Sweeney Astray

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this lonely pilgrimage, Sweeney, instead of wishing for a return to court, comes to yearn for the solace of the woods. On Ailsa Craig, “[a] hard station!” (p. 53), he laments: Fergus Kelly, “Trees in Early Ireland”, Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters, vol. 56, no. 1, 1999, p. 41. The other “lords” were oak, hazel, ash, pine, holly, and apple. Trees were evaluated by their usage, their comparative stature, and their longevity, and a complex system of penalties was in place for their misuse. Indeed, there are surviving references in 7 th-century texts to a lost law tract titled Fidbretha (Tree Judgments) that indicates woodland as a legal jurisdiction. See Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Cork, The Collins Press, 2003, p. 13. Malloy, Catharine, and Phyllis Carey, editors, Seamus Heaney—The Shaping Spirit, University of Delaware Press (Newark, NJ), 1996. O'Brien, Eugene, Seamus Heaney: Creating Ireland of the Mind, Liffey Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2003.

First published by the Field Day Theatre Company in 1983 and then by Faber and Faber in 1984, Seamu (...)Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 597. Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography: Contemporary Writers, 1960 to the Present, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland), February 22, 2003, p. 61; April 12, 2003, p. 62; July 5, 2003, p. 57; July 12, 2003, p. 59; July 19, 2003, p. 55; August 2, 2003, p. 59; October 25, 2003, p. 55. Then he acquires aerial powers, sprouts feathers, and takes to the trees. Crucially, his madness is accompanied by a talent for poetry, so that the description of his subsequent tribulations, and of the many locations through which he passes, is a classic of early literature. Joep Leerssen, “Wildness, Wilderness, and Ireland: Medieval and Early-Modern Patterns in the Demarcation of Civility”, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 56, no. 1, 1995, p. 27. Sweeney seems on his way to recovery, and a local woman felt sorry for him and would leave him milk and food. However, her husband becomes jealous and kills Sweeney with a spear. The place of his death was at the well near Glen Bolcain and is called The Madman’s Well. Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1999, Elizabeth Lund, "The Enticing Sounds of This Irishman's Verse," p. 20; February 3, 2000, "' Harry Potter' Falls to a Medieval Slayer," p. 1; April 13, 2000, p. 15; April 26, 2001, p. 19.Guardian (London, England), April 3, 1997, p. 9; October 9, 1999, p. 6; October 16, 1999, p. 10; October 18, 1999, p. 17; December 4, 1999, p. 11; January 19, 2000, p. 21; January 29, 2000, p. 3; September 30, 2000, p. 11; March 24, 2001, p. 12; April 7, 2001, p. 8; July 27, 2002, p. 21. exciting creation that seems to grow into an original work. Some prose passages and even some of the poems are relatively flat, deliberately so. The original is also prose and poetry, but it is only as one reads and rereads Mr. Heaney's Goodby, John, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History, University Press (Manchester, England), 2000. The medieval Irish work Buile Suibhne was left untranslated from 1913 till Seamus Heaney published this, Sweeney Astray, in 1983. Heaney breathed new life into it for the contemporary audience. The hero of the poem is Mad Sweeney, who is cursed at the Battle of Moira; he is turned into a bird and flees. The Mad Sweeney from Gaiman's American Gods is based (quite loosely) off Buile Suibhne, which is perhaps the only other reference to the poem I can think of. The blurb of my old Faber & Faber edition states, "The poetry spoken by the mad king, exiled to the trees and the slopes, is among the richest and most immediately appealing in the whole canon of Gaelic literature."

Hensen, Michael, and Annette Pankratz, editors, The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence, Stutz (Passau, Germany), 2001. New York Review of Books, September 20, 1973; September 30, 1976; March 6, 1980; October 8, 1981; March 14, 1985; June 25, 1992; March 4, 1999, Fintan O'Toole, review of Opened Ground, p. 43; July 20, 2000, p. 18; November 29, 2001, p. 49; December 5, 2002, p. 54. The poem is mostly plotless. The poem's catalyst is Sweeney's curse and metamorphosis, but from there, Sweeney journeys across Ireland (and beyond) and the poem becomes an ode to the landscape as much as it does his character and arc. Ireland is at the heart of the poem. The American photographer Rachel Giese (now Rachel Brown) accompanies Heaney's poem with incredible, dramatic photographs of Northern Ireland in her subsequent publication called Sweeney in Flight. Her phot America, August 3, 1996, p. 24; March 29, 1997, p. 10; October 11, 1997, p. 8; December 20, 1997, p. 24; July 31, 1999, John F. Desmond, "Measures of a Poet," p. 24; July 31, 1999, p. 24; April 23, 2001, p. 25. Some days later Ronan also shows up at the battle between Sweeney and Donal and the priest lays down some rules: no one may be killed before a certain hour of the morning and no one may be killed after a certain hour of the evening. In pointed rejection of Ronan’s authority, Sweeney makes it his business to kill one of Donal’s soldiers earlier each morning that Ronan’s rules allow, and also to kill one in the evening after the killing should have been over.Translator) The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles'"Antigone," Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2004. Heaney’s figurations of landscape are often remarkably consonant with the dinnseanchas tradition. Modern Irish translates the word dinnseanchas as ‘topography’—in old Irish, it connotes ‘stories, or lore of the old places,’ and the genre dates to the early Middle Ages, at least to the 11 thcentury (the earliest date known for such poems as were compiled in the Book of Leinster.) Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who has reimagined the genre in both her poetry and criticism, writes: “In dinnseanchas, the land of Ireland is translated into story: each place has history that is being continuously told… The landscape itself contains memory, and can point to the existence of a world beyond this one. [It] allows us glimpses into other moments in historical time.” [4]

The universal dimension of SH’s local preoccupations and the redressing power of literature across confines and cultures are made evident in an interview with Jon Snow for Britain’s Channel 4 News (1999) in which SH draws a parallel between the situation in Northern Ireland and events in Beowulf, which he had recently completed. Because of their ‘extreme ordeal, a little exhaustion, and tremor’, the people of Ulster, like those in the Old English epic poem, he said, ‘know a lot’ about danger, dread, hurt and suffering. This is ‘the general condition of species at the end of the century’, observes SH, ‘and the particular condition of people in Northern Ireland’ (Heaney 1999e, 4:34–5:49).Washington Post Book World, January 6, 1980; January 25, 1981; May 20, 1984; January 27, 1985; August 19, 1990.