Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
St Molings monastery by the River Barrow, otherwise known as St Mullins, Co Carlow, where Sweeney finds refuge.
Irish Book Awards Nominee
Manchán Magan’s final book: Naked, cursed and living in the trees - the story of Mad Sweeney
In an extract from his final book, the late Manchán Magan shares the medieval tale of Buile Shuibhne as a lament for a worldview rooted in the land.
In his final book, the late Manchán Magan asks us to move from the limited rational world to a more expansive spiritual one. In the book, In Seeing What’s Hidden, Manchán explores how ancient Irish culture retains deep resonances with other indigenous worldviews. Drawing on mythology, early law, folklore and place names, Manchán traces how Ireland’s forests, sacred trees and landscapes shaped the Irish psyche with such a resilience that many beliefs and customs endure to this day. The book is nominated for Best Irish-Published Book, a category sponsored by The Journal in the An Post Irish Book Awards. Here is an extract…
ONE CENTRAL FEATURE of Buile Shuibhne is the way the narrative is woven intrinsically into specific points in the landscape. Place names and therapeutic locations are highlighted throughout. During his wanderings, Sweeney visits 37 different sites, and most new settings coincide with a new theme or insight. The land and its place names are as integral to the story as the incidents that occur.
Of the 147 place names mentioned, many are in Northern Ireland, predominantly scattered across Counties Derry, Antrim, Armagh and Down, with many others scattered through the midlands, particularly around Counties Offaly, Roscommon and Longford. In fact, it would be easier to name the few counties that Sweeney didn’t visit or even refer to in passing: Cavan, Wicklow, Wexford and Westmeath.
This ties in with a core element of many Indigenous traditions: mapping the world through story rather than cartography. ‘Sacred geography’ is the term used to describe the practice of embedding one’s history and spiritual understanding in particular landscapes and toponyms – or, as an Apache elder described them to the anthropologist Keith Basso, ‘maps in the mind’. The land is called into being and honoured by regularly naming it and bringing it to mind, just as you would pray for a loved one.
Places such as Sliabh Cúa (Slieve Gua), Inis Bó Finne (Inishbofin), Es Ruaid (Assaroe Falls), Glenn Aicle (Glencolmcille), Benna Bairche (Mourne Mountains), Sliabh Echtigi (Slieve Aughty) and Dún Cermna (Downmacpatrick) are so much more than locations along the route of Sweeney’s exile; they are acupuncture points through which the vibrancy of the land can be accessed by the storyteller and audience.
Considering our earlier exploration of the importance of the crimson cloak in Gaelic tradition, it’s worth noting that a similar garment appears as a motif in Sweeney’s story. He is described as going into battle at Magh Rath wearing ‘a crimson tunic of one colour … with a close, well-woven border of beautiful, refined gold set with rows of fair gems of carbuncle from one end to the other of the border, having in it silken loops over beautiful, shining buttons for fastening and opening it, with variegation of pure white silver’.
‘Stark naked’
When Sweeney first hears Rónán’s bell and rushes out to banish him, his wife tries to restrain him by seizing ‘the wing of the fringed, crimson cloak which was around him, so that the fibula of pure white silver, neatly inlaid with gold, which was on his cloak over his breast, sprang through the house. Therewith, leaving his cloak with the queen, he set out stark-naked in his swift career to expel the cleric from the church, until he reached the place where Rónán was.’
As a result, Sweeney confronts the cleric stark naked, adding further insult. The scandal of this was heightened even more when Rónán was later made a saint – beatified for his miracle of transforming Sweeney into a crazed nomad. In retaliation, the would-be saint added a clause to his curse, stipulating that Sweeney would remain naked during his years of exile. And so the loss of his cloak becomes an additional burden for him throughout his ordeal in the wilderness: ‘I am without mantle or smock, the evil hour has long clung to me.’
When St Moling attempts to offer him food, Sweeney replies, ‘If you but knew, cleric, more grievous is it to be without a cloak.’ Moling offers him his cowl or smock, which Sweeney rejects. Sweeney’s cloakless state is a symbol of his loss of connection to the civilised world, as well as a commentary on the ostentatious clothing worn by the clergy. It may also refer to the symbolic and supernatural powers of a druidic cloak, and to the gradual loss of these meanings with the arrival of Christianity. In fact, some scholars have suggested that the confrontation with St Rónán may be a later addition to the tale, and that the original story was all about the loss of Sweeney’s ceremonial cloak and what that implied for his power and standing.
This clash between Indigenous wisdom and the new Christian order is central to the story of Sweeney. His madness can be read as an expression of the psychological fracture that occurs when a worldview centred on the land and its cycles is displaced. It is a familiar tale in countless traditional cultures that have been suppressed or uprooted by colonisation or the imposition of a foreign religion. Often the theme is settler–colonial violence, although in this case it’s about the potentially equally disruptive upheaval of proselytisation. Sweeney’s lamentations often read like an elegy to a vanishing world – an oral testament to the potency of landscape, memory and language, and to the trauma and disorientation that comes from losing connection to these foundational elements of culture.
Towards the end of the poem, Sweeney finds temporary refuge with St Moling in his monastery by the River Barrow in County Carlow. He and Moling develop a cautious friendship, but Sweeney remains adamant that the old animistic, nature-rooted beliefs are superior to the saint’s Christian practices. At one point, Moling says, ‘Delightful is the leaf of this book’, referring to the psalter of St Kevin, and Sweeney counters: ‘More delightful is a leaf of my yew in happy Glen Bolcain.’ When Moling invites him to accompany him to Mass at Glais Cille Cro, Sweeney replies, ‘I will leap a fresh ivy-bush, a high leap, and it will be a greater feat.’
Civilised man having a mental breakdown
While it’s worth highlighting aspects of Buile Shuibhne that resonate with Indigenous traditions and perspectives, I don’t wish to overemphasise them. In many ways the tale expresses a common mythological theme: the civilised man experiencing a mental breakdown and retreating into the wild in search of sanctuary and relief. The motif of the madman perching naked in trees and performing great leaps appears frequently in folklore, as does the notion of the madman challenging rigid power structures or autocratic rule while revealing perceptive insights amid apparently incomprehensible ravings. We find both in Shakespeare’s King Lear. There is also the common trope of being banished by clergy into the wilderness.
Some scholars suggest that Sweeney’s story is a reimagining of the British tale of St Kentigern and Lailoken, which tells of a wild prophet who went insane after the Battle of Arfderydd in Cumbria, a century before Sweeney’s story begins. Myrddin Wyllt (the Welsh forerunner of the Arthurian wizard Merlin) is said to have also gone mad at this battle, and both he and Lailoken fled to the forest, where they survived on wild fruit and roots.
There are indeed some similarities between the stories, but Lailoken is a Christian, and the focus of the tale lies almost entirely on St Kentigern and his clerics, and on the prophecies that Lailoken and Merlin make in their insane states. It’s basically a Christian parable, lacking the profound identification with land, seasons, water sources, birds and animals that lies at the heart of Buile Shuibhne. The Indigenous perspective that interprets ‘madness’ as a relational or spiritual imbalance, rather than a purely individual pathology, is also absent.
In summary, while Buile Shuibhne emerges from a distinctly Irish mythological and Christianised context, its themes align with broader patterns seen in Indigenous storytelling and cosmology. In fact, so numerous are the Indigenous elements contained within it that it seems beyond coincidence. There is the deep connection to specific trees, water sources and sacred places; the focus on localised knowledge, allied with a mystical attunement to the natural world; the encoding of ecological wisdom in poetic or mnemonic form; the experience of madness as transformational, rather than pathological; the shifting, permeable boundaries between human and animal – or avian – form; the notion of the wisdom of those who dwell at the edges; and the concluding episode in which St Moling’s community cares for Sweeney neatly parallels Indigenous practices of collective responsibility and healing, emphasising restoration over punishment.
Whether or not the poem was an attempt across the centuries to transmit insights into Indigenous ecological awareness, cultural memory and methods of resistance – smuggled into the form of a long-winded lament preserved on parchment in Christian-collated manuscripts – is unknowable, but we are indeed fortunate to have the text today. It contains insights and lessons regarding our loss of sovereignty and identity through colonisation, our growing sense of isolation and alienation from society, our sense of grief at witnessing the collapse of ecosystems.
There are also echoes of our distrust of extractive, hierarchical systems (as represented by St Rónán’s church-building and intrusion on society) and an expression of our discomfort with notions of Christian exceptionalism or human supremacy. It could be argued too that, ultimately, Buile Shuibhne hints at how we might go about rebuilding relationships with both ourselves and the environment that we depend upon. It shows the nourishment and sense of deep connection offered by rivers, plants and trees, as well as by the birds and other animals that live among them.
In Seeing What’s Hidden by the late Manchán Magan, is nominated for Best Irish-Published Book, a category sponsored by The Journal in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2026.
have your say