The Man of the Wood

Three men, three literatures, one pattern. In Ireland, Suibhne mac Colmáin, king of Dál nAraidhe, assaults the cleric Rónán on the morning of the battle of Mag Rath (637), is cursed, and at the battle's din goes mad — levitating, bird-like, out of the slaughter and into a life naked among the trees, uttering some of the most piercing nature poetry in Irish, until the saint Moling takes him in and records his story. In the North, Lailoken runs mad into the Wood of Celidon after a battle at Arfderydd (573), sees a terrible vision in the sky, prophesies compulsively, and foretells his own threefold death — beaten, pierced, drowned — which comes true. In Wales, Myrddin Wyllt speaks the Afallennau and Oianau from his exile in that same Caledonian forest, addressing an apple tree and a piglet, mourning his slain lord Gwenddolau, prophesying to his sister Gwenddydd.

The complex is remarkably stable: battle-trauma at the root; a holy man's curse or a heaven-sent horror as trigger; flight to the wilderness; physical transformation toward the bird or the beast; the compensations of madness — poetry, prophecy, sight; and a mediated return at the end, usually into a saint's keeping. Kenneth Jackson's classic analyses, Pádraig Ó Riain's anatomy of the "wild man" pattern, and the comparative work gathered in The Arthur of the Welsh let you watch philologists argue about which telling is primary — the Irish and Scottish material is intertwined at the root, and the name Myrddin may even have been generated from the place-name Caerfyrddin. For this path the direction of borrowing matters less than the pattern's meaning: sight is purchased by expulsion. The seer must first be driven out of every human category — king, warrior, husband, sane man — before he can see.

Hold this unit close. Geoffrey of Monmouth will fuse this wild prophet with a different Merlin in Movement II; the Grail romances will quietly inherit his structure (the fool in the wilderness who becomes the seer); and Unit 36 will find him alive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also the hinge between this path and the creative wing of this site: Sweeney in Flight is what it looks like to inhabit this pattern rather than annotate it. The doors below lead there.