Sweeny, Peregrine
The Prose

It's no secret how Sweeny, king of Dal Araidhe and scion of noble though disputed stock, wandered deranged from battle. These periods recount his flight, its reasons and results. These are the records of Sweeny's madness. There was then in Ireland a cleric called Ronan Finn. A pious and temperate man, he was dedicated to serving his God and opposing the forces of evil.

A time came when he began to plot a church which fell within the area of Dal Araidhe, Sweeny's domain. As the monk circled the boundaries of his site he made such a racket with his handbell that it wasn't long before Sweeny had inquired the source of the strange tolling, and, in a great rage, set out to put an end to Ronan's building. Eorann, his wife, tried to restrain him by grabbing the crimson tassels of his cloak. Thefibula sprang from his throat and its precious metal clattered on thefloor. His cloak fell limp in the queen's hand as Sweeny made for the church. As yet, only his nakedness was stark.

When Sweeny arrived he found Ronan enumerating the manifold epithets of God from his best psalter. Sweeny snatched that book and tossed it far out into the nearby lake where it tumbled swiftly down the chill waters. Next, as he got set to haul Ronan from the church, he was interrupted by a sudden cry; a servant had arrived from Congal Claon requiring Sweeny to fight at Magh Rath. Left alone as Sweeny and the messenger departed, Ronan bemoaned the loss of his psalter, and recalled with rancour his humiliation.

After a day and a night, a convenient otter fished the psalter up from the bed of the lake and brought it to Ronan. The monk inspected the book and, when he found it intact, began at once to praise God and curse Sweeny, saying: "pray God, naked as Sweeny came let him remain until a spear puts end to such extravagant flight." Then he cursed all Sweeny's kinsfolk; only Eorann was excused, and came in for a blessing. Ronan next made his way towards Magh Rath, hoping to secure a pact between Domhnall and the tribe of Congal. He did not succeed in this aim; the best he could do was to arrange a truce each night between certain hours. But always the truce was broken; each morning before the hour of battle Sweeny would kill one of Domhnall's men, and he would kill another after the combat ceased at night.

On the day fixed for the deciding battle, Sweeny was first in the field. His skin gleamed through a silken shirt belted with satin. He wore the tunic Congal gave him the day he bested Oilill Cedach; crimson thickly bordered with gold. Chips of carbuncle gemmed its edge and bright silver buttons glinted through loops of silk. Broad heads of iron shod his twin lances, and a shield of tough yellow horn hung at his back. The haft of the sword was worked in gold.

When the other warriors had arrived, and all the great forces were gathered there, Ronan began to go among them with the psalmists of his community. They sprinkled holy water over the assembled ranks and Sweeny received its benefits along with his comrades. Suspicious of being mocked, he slipped his finger through the loop of his iron-tipped spear and with a single blow he killed one of the psalmists. He made another cast then; this time the target of his lance was the monk himself. The blade penetrated the bell on the monk's breast, but the shaft ricochetted, jolting vertically up. Then Ronan spoke: "I invoke the might of God," he said, "that just as that shaft flew high among the upper vapours, you may go also, birdlike, and may your death be by a spear as your spear killed my ward. My curse on you and my blessing on Eorann; and may all the ancient powers bedevil your kin and offspring."

Then the battle was joined. As the vast armies clashed, the warriors grunted and roared, and three times they raised a cry like the loud challenge of a stag, answered and echoed. When Sweeny heard this shrill cacophany rebounding toward him from all sides so that even the sun shook and reverberated in the heavens, he looked up. Troubled then, rage and dread began to grow in him and he became dizzy and a strange restlessness seized him. All the places he knew seemed suddenly repulsive now, and he longed to arrive where he had never been. His fingers trembled and his pulse rushed in his ears as he swayed on weakening legs. His sight was distorted and all his senses dulled when he fulfilled the curse of Ronan. Deranged and rattled as a wild bird, Sweeny began his wanderings. This commencement of his flight did not disturb even the glittering dew that hung upon the grass; still, crystalline, it lingered. He did not halt on pastureland or rock, in haggard, moor, or dense timber, all of which he passed in that initial flight, but entered the yew-tree of Ros Bearaigh. Sweeny's kinsmen were routed. It was when their diminished forces passed in their retreat the yew-tree of Ros Bearaigh and tried to cajole him out with promises of wealth that Sweeny, crimson-cloth, whose hair matched the blond adze-flakes, and whose eyes were as blue and flawless ice, rejected them: "you do not know me."

He sprang from the tree into the blind alleys of the rainclouds, remote from roofs and mountains, then travelled Ireland, ferreting chine and gorge, grazing the high jagged cordons of the ivy and tight fissures of stone, from estuary to estuary, among summits and valleys and their recurrence, until he reached the genial Glen Bolcain. Here is the resort of the Irish-turned-maniac, and the glen delights them. Pannage is underfoot, berries abound, and there are many and sweet springs. In simple joy the innocent mad would strike each other down for a choice sprig of cress or a niche to sleep in.

Sweeny dawdled in the glen till one night when he roosted high in an ivy-strangled whitethorn. He couldn't sleep there because each time he twitched the wood tines stuck him, leaving his flesh split and specked with blood. So he went to where a single blackthorn limb spired above a briary thicket, rayed with fine spikes. He perched there, but the slender branch sagged under him and it snapped, throwing him into the thorny mass below so that his skin from heel to head was a crimson tracery. It was thus that Sweeny took a scunner against thorns.

The period of Sweeny's peregrinations between this grievous issuing from Glen Bolcain and his return thereto, was seven years. It was his fastness and his den; women there did not, through thrashing of the yellow flax, recall to him his kinsfolks' thrashing at Magh Rath. Only random care had power to expel him.

Soon in search of him came Loingseachan, a man of close, if uncertain, relation. Beyond any question, though, was his concern for Sweeny, for three times he had retrieved him from out the tortuous courses of his madness. Loingseachan now sought him in the glen, sought him by his prints beside the cress-providing springs, and by the hail of small timber with which his aërial disquietude threatened the timid fauna of the earth. But it was Sweeny who first sighted his pursuer, when he found him asleep in the glen, and he chanted over him the bitter threnodies of his madness.

Shortly the pursuit was resumed with ruse and lure, and Sweeny had occasion in hisflight to regret the curse of Ronan Finn. He had recourse to the company of his wife Eorann, whom that cleric had blessed, but he found no haven there. Eorann had taken for husband one Guaire, and the henchmen of this feeble thug drove Sweeny back into the darkness and the frost of which he had made such desperate and formal complaint. The wife of a local erenagh attempted then to beguile him, but shrewdly he eluded her, bidding her tend to her husband and her glebe, and calling to mind their common end. The sharpness of her eyes had troubled him. He went then to one of the refuges he retained in his homeland, and entered the yew-tree of Ros Earcain. For a month he lived there undetected, but once more there came against him the wily Loingseachan. That man, captor elect, approached the yew, lifting his eyes to the distraught figure on the boughs above. "Sweeny," he began, "I find you here starved, naked on a branch as any bird, with parched lips and a clenched arse. It is hard that this should be the end of one whose body thrilled to silk and dull tunics of satin; once you loosed flickering reins across the necks of foreign stallions, your house held noble youths, fine gentlemen, choice hounds and mastercraftsmen. You dined at many mansions, and countless lords, leaders, squires and hospitallers noted your every whim. Quondam owner of many goblets, with cruets of carved horn for liquors dry and sweet: bird-form now, glimpsed only between wilderness and wilderness. It is hard." At this, Sweeny lingered. He asked for news of his kinsfolk, and Loingseachan, eloquent in his deceit, told him that both his parents were dead, his brother also, and his wife. "A house without a wife," said Sweeny, "is a rudderless boat, is a coat of feathers to the skin, is the kindling of a single fire."

"Dead is your daughter."

"The heart's needle is an only daughter."

"And your only son is dead."

At this last, Sweeny tumbled from the tree and fell to the gyves and shackles of his pursuer.

Locks and fetters were fitted on him and remained, until at last, through manacle and spancel, sense returned. Memory and reason returned to him, as did his figure and appearance; kingship was manifest in him. When the season of harvest came round, Loingseachan went with his people into the fields. Not so, Sweeny. He was locked deep in an inner chamber of the mill with only the mill-hag for company and warden, and she had been enjoined to silence lest she unsettle the frail sanity of the man. Wilfully, she spoke, inquiring the exploits of his madness. He cursed her, but she led him on, saying the truth should out. She goaded him to leap then; first, over the bed-rail. She matched that. Next through the rooflight of the chamber she followed him, and across the five cantreds of Dal Araidhe, until wearily he roosted on an ivy-branch in Fiodh Gaibhle, the hag beside him.

It was the end of the harvest-time precisely. The cry of the hunt and the bellow of the running stag carried through the wood; Sweeny suppressed his initial fright and chanted of the trees of Ireland, and of his grief. This done, he took off once more across the summits of the land, and each leap was mimicked by the hag until at last he sprang from the battlements of Dun Sobairce and she faltered in pursuit; she fell upon the sea-cliffs and the rock broke her. A catspaw played with her wreck.

Fearful then of Loingseachan's vengeance, he wandered on, coming at last to the land of the Britons. He held the castle of the king of that land upon his right side and came upon a forest, wherein he heard sounds of lamentation and anguish. Sweeny entered the forest and found there another madman, the Man of the Wood. Each recited the aetiology of his derangment, and the two entered upon a contract of friendship: "Sweeny," said the other, "we have exchanged con. dences, now each must be the other's guard; he who attends the crane's call break above the blue and turquoise waters, who hears the lucid cry of cormorants, the clatter of a woodcock's wings, snapping of spent wood, or sees birds' shadows on the roofing boughs, let him give warning; two tree-trunks shall divide us and if either hears any of these things or similar, then let us flee, swiftly." For a year they were together; then the Man of the Wood had, perforce, to go to where his death awaited him, to be snatched by a gust into a waterfall to drown. He delayed only until Sweeny had told him his own tale just as it is set down hereinafter, then sought out that fatal and elementary conjunction, and the fall included him.

Sweeny went back to Glen Bolcain. There a madwoman pursued him until Sweeny divined her madness and turned, whereupon she fled before him. This he made the subject of his chant, strophe and shrill counterstrophe. He did not stand. His course brought him back to the home of his old wife Eorann, where again he came to grief; she, seeing his wretchedness, rejected him. On Benn Boirche, a peak among the southern ranges, he found such rest as he could take, victim of storm and graupel, and retold the shifting numbers of his ways.

At firstlight he entered again upon his route; he crossed the green and limpid Shannon, saw the sublime Sliabh Aughty as he made his way to Bile Tiobradain in east Connaught. That night the snow came down, and as it fell it froze, drift upon drift. "Though it be the death of me," said Sweeny, "better to suffer philanthropy than such incessant pain." In this form, a gleam of reason came then to the nearly reclaimed haggard; but it was revealed to Ronan Finn that Sweeny had come to, and would return amongst his people. Adamant through time, the monk renovated his curse: "let him have no relief from your just vengeance, Lord, till death," and the Lord obliged.

At midnight Sweeny halted at the centre of Sliabh Fuaid, and there beheld an apparition. Bloody truncated torsos, their lopped heads leaping beside them, gibbered and brawled on the path, and five of them, heads grizzled and hirsute, lacked torso or trunk between them. He heard their chat:

"He's mad," said the first head.

"A madman of Ulster," said the second.

"Let us hunt him," said the third.

"Long let the hunt be," said the fourth.

"To the sea," said the fifth, and they lifted towards him; headlong he fled. The call of that hunt was the din and stridulation of stark terror and the hubbub of the chivvying spectres. They butted and plucked at his calves, ankles, shanks, shoulders and nape, clashing with branches, rocks, and each other like a flood unleashed and falling. At last he hid in the high gauze of the clouds, to be sure to be sure that he had lost them; both human heads and those of dog and goat which had been intermingled. Such was the most strenuous of Sweeny's flights, and for three fortnights after he didn't halt from his career long enough even to drink.

Another of Sweeny's demented journeys took him from Luachair Deaghaidh to where the serene waters of Fiodh Gaibhle doubled its bright blossom. For a year he fed upon the blood-red and the saffron berries of the holly-trees, the dark earth-colours of the acorns, and clear water, then his grief returned upon him and he took up his chant.

He was diverted only briefly then by the cliff of Farannan, but was pleased enough by its ivy and apple-trees, and by the wild deer and the ponderous swine of the valley, and the fat seals snoring on the wrack below, and so he praised it.

Soon he came to where Moling was reading to his students; he lay at the edge of the spring and began to crop the water-cress. The saint greeted him, saying that his arrival was foreknown, as, also, his death in that place. Further, he bound the madman that, however far he might travel by day, each night he would return so that his tale might be set down.

This, for a year, was his routine, and each night he attended vespers with the saint. Moling instructed Muirghil, wife of his swineherd Mongan, to give Sweeny some of each day's milking. It was her habit to thrust her heel into the pat of cowdung nearest her, and fill the depression with new milk; surreptitiously, Sweeny would steal into the vacant yard to lap up the proffered meal.

Muirghil fell out one evening with another woman. Out of sheer spite the other accosted Mongan next day as Muirghil was pouring the milk into the dung and Sweeny watched from the hedge beside. "Coward," she said, "there's a man at your wife in the hedge beyond." The jibe aroused his anger, and he snatched up a spear from the rack and made for the hedge.

Sweeny's flank was towards him as he lay feeding from the dung. The herd lunged, the blade penetrated the rib-cage beside the right nipple and so shattered the spine. Or was it perhaps the tine of a deer's antler which the herd had concealed at Sweeny's trough which did the irreparable harm?

Whichever the case, when the deed was reported to Moling he came with retinue of clerics to the place where Sweeny lay, and there administered all appropriate sacraments.

It was then that the stricken man uttered his final chant as the death-swoon softened him and he could no longer sustain the rigorous discipline of his derangement. He lasted long enough only to be enjambed across the threshold of the church, whereupon death took him. He was interred by Moling with the inevitable rites.

Moling it was who first recorded this tale of Sweeny, and noted his chants, but it is uncertain to how great an extent that saint expressed his reverence for the silent dead by emendation of a strange and confused history, and how far editors and critics have conspired with him, and time, and chance, to make corruption of the word outpace that of the flesh. Perhaps a final turn was added too, to make a palinode. May we, then, conclude just this: that, after all, we have not here those words which Sweeny, between flight and fall, spoke to the Man of the Wood?