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Showing posts with the label Art O'Murnaghan

Swinburne '77 meets O'Murnaghan '15

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London. The year is 1977 and the Sex Pistols, Damned and The Clash are taking on the disco, pop and rock establishment. Bowie is across the Channel in Berlin recording Heroes with Brian Eno. One person seems fairly much oblivious to the noise in the bedsits, pubs and clubs. Zachary Cox is frustrated. His love of good poetry has taken him on a quest for more published works from Swinburne yet he becomes increasingly dismayed at what he finds some 70 years after the poet's death. His thinking at the time is summarised in his own words within the foreward of “Swinburne 77,” a little book he subsequently publishes that year:- “It is a sobering fact that ….there is no complete edition of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne in print nor even an edition of any one of his complete volumes of verse. All that can be found are 'selections' – selections made by lesser and later poets, who appear to be determined to select only those works which match up to the em...

Art O'Murnaghan's retelling of "The Sword of Light"

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And now for the next instalment in our explorations into Dion Fortune’s Hibernian Adept, Art O ’Murnaghan…. This part of the story begins in 1891 with an American called Jeremiah Curtin. Having recently recovered from a bad dose of pneumonia, Curtin set off from Boston on a boat called “The City of Chicago,” sailing for Queenstown in Ireland. This was his second visit to Ireland on a trip which lasted between 1891 and 1893. During this visit he spent time in a number of places including Dingle, Traigh Fionntrá (Ventry Strand) and Donegal, collecting as many jewels of Celtic folklore as he could find. So who was Jeremiah Curtin? Pictured below, he was a successful American linguist, mythologist and folklorist.   Alongside Alexander Carmichael, Ella Young, Evans-Wentz and Kenneth Mackenzie, Curtin was one of the great collectors of folklore in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. While there is much warranted criticism about Curtin’s translations, interpretation and occasio...