The Nine Hazels of Wisdom

Key takeaways: the nine hazels stand over an Otherworld well, not a mappable Irish site; their falling nuts feed the salmon and generate imbas, the inspiration that runs up the Shannon and the Boyne; the famous Fenian salmon story never names the hazels, the link is tradition; the hazel was a legally protected noble of the wood; and hazel folklore survived into twentieth-century Mayo.

What are the nine hazels and what do they do?

The nine hazels occupy the centre of Irish Otherworld cosmology. They stand above a sacred well located, depending on the source, beneath the sea (fon aibeis eochar-guirm, “under the blue-rimmed ocean”: Sinann II), in the Land of Promise (Tír Tairngire: Sinann I), or in a síd (Otherworld mound) belonging to Nechtain (Boand I). The well has two primary names in the medieval texts: Tipra Chonnlai (Connla’s Well, Sinann II) and the topur diamair (the secret well, Boand I), also called the Well of Segais (Segais being Boand’s Otherworld name; the well and the goddess were in some sense the same being). The conflation of Connla’s Well with the Well of Segais is a matter of ongoing scholarly discussion: some sources (such as James MacKillop’s Dictionary of Celtic Mythology) treat them as a single well serving as the mythological source of both Shannon and Boyne, while others distinguish them as belonging to different dindshenchas traditions.

What is consistent across the sources is the action of the hazels. In Sinann II (Gwynn 1913, pp. 292-293):

In úair is abaig in cnúas / tuitit ‘sin tiprait anúas; / thís immarlethat ar lár, / co nosethat na bratán.

“When the cluster of nuts is ripe / they fall down into the well; / they scatter below on the surface, / so that the salmon eat them.”

And the result:

Do shúg na cnó, ní dáil diss, / dogníat na bolca immaiss.

“From the juice of the nuts, no insignificant matter, / are formed the bubbles of imbas [inspiration].”

This is the mythological mechanism: hazelnuts to salmon, salmon to imbas, imbas to the world’s rivers and poets. The hazel grove is the ultimate source. The well does not simply contain knowledge; it receives it from the hazels, which stand at the outer edge of the Otherworld and make the universe’s wisdom available through the ordinary cyclical process of a tree ripening, dropping its fruit, and feeding whatever creature is present to receive it.

What should the hazels be called?

Popular accounts sometimes give “Coll Crimaill” as the name of the hazels. This requires scrutiny. In Gwynn’s Metrical Dindshenchas, Part III (1913), the Sinann II poem carries the Irish stanza: Nói cuill Chrimaill, ind fhir glic, / dochuiret tall fon tiprait, translated by Gwynn as “The nine hazels of Crimall the sage drop their fruits yonder under the well.” The Irish nói cuill Chrimaill consists of nói (nine) plus cuill (genitive plural of coll, hazel) plus Chrimaill (lenited genitive of Crimall, a proper name). The form “Coll Crimaill” does not appear in the primary Irish text as a standard compound name and should be treated with caution: it is a loose anglicisation, conflating the nominative coll and the proper name Crimall. The correct reference in scholarly citation is nói cuill Chrimaill or “the nine hazels of Crimall.”

A further complication: the Sinann I poem (the earlier poem in the same volume, pp. 286-291, translated by Isolde ÓBrolcháin Carmody in Story Archaeology) names the hazels differently, coll n-écsi n-ilcheólach (“the many-musicked hazels of the scholars/poets”), and associates the falling nuts with Crínmond (“Crínmond’s sweet nuts”). This may represent a variant tradition or the same grove under a different epithet. The Echtra Cormaic (Stokes 1891, section 35) calls them “nine hazels of Buan” (nói cuill Búain). These variant names, Crimall, Crínmond, Buan, appear to be epithets for the grove or its presiding figure, and represent different strands of the tradition rather than contradictions. None of the three should be treated as the single canonical name.

Who is Crimall?

The text of Gwynn’s Sinann II uses ind fhir glic, “of the clever/wise man,” as a gloss on the name Crimall, presenting him as a sage or wizard who in some sense owns or tends the grove. Crimall is also a name in the Fenian tradition: Crimall mac Trénmoir, Finn mac Cumhaill’s uncle, appears in Macgnímartha Finn (Kuno Meyer, Ériu 1, 1904, p. 179: “he goes into Connaught, and finds Crimall as an old man in a desert wood there”), suggesting a possible Fenian resonance in the dindshenchas epithet, though direct identification between the Crimall of the hazels and the Crimall of the Fenian tales is not established in the primary texts and should not be stated as fact. The form Crínmond in Sinann I and “Buan” in the Echtra Cormaic may be alternate epithets for the well’s guardian or for the grove itself; none has been satisfactorily identified in a primary source as a specific mythological figure.

How did Fionn mac Cumhaill receive the salmon’s wisdom?

The Macgnímartha Finn, “The Boyish Exploits of Finn,” is the principal Fenian text involving the knowledge transmitted through the hazels, though the connection is one of tradition and logical sequence rather than explicit statement in Meyer’s translation. The text (Kuno Meyer, Ériu 1, 1904, pp. 180-190; CELT T303023) records in ¶17 that Finn, having met his uncle Crimall, “went to learn poetry from Finnéces, who was on the Boyne.” In ¶18: “Seven years Finnéces had been on the Boyne, watching the salmon of Féc’s Pool; for it had been prophesied of him that he would eat the salmon of Féc, when nothing would remain unknown to him.” Finn cooks the salmon, burns his thumb, sucks it, and receives what was destined for the poet: universal knowledge. Finnéces then says: “Finn is thy name, my lad, and to thee was the salmon given to be eaten, and verily thou art the Finn.” Meyer’s text does not name the Well of Segais or the nine hazels, but the salmon’s knowledge must have an origin, and the dindshenchas tradition makes that origin clear: the hazelnuts falling into the Otherworld well are the ultimate source. The identification of the salmon of Féc with the Salmon of Wisdom that ate the hazelnuts is an inference shared across the tradition, not a statement within the Fenian text itself.

The structure of Finn’s story is significant. It is not an intentional eating but an accidental tasting: the burning of the thumb and the reflex of putting it to the mouth. This preserves the well’s fundamental logic. You cannot approach wisdom directly; it comes through the body, through process, through accident. This parallels the dindshenchas stories of Sinann and Boand, who both seek the well’s knowledge directly and are destroyed in the attempt. Finn, having made no claim to the salmon, receives what the poet of seven years cannot have.

What does Cormac see in the Land of Promise?

A structurally similar scene appears in the Echtra Cormaic i Tír Tairngirí (Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise), translated by Whitley Stokes (1891) and available at CELT. In section 35, Cormac finds in the Otherworld: “a shining fountain, with five streams flowing out of it, and the hosts in turn a drinking its water. Nine hazels of Buan grow over the well. The purple hazels drop their nuts into the fountain, and the five salmon which are in the fountain sever them and send their husks floating down the streams.” The presiding figure Manannán mac Lir then explains: “The fountain which thou sawest, with the five streams out of it, is the Fountain of Knowledge, and the streams are the five senses through which knowledge is obtained.” Here the number five (streams, salmon, senses) dominates rather than nine. The nine hazels are the constant element across sources; their fruit and the salmon who eat them vary in number.

How did early Irish law protect the hazel?

The legal texts offer a complementary dimension. Under the eighth-century Bretha Comaithchesa (Judgments Concerning Neighbourhood Law), Irish jurists classified twenty-eight native trees and shrubs into four grades. The seven airig fedo, nobles of the wood, attracted the heaviest penalties for wrongful cutting: a díre (penalty-fine) of two milch cows plus a three-year-old heifer. Coll (hazel) ranked second in this group, after oak. As Fergus Kelly’s paper for the Woodlands of Ireland confirms (p. 56): “It might seem surprising to find the relatively small hazel-tree (coll) included among the ‘lords of the wood’, but it was clearly of considerable importance in the early Irish economy: our legal commentary states that it was valued for ‘its nuts and its rods’.” The nuts were a staple foodstuff; hazel-rods were used for fences, house-walling, and wattle construction; annalistic records note exceptional mast years (836 AD, 1066 AD in the Annals of Ulster). The description in the early legal poem Ma be rí rofesser calls hazel briuguid caille, “the hospitaller of the wood,” emphasising its role as a provider of sustenance.

The legal protection of hazel was therefore grounded in practical economics, but it sat alongside mythological prestige. The same word coll that anchors the legal grade carries the full weight of the wisdom tradition.

What hazel folklore survived?

The hazel’s supernatural associations persisted into living memory, in several distinct folk-belief clusters.

Divination: the use of hazel rods for water-divining (slat choill) is widely attested in Irish tradition. The wood was considered especially sensitive to underground water sources, which may partly reflect the mythological association of hazel with the Otherworld well. The Dúchas Schools’ Collection (1937-39) includes a Co. Mayo entry (CBÉS 0107) associating a hazel bush with a hidden treasure location (“a pot of gold in Walshe’s hill”), linking hazel to the concealment and disclosure of hidden value.

Protection: a second Mayo entry (CBÉS 0171) records the general belief that “it is considered unlucky to cut a hazel tree or a blackthorn bush,” reflecting a protective taboo. Other Schools’ Collection entries record that carrying a hazel stick was believed to afford protection against fairies and witchcraft; conversely, a hazel grove or stand was considered a liminal place where the boundary between worlds was thin. Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends (1887) records that certain fairy doctors “would not touch a hazel stick”: the ambivalence of the tree, simultaneously protective and a threshold marker, runs through the folklore.

Literature: W.B. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899) opens: “I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head, / And cut and peeled a hazel wand.” The poem is a literary transformation of the tradition, the hazel wood as the place of inspired longing, the hazel wand as the instrument of vision, but Yeats is writing lyric poetry, not documenting myth. His use of the hazel wand echoes the mythological status of the tree without being a primary source for it.

Why are there nine hazels?

Nine is among the most consistently significant numbers in Irish literary tradition. In the dindshenchas tradition alone: nine hazels (Sinann I, II), nine months as a compressed unit of divine time (Boand II, where the sun stands still for nine months to conceal Óengus’s conception), nine waves as the boundary between Ireland and the Otherworld in immram tradition. In Cath Maige Tuired, the Morrígan has nine loose tresses. Nine warriors, nine sisters, nine sacred wells recur across the sources. As three multiplied by three, the double completion of the sacred triple, nine functions as the fullest expression of a thing: not merely complete but completed to the point of transformation or transgression. The nine hazels over the well represent not a grove of arbitrary size but a grove so full of wisdom that it has reached the limit of completeness and must overflow into the world. That overflow, the nuts falling, the salmon eating, the bubbles rising, the rivers running, is the natural world’s mechanism for distributing what the Otherworld accumulates.