce imagined him as a sleeping giant, interred in the Irish landscape, with his head beneath the Hill of Howth (Da hoved: head) and his toes sticking up at Castleknock.
  • US Sl fin: a colloquial term for the five-dollar bill bearing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln
  • Finland
  • Finn: a giant who, according to folk mythology, built the cathedral in Lund
  • Finn: a Frisian lord who appears in Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg
  • finicky
  • Finn’s Hotel: a hotel in Dublin, where Nora Barnacle worked when Joyce first met her