And so it began. His re-emergence into a world he thought he knew, the world he had left behind, but different now. Not so much because the world had changed, or even because he himself had changed. But because his place in the world had changed. He went into the cell Brian Keenan, an unknown university teacher from Belfast. He then became Brian Keenan, the disappeared. Referring to his urine and drinking water going ‘From bottle to bottle, through me, this fluid will daily run’, Keenan uses these endless cycles of life to symbolise the monotonous days of his captivity. The phase ‘from bottle to bottle’ and ‘though me’ suggest a continuous flow, while the word ‘daily’ informs us of the length of one standard cycle. Keenan seems to live the same tedious days over and over again, making him feel lifeless and purposeless. Maedhros’ head lolled down onto his chest as exhaustion stole through him, the tightness of the gag tore at his lips and sent waves of such horrible pressure throbbing through his head. Despair clawed at his heart as for what felt like the thousandth time he squirmed within his bonds, he near ripped his wrists bloody in his attempts to free them, but such efforts were made in vain. He talks about a letter he received recently from a woman whose daughter is dying of leukaemia. "There's far more heroism in that woman than there will ever be in me." Now, he says, he turns down offers to speak about his experience. "It's the past. Why would I want to do that?" He has always refused to go to America to lecture. "I am asked and I say, 'No.'" Money couldn't tempt him. "Money has always been the last thing on my mind. Though I don't have a lot of it. I have to work, my wife has to work." This is nothing more than a feint,” Celegorm had whispered, he had implored Maglor to see reason even as the final preparations for Maedhros’ leave-taking were made. “This is a game of daggers and mirrors, and we cannot fathom what shadows lurk behind this façade. Nelyo will not see sense, he will not see the snare that loops before him; he will throw himself away upon the rash hope that a thief might relinquish that which he has stolen. This is madness, Káno, this is folly, and you must make him see it.”

Yet even as that resolution turned in his mind, unbidden anger churned in his blood, and hard he gripped into the edge of the table to still the shake in his fingers. The Oath, that accursed oath sworn in fey mood and wrathful flames pounded in his veins and it renounced all clemency, it thirsted for blood, it crooned for war, but Maedhros would not so easily succumb to its seduction. Strength in arms might not avail his kin in reclaiming the Silmarils; their armies reeled in the wake of his father’s death, they mourned their kindred slain in the battle under the silent stars and wished no more for conflict, and Maedhros would not see the blood of his people further spilled upon capricious whim. The Oath renewed at his father’s deathbed might gnaw at him, and his brothers also; it would cozen patience to careless haste, it would twist sense to base impulse, but he would not fall prey to its demands. A dissenting grumble rolled through the orcs, but slowly they shuffled off, and relief poured through Maedhros’ heart as he heard them depart. Yet setting towards him then he heard the heavy tread of the captain; unseen things crunched to the stones by his side, and swiftly he steeled himself, he drew to himself whatever shreds of lordliness he had left and thrust them out before him like a shield. In his book he writes. "It is memory that ages us not time." The mind forgets nothing, he says. "I may forget things, but the mind doesn't." In captivity he found himself remembering details from his childhood, things that he didn't even know he knew. "I could smell the linoleum in the house I grew up in. I could feel, twirl in my hand, the earrings that my mother wore when I was a child and she'd carry me in her arms." So he knows, however much he says, what happened in Beirut is the past. "It's like a book I can take down from a shelf and read it and replace." Within the stirrups he rose, he touched his spurs once more to his horse’s flanks and gave the beast its head, and he let the tender night wash over him as they sped away across the plains. He wasn't sure about fatherhood. "I was anxious, still am. I thought, at 45, I was too old. But they are nice kids, lovely people." And tall, both of them are going to be over six foot. "As a small person I always wanted to be tall." When he was, his mum used to say to him, "'Be careful with what you want, you may get it.' So, she was right. I did get it."What was known about Turlough was his music, his art. He is honoured and revered by many musicians through the centuries, in contemporary times particularly by the Chieftains, who have been playing Turlough's music for 30 years. Yet nothing was known "of Turlough's head and his heart".

When Keenan is given a bowl of fruits his ‘eyes are almost burned by what they see’. This suggests that due to his the repetitive, dull and lifeless days his senses became “thirsty” for a stimulus, and when they get it, they overact. This is suggested by the word ‘burned’, as the colours seem to go through his eyes, harming his retina, just as if he was kept in a dark place and then suddenly exposed to light, blinding him. His chaotic reaction is further emphasised by the extreme, seemingly almost exaggerated verbs or adjective for their nouns. Such examples include ‘ecstatic embrace’, ‘torrents of tears’, ‘great rage’ and tears that seem to ‘tear the skin’. These powerful adjectives and verbs suggest his intense experience of the world. He seems to be flooded by these feelings and senses driving him into confusion and madness. This is also proven by his rapidly changing moods, from ecstasy to raging weeping. Keenan claims that ‘the fruits, the colours, mesmerize me in a quiet rapture and spins through my head.’‘Mesmerize’ and ‘rapture’ suggest that he is a prisoner of his senses, almost as if his raging senses rule over his logic and healthy judgement. This makes him go insane and have no control over his thoughts. No!” he screamed, though pain raced through him panic lent strength to his movements, and near blind with fear he tore against the orcs that held him. “No,” he spat; he grunted and shook as a savage jerk upon his hair pulled him up short, and those hateful fingers only grasped him the tighter. “No, no, let me go! Let me go!”

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One by one they were slain; the Noldor’s tight defensive knot frayed as the orcs gnawed at it, as the Valaraukar unravelled it; and Maedhros screamed out his hatred as he felt the rush of sundered fëar envelop him, and loathing bubbled in him that his friends might have been defiled so cruelly. For how dare the Moringotto think to cross him; viciously he decapitated the squat orc who leapt at him and sent its grotesque skull tumbling; how dare Morgoth renege upon his vows, how dare he lull the Noldor to their slaughter like some craven, honourless dog; and as the warm splatter of orcish ichor drenched him, a feral snarl ripped across Maedhros’ face.

Sleep while you can, prince,” he said slowly, almost sorrowfully; and his words drenched Maedhros in nothing but despair. “For my home is forged of nightmares, and you will find no rest there.” He hates it, and he hasn't got used to it. "It embarrasses me." A shy, modest man, he accepts it when people come up to him in the pub, offering him drinks, asking to shake his hand. He is polite and politely unimpressed. He doesn't want this fame. "I don't really understand it. What have I done? I didn't ask to be kidnapped." Keenan is an odd mixture of the literal and the intensely poetic - both these helped to preserve him in prison. He used his willpower and his practical intelligence to make what sense he could of what was happening to him - he could kid himself for only a few days that they'd let him out as soon as they found he was an Irishman. And, as he has said, he used his imagination to escape into himself. Alone, for five months, he invented or rather elaborated a character, Turlough O'Carolan, Ireland's national musician, a 17th-century itinerant blind harpist, who became his companion. A strange choice, you might think, when he could have imagined some sexy seductress. But, as he knew, or was beginning to know, survival depended somehow on suspending desire, not promoting it. Men in prison, he says, think of sex far less than you'd believe. "That's an invention from movies. The men I knew in captivity didn't talk about sex much at all." They couldn't bear to. Furiously he fought; they would not take him, they would not take him, the thought screeched through his head as his boots skidded through a mire of blood, but as a fiery whip suddenly cut towards his head, in that terrible instant he came undone. That survival is mutual. Everyone there had to put a part of themselves on the table for everyone else to take what they needed." So, until the debt was clear, he would not be free to act. He is a very unusual man, in many ways no doubt. But in one way in particular. He is not prepared to be cynical. Unmodern, you could say, in that way.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Celegorm’s words turned in his mind, but Maedhros would not allow them to daunt him. For as the ranks of his retinue formed up behind him, as Gaelor loosed his banner and Orellë sounded a triumphant horn to the skies above, as the drum of galloping hooves filled his ears, grim, unyielding resolve settled in Maedhros’ stomach, and it would not be undone. His mother, a housewife, used to say to him: "Politics stops at your doorstep.""But I never knew if she meant coming in or going out." His father was a telephone engineer and before that he worked on the buses. A sweet man. "I remember him bringing home all these injured animals he'd find on the road and mum telling him to get them out." Stubbornly - it is stubbornness that he considers his principal trait - he has resisted having an identity foisted on him. And this has served him well. But intransigence, as he points out, can carry its own terrible consequences. "If I believe something, I believe it passionately and no one will change it. It's awful. I am old enough to know better, old enough to rationalise things. But, with me, belief has to be a hundred per cent." So he can understand, he says, what happened in Beirut. "The ramifications of that sort of belief. Why they took hostages. How they came to murder six people. I don't approve. But I can understand it." Y’hear that, snaga,” a deep voice growled, and an iron-shod boot clipped into the side of Maedhros’ thigh an instant later. “My boys should ‘ave their fun with you. Such troubles we took with you, you might give us a little pleasure in return…” Why, Captain?” the deep voice called, and a chorus of snarls accompanied it. “He is a slave, for so we’ve captured him. We cannot take our sport with him?”Eventually Maedhros finished the bowl, and as the broth settled like a fortifying, invigorating weight into his stomach, softly he murmured, “Water… p-please…” Not to myself. To myself I never disappeared, I knew exactly where I was." Crucial, this. All the time that the world knew nothing of his existence, he hadn't ceased to exist, though he had transposed worlds. His reality, confined though it was, was his own. He didn't look outside. "My recollection is that if you focus on the real world, which isn't your real world, because your world is here in your head, then you are going to make life very difficult."