Sweeney in Flight

For two years I searched university libraries for Merlin's Irish double through the footnotes of a book — a mad king in the trees of Ulster I could never quite put my hands on — and then gave up.

Two years later, while I was searching my own surname for family history, a packet arrived from Ireland with a story inside it: Buile Suibhne. The Madness of Sweeney. The untraceable madman I had chased through Tolstoy had been in my own name the whole time. The two threads of my life had converged, leaving me wondering if I had been searching for myself the entire time.

This site is the answer to that question — a prose retelling of the old tale, an atlas of the ancestry beneath it, and an attempt to take up the office the name has always carried. Why this author → · The full account →

What to expect

Each station keeps the same three layers. The page itself is a map — the tradition and the scholarship behind it, sources listed, contested claims marked as positions rather than smoothed into fact. Beneath each map stands a keystone essay that makes the station's argument at full length. And beside the keystones runs Identity: six first-person essays, the life that walks the same arc without announcing every parallel. The central work is a prose retelling of Buile Suibhne, still under the copyist's hand — unfinished leaves are set down in the open and marked with a scribal note, and finished work is called in through the last door, Take Flight.