Story

Essays and a prose retelling drawn from Buile Suibhne — where kingship breaks and poetry becomes shelter.

"However much of Ireland you may travel each day, you will come to me each evening so that I may write your history."

— Moling to Suibhne, Buile Suibhne (O'Keeffe)

The keystone essay

The Shape of the Frenzy

A reading of Buile Suibhne in five movements — Anger, Curse, Madness and exile, Vision, Mercy — a tale about prayer, told through the man who made war on stillness.

Read The Shape of the Frenzy → July 13, 2026

buile-suibhne frenzy prayer structure

Story is the heart of the work: essays that read the medieval imagination, and a prose retelling drawn from Buile Suibhne — where kingship breaks, the wilderness answers, and poetry becomes both wound and shelter. Before the novel can walk the tale in prose, the tale must be read for its shape.

The Novel

Sweeney in Flight carries that reading into narrative: a prose retelling drawn from the Irish Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), written from inside the king's rupture rather than from the safety of commentary.

After a catastrophic rupture — part curse, part judgment — Sweeney is driven from the human world into the branches. He becomes a fugitive of his own mind and a stranger to ordinary time, living among birds and storms, carried by a voice that will not go silent. The tale moves between courts and forests, sanctity and violence, comedy and terror, as Sweeney's flight turns into a long argument with God, memory, and the shape of mercy.

This work is not a strict translation. It is a faithful prose rendering shaped by the medieval imagination: symbolic, attentive to cadence, and unwilling to flatten mystery into explanation. The goal is a narrative that reads cleanly to modern eyes while retaining the older weather of the story — its holiness, its wildness, and its strange clarity.

By S. S. Sweeney (Seraphim Scott Sweeney) — why this author →

From the manuscript

First Scene — Coming Soon

The opening scene of Sweeney in Flight is taking shape — a prose passage drawn from the rupture at Mag Rath and the first hours of exile. It will appear here as the draft reaches a finished cadence.

For finished excerpts as they land, subscribe via Take Flight.

Buile Suibhne — The Source — key scenes in O'Keeffe's 1913 translation, cited by section
Buile Suibhne — The Study — manuscripts, the geilt tradition, and every edition
Battle of Mag Rath — the rupture the retelling opens on
Sweeney — why this author carries the name, and the scholarship behind the claim
Quest — the road the frenzy becomes, read across the tradition
Take Flight — where finished excerpts are called in

An identity essay

I · 1980

Becoming Anchorman

Eighth grade, 1980 — auditioning only for Anchorman in The Idiot Box, and recognizing the guardian archetype that would keep returning: the long white beard, the book against the machine, the keeper of the word.

Read Becoming Anchorman → In progress

creative-nonfiction identity archetype anchorman

References

The primary text behind the retelling, and the terms on which this version stands beside it.

J. G. O’Keeffe, ed., Buile Suibhne (Irish Texts Society, 1913) — the standard edition and facing translation, and the source of the Moling epigraph above.
J. G. O’Keeffe, Buile Suibhne (1913) — full scan of the printed edition.
Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray (1983) — the verse rendering that carried the tale into modern English, and the standing measure for any retelling after it.
Sweeney in Flight is a prose retelling, not a translation. Scenes, cadence, and interior life are the work of this author; the tale, its sequence, and its verses belong to the medieval text edited above.

Story

The Shape of the Frenzy

First Scene — Coming Soon

Related

Becoming Anchorman

References