Buile Suibhne (Irish pronunciation: [ˈbˠɪlʲə ˈhɪvʲnʲə], The Madness of Suibhne or Suibhne's Frenzy) is the tale of Suibhne (frequently anglicised as Sweeney or Sweeny), a legendary king of Dál nAraidi in Ulster in Ireland.[1] The story is told in mixture of poetry and prose and exists in manuscripts dating from 1671–1674 but which was almost surely written and circulated in its modern form sometime in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. It is likely, from references in works going back to the tenth century, that some form of the tale of the mad king goes back to the first millennium.
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In the legend, the king was annoyed by the sound of a bell. When he learned that the sound came from Bishop Ronan Finn as he set up a church, the pagan king stormed naked to the church, pulled the bishop forth, and threw his psalter into a lake. He would have killed the bishop were he not called at that moment to fight in the Battle of Mag Rath (near modern Moira, 637 A.D.). Prior to the battle, Bishop Ronan blessed the troops. Suibhne took the sprinkling of holy water as a taunt and killed one of the bishop's psalmists with a spear and threw another spear at Ronan himself. The spear struck Ronan's bell and broke it. At this, Ronan cursed Suibhne with madness. His curse was: 1) that as the sound of the bell had been broken, so now would any sharp sound send Suibhne into madness, 2) as Suibhne had killed one of Ronan's monks, so would Suibhne die at spear point. When the battle began, Suibhne went insane. His weapons dropped, and he began to levitate like a bird.
From that point on, Suibhne leapt from spot to spot, like a bird. Also like a bird, he could never trust humans. His kinsmen and subjects sent him mad with fear, and he could only flee from place to place, living naked and hungry. After seven years in the wild, Suibhne's reason was briefly restored by his kinsmen, who very gently coaxed him back to earth, but, while recuperating, a mill hag taunted him into a contest of leaping. As Suibhne leapt along after the hag, he again took flight and returned to madness. Eventually, after travels throughout Ireland and Western England, Suibhne was harbored by Bishop Moling. He lived, broken and old, with the bishop, and the bishop entrusted his care to a parish woman. Unfortunately, that woman's husband, a herder, grew jealous and killed Suibhne with a spear. On his death, Suibhne received the sacrament and died in reconciliation.
The poetry in the story of Suibhne is rich and accomplished, and the story itself of the mad and exiled king who composes verse as he travels has held the imagination of poets through to the twentieth century. At every stop in his flight, Suibhne pauses to give a poem on the location and his plight, and his descriptions of the countryside and nature, as well as his pathos, are central to the development of the text.
Many poets have invoked Sweeney—most notably T. S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney. Heaney published a translation of the work into English, which he entitled Sweeney Astray. The author Flann O'Brien incorporated much of the story of Buile Suibhne into his comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds. Another version from the Irish text, titled The Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine, was published by the Irish poet Trevor Joyce.[2] Sweeney also appears as a character in Neil Gaiman's novel, American Gods. A contemporary version of the legend by poet Patricia Monaghan explores Sweeney as an archetype of the warrior suffering from "Soldier's Heart".[3]
Joseph Heller also references the story in his novel Catch-22, where he portrays Yossarian perching naked in a tree during, or after, Nately's burial.