Sweeney Astray
“G. O’Keeffe’s bilingual edition, which was published by the Irish Texts Society in 1913. In the meantime, Flann O’Brien gave its central character a second life, as hilarious as it was melancholy, when he made Sweeney part of the apparatus of his novel At Swim-Two-Birds; and a number of other poets and scholars have continued to make translations of different sections of the verse.
The basis of the 1913 edition is a manuscript written in County Sligo between 1671 and 1674. This manuscript is pa...rt of the Stowe collection in the Royal Irish Academy and O’Keeffe believed that, on linguistic grounds, “the text might have been composed at any time between the years 1200 and 1500.” Nevertheless, the thing was already taking shape in the ninth century. O’Keeffe cites a reference in the Book of Aicill, a text dating from the tenth century at the latest, to stories and poems relating to Sweeney’s madness; and other evidence from literary and historical sources leads him to conclude that the Buile Suibhne which we now possess is a development of traditions dating back to the time of the Battle of Moira (A.D.MoreLess
The basis of the 1913 edition is a manuscript written in County Sligo between 1671 and 1674. This manuscript is pa...rt of the Stowe collection in the Royal Irish Academy and O’Keeffe believed that, on linguistic grounds, “the text might have been composed at any time between the years 1200 and 1500.” Nevertheless, the thing was already taking shape in the ninth century. O’Keeffe cites a reference in the Book of Aicill, a text dating from the tenth century at the latest, to stories and poems relating to Sweeney’s madness; and other evidence from literary and historical sources leads him to conclude that the Buile Suibhne which we now possess is a development of traditions dating back to the time of the Battle of Moira (A.D.MoreLess
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