An Evil Cradling

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For a moment he staggered; hot tongues of pain lapped up his arms left cramped and aching from so long in confinement, but before he could take so much as a step the orcs seized him once more, and in one disorienting arc spun him about.

His mother died in 2004 having survived his captivity – something she rarely spoke about, Keenan says. Celegorm’s terse words whispered not hours before flitted through Maedhros’ mind, but grimly he steeled his will against them. Fëanor’s son he was, though his mother’s noble spirit oft tempered his moods, but by it he was diminished in neither pride nor courage, and though sorrow for his father’s death wore at him, it would not be his master. Keenan remembers that his Sunday afternoon task was to cut up newspapers into six-inch squares as toilet paper for the outside loo.Alone within the royal tent hastily erected upon Mithrim’s roaming plains he had been readying himself for his departure, yet the woven banners strung about the wide walls were not enough to dampen those ill-fated words.

Keenan took his destiny in his hands, dropping out of the plumber's apprenticeship he started, getting himself to university to read English literature, and then becoming a teacher: the only kid in his street, as he has often said - and not in a self- congratulatory manner - to do so. Stubbornly - it is stubbornness that he considers his principal trait - he has resisted having an identity foisted on him. If I'd been a bit younger, had less of a head on my shoulders, I could have been locked up in a prison in Belfast rather than in Beirut.But when he allows his brain to wander, one of the things he is most struck by is the difference between the childhood his sons are having and his own. Yet even as he struggled to right himself clawed hands came down upon him, gnarled fingertips gripped about his shoulders, his arms; vile fingers wrested his sword from his hand, and though he thrashed and spat in their tightening grip, his efforts were in vain. He uses a various range of strong descriptions to portray his condition, ideas, thoughts and impressions. The fact that these images are ‘unwanted’ and invade his thoughts proves that he has no control over his mind. He would build a house on the west coast of Ireland, which he has done: a traditional cottage with the view out of one window of Clare Island and out of the other a view of Croagh Patrick, the holiest mountain in Ireland.

The hot, frightened pants of his own breath were all that Maedhros knew to be certain; everything else was but some hideous dream painted in sore, tired flesh, a dream from which he could not awaken. Among them one stood tallest, hulking amid the twilight as some unclean thing birthed from an abhorrent womb, and at his roar the orcs surged forward over the hollow. He is thus able to take the reader with him through unfamiliar levels of despair and self-discovery.And all this, as Keenan says, at one of the most brutal times in Irish history, the late 17th century, when the Protestant ascendancy finally crushed the Catholic opposition. He had given up teaching, "because what the kids needed to learn they were learning on the streets and not in my classroom.

It wasn't her first choice of destination, she's happy to admit, but she sent Brian along first to check out that it really was safe for the boys. The Moringotto’s messengers he would meet in a cleft amongst the Ered Wethrin, in a hollow basin delved amid the spires of the mountains some fifty leagues north of Eithel Sirion.

He is calm in his squalid cell; he is Irish and therefore, he reasons, can be of no importance to his captors; he tries to 'deny' what is happening. 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.