This essay is in progress. What follows is the working shape of the second piece in a trilogy of creative nonfiction — the recognition that started this site. Subscribe via Take Flight for the finished work.

The Quest for Merlin

Trilogy II of III — with Becoming Anchorman and The Curse of Sweeney.

Premise

In 1995, at university, I was researching Arthurian mythology on my own and read Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin. That book triggered an intense search for J. G. O’Keeffe’s translation of Buile Suibhne. I could not find a copy. Merlin held me. Two years later the Irish double walked out of a family packet wearing my name.

What the essay will hold

1995 — The hunt

• Tolstoy’s trail: Merlin backward out of Arthur’s court into the Caledonian forest; Myrddin Wyllt after Arfderydd
• Footnotes pointing east to an Irish mad king in the trees
• University libraries, empty shelves, the search gone cold

1997 — The name

• First time on the public internet; the first search: Sweeney
• sweeneyclan.net — Doe Castle, County Donegal; the diaspora gathering every other year
• Email to the webmaster; a package in the mail: ancestry material, and inside it Buile Suibhne — The Madness of Sweeney
• Suibhne. Sweeney. The two drawers of the mind — mythology and family — revealed as one
• The felt boom: I was related to Merlin — and the precise meaning: I had been hunting Merlin’s wild double without knowing his Irish name was my own

Aftermath

• Why the prose retelling, and this whole site, began as the answer to that afternoon
• Door into The Curse of Sweeney: once the name attached, the tale began to haunt the life

Series position

1. Becoming Anchorman — the archetype recognized (1980)
2. The Quest for Merlin — the scholarly hunt and the name that answered (1995–1997)
3. The Curse of Sweeney — the life that rhymed with the tale, and the mercy that restored it