The ancient exile, and the living name.
In the seventh century, a king named Suibhne was cursed at the battle of Mag Rath and driven into the trees. He lost his throne, his mind, his place among men. What he gained was poetry — verse born from cold branches, rushing water, and a long argument with God about whether exile is punishment or gift. The Irish tradition calls his story Buile Suibhne, the Frenzy of Sweeney.
Scholars of the Insular north have long set him beside another wild man of the trees: Myrddin Wyllt — Merlin before he was Arthur's Merlin — who broke at Arfderydd and fled mad into the Caledonian forest. The pattern is the same — battle, break, flight, wilderness, poetry or prophecy — and Suibhne is Merlin's Irish cousin in that tradition: not related by blood, but by the geilt type the north already knew. The books below source the argument; the discovery that follows is how it found me.
Centuries later, the MacSweeney gallowglass carried the name to Donegal, building Doe Castle on Sheephaven Bay and holding it through wars, plantations, and the slow weathering of Gaelic Ireland. They adopted Suibhne as ancestor — not by blood, but by claim. A spiritual lineage. The wild king became their founding story.
I carry the name too. Whether the thread connecting a seventh-century king to a twenty-first-century writer is genealogy or myth or something in between, the name is the bridge. This project is an attempt to walk across it — to retell the old story in prose, to trace the ancestry in the landscape, and to ask what it means when a name outlives every person who bore it.
Two Suibhnes, one inheritance — the fuller honesty on the clan hub →
The keystone essay
Enchantment, captivity, and the disciplines that keep us human — Merlin and Suibhne as liminal figures who become voices of warning and vision.
The wild prophet in his tree; the writer who found the name waiting in his own.
In 1995 I was reading Nikolai Tolstoy's The Quest for Merlin — chasing the historical Merlin backward out of Arthur's court into the Caledonian forest, to the wild prophet the Welsh called Myrddin Wyllt, who broke at the battle of Arfderydd in 573 and fled mad into the trees. Tolstoy's trail kept pointing east across the water, to an Irish figure I could find only in footnotes: a mad king in the trees of Ulster, in a text I couldn't put my hands on. I hunted university libraries for the O'Keeffe edition and came up empty. That search went cold, the way searches did then.
Two years later I was doing something that felt entirely unrelated: an early-internet search on my own surname. Family history, not mythology — two different drawers of the mind. A contact in Ireland answered with MacSweeney material — and there, inside the family packet, was a title: The Madness of Sweeney. Buile Suibhne. Suibhne. Sweeney. The text itself was waiting online at CELT, University College Cork's early corpus — O'Keeffe among the first postings — and that is where I first read the tale on a screen.
The two drawers were one drawer. The untraceable madman in Tolstoy's footnotes — Merlin's Irish double, the one I had hunted for two years and given up on — had been filed under my own name the entire time. For a moment the feeling was simple and wrong in the best way: I was related to Merlin. What it meant, more precisely, was this: I had been hunting Merlin's wild double for two years without knowing his Irish name was my own name. I did not find the connection. It found me, and it had been waiting in the one place I never thought to look, because I carried it.
The prose retelling on this site — the whole site, truthfully — began as the answer to that moment. The full account lives in The Quest for Merlin; the life that rhymed with the tale, in The Curse of Sweeney; the archetype that came first, in Becoming Anchorman.
A trilogy of creative nonfiction: the archetype, the recognition, and the life that paralleled the curse and the mercy. Drafts in progress — the doors are open so the hook can be read as one arc.
I · 1980
Eighth grade. One audition, one part — the guardian in The Idiot Box who teaches a child to read against a world ruled by the screen. The long white beard, the book, the archetype recognized.
In progress →II · 1995–1997
Tolstoy at university; the hunt for O'Keeffe; a first internet search on the surname Sweeney — and a packet from Ireland that delivered Buile Suibhne under my own name.
In progress →III · After
PTSD, exile, addiction, liminal sight — and the desert fathers' mercy paralleling Moling. Why retelling Suibhne's story is, metaphorically, retelling my own.
In progress →S. S. Sweeney
(Seraphim Scott Sweeney)
Since that afternoon in 1997, the name has been an assignment. Born at Tibbetts Point — his father a lighthouse keeper — he grew into a tradition of watchfulness, prayer, and the keeping of light. He writes as an Orthodox Christian, a former cavalry scout, and a MacSweeney: three ways of saying one thing — someone formed by watchfulness, at the edge of the camp, under orders to remember.
The work in progress is a novelization of Buile Suibhne — the mad king's tale retold from inside, by one of his own name. Chapters appear in Story as they reach a finished cadence.
Three witnesses to the Merlin–Suibhne braid: ignition, ballast, and voice. Begin here if you want to walk the same trail.
1985 · Ignition
The book that started it. Tolstoy hunts the historical Merlin out of romance and back into the sixth-century north — a real wild prophet in a real forest after a real battle — and in doing so points, almost in passing, at the Irish double whose name I would not recognize for two more years. I owe this book the way you owe a door.
2016 · Ballast
The sober historian's answer to the romantic quest — a careful sifting of what can and cannot be known about the Myrddin/Lailoken figure of the old North. If Tolstoy lights the fire, Clarkson keeps it honest, and this site's habit of drawing hard lines between evidence and inheritance is partly his example.
1983 · Voice
How the living ear hears the mad king — an Ulster poet carrying an Ulster poet across thirteen centuries, open about his own claim on the material through affinity. Proof, if it were needed, that the figure is not a museum piece. Read O'Keeffe first; read Heaney to hear what a great poet keeps.
Primary text: J. G. O'Keeffe's 1913 edition is free — Internet Archive · CELT. For the tale, its manuscripts, and its tradition, see the Buile Suibhne ancestry page.
The frenzy has always been readable as a grammar for a mind after battle — a door left ajar in The Curse of Sweeney; the tradition already knew what we have had to relearn.