Salmon of Knowledge

So if I just described you with uncomfortable accuracy, you may have found your tree.

Now let's get into the folklore, because while I struggled to find one big, beautiful vine mythology comparable to Hazel's Salmon of Knowledge, there is quite a bit of folklore once we shift our attention to bramble.

And some of it is wonderfully weird.

One of the strongest Irish traditions surrounding blackberries is the belief that you absolutely should not eat them after a certain point in autumn.

And people are just going to throw me in a bucket here when they hear that my next big piece of research after the bee is the sacred salmon.

At Taro and Salmon of Wisdom.

I'm going to go, hopefully I'm going to pop up to Scotland next week and they have some salmon walls up there where they still keep salmon in the well and eat it.

So it's something that's going on starting in Ireland.

And eventually, in one of Ireland's most beloved legends, that wisdom finds its way into a young man named Fionn.

Fionn Maccumo and the Salmon of Knowledge is the story.

And there are so many different versions of this story, which is exactly what we would expect from a story that's been told and retold for generations.

But basically the story goes something like this.

A wise poet named Phinegas had spent years trying to catch the legendary Salmon of Knowledge because the person who ate the salmon would receive extraordinary wisdom.

Eventually, Phinegas finally caught it.

And he gave the fish to his young student, Fionn, and asked him to cook it.

We got raised with St. Patrick.

We got raised with the Salmon of Wisdom, the Children of Lear, Children of Lear tragedy.

And so you're told those by the time you're seven, you know all of those.

Wow.