Buile Shuibhne: Mad Sweeney (Buile Shuibhne)

A king cursed into a bird, driven mad across Ireland, who turns into one of the finest nature poets in the language.

Suibhne was king of Dál nAraidi in Ulster. Hearing a cleric called Rónán marking out a church on his land, he went at him in a rage, threw his psalter into a lake and dragged him out by the arm, and Rónán cursed him: that he would wander Ireland naked and witless like a bird, and die by a spear point.

It took hold at the battle of Mag Rath. In the middle of the fighting, Suibhne's weapons fell out of his hands, the noise of the battle became unbearable, and he rose into the air and went. For years afterwards he lived in the tops of trees, eating watercress and sleeping in yew trees, moving the length of Ireland from glen to glen, half bird and in terror of everything.

What makes the text extraordinary is that he composes while he does it. The poems in Buile Shuibhne are some of the best nature writing in medieval European literature, and they are not pastoral: they are cold, hungry, precise, and attentive to particular trees and particular places by name. He praises the glens that are killing him.

It is usually grouped with the Cycles of the Kings, the body of literature about legendary and semi-historical kings rather than gods or heroes, and the battle of Mag Rath it hangs on was a real one, fought in 637.

Seamus Heaney translated it as Sweeney Astray, and said he recognised something of himself in a man displaced and still describing where he was.