Now there was among the following of Conn a man named Fiacha, who had been as a youth a trusty friend and follower of Cumhal.  He came to Finn and brought with him a spear having a head of dark bronze with glittering edges, and fastened with thirty rivets of Arabian gold, and the spear-head was laced up within a leathern case.  “By this weapon of enchantment,” said Fiacha, “you shall overcome the enchanter,” and he taught Finn what to do with it when the hour of need should come.

So Finn took the spear, and left the strings of the case loose, and he paced with it towards night-fall around the ramparts of royal Tara.  And when he had once made the circuit of the rampart, and the light had now almost quite faded from the summer sky, and the wide low plains around the Hill of Tara were a sea of white mist, he heard far off in the deepening gloom the first notes of the fairy harp.  Never such music was made by mortal hand, for it had in it sorrows that man has never felt, and joys for which man has no name, and it seemed as if a man listening to that music might burst from time into eternity and be as one of the Immortals for evermore.  And Finn listened, amazed and rapt, till at last as the triumphant melody grew nearer and louder he saw dimly a Shadow Shape playing as it were on a harp, and coming swiftly towards him.  Then with a mighty effort he roused himself from dreams, and tore the cover from the spear-head and laid the metal to his brow.  And the demoniac energy that had been beaten into the blade by the hammers of unearthly craftsmen in ancient days thrilled through him and made him fighting-mad, and he rushed forward shouting his battle-cry, and swinging the spear aloft.  But the Shadow turned and fled before him, and Finn chased it northward to the Fairy Mound of Slieve Fuad, and there he drove the spear through its back.  And what it was that fell there in the night, and what it was that passed like the shadow of a shadow into the Fairy Mound, none can tell, but Finn bore back with him next day a pale, sorrowful head on the point of Fiacha’s spear, and the goblin troubled the folk of royal Tara no more.

But Conn of the Hundred Battles called the Fianna together, and he set Finn at his right hand and said, “Here is your Captain by birth-right and by sword-right.  Let who will now obey him hence-forward, and who will not, let him go in peace and serve Arthur of Britain or Arist of Alba, or whatsoever King he will.”  And Goll, son of Morna, said, “For my part I will be Finn’s man under thee, O King,” and he swore obedience and loyalty to Finn before them all.  Nor was it hard for any man to step where Goll had gone before, so they all took their oaths of Fian service to Finn mac Cumhal.  And thus it was that Finn came to the captaincy of the Fianna of Erinn, and he ruled the Fianna many a year till he died in battle with the Clan Urgrenn at Brea upon the Boyne.

CHAPTER XI