Shaun Mac Irewick

Shaun Mac Irewick enters not through a conventional biography but through a mock-official notice: he is a “briefdragger,” engaged for the concern of Messrs Jhon Jhamieson and Song and rated at “one hundrick and thin per storehundred.” The notice says he misunderstruck the assignment, aimed at an item numbered three, and left four free responses in “their own fine artful disorder.” His character is thus framed at once as performer and misreader, a figure whose identity unfolds through a deliberately unruly catalogue rather than a stable account.

A Mismanaged Challenge

The preface describes a nightly test involving “twelve apostrophes,” set by Jockit Mic Ereweak. Shaun’s mistake is specific but obscure: he aims for an “ollo” of number three and leaves four answers disorderly. The pompous language of rating, commission, and performance makes the episode sound bureaucratically precise, while its distorted words frustrate precision. That tension governs the portrait: Shaun is assigned a role and measured, yet the measure itself is comic and unstable.

The Catalogue of Accomplishments

The first answer asks which “myther rector and maximost bridgesmaker” rose taller through a beanstalk than a bluegum, baobab, or giant sequoia. It then accumulates incompatible feats and identities. Shaun is associated with wading, as a young man, into a little Liffey when it was scarcely in its “tricklies”; with placing a conciliation cap on the “esker of his hooth”; and with wearing a chain-ganger’s Albert over his “hullender’s epulence.” He is said to have thought himself a new ton after felling his first apple, while granting the “heinousness of choice” to successive generations of knights. The details make the answer less a factual résumé than a swelling, pun-driven portrait in which bodily scale, public office, and private appetite crowd together.

The catalogue shifts from domestic and civic references to acts of violence and survival. It says Shaun “killed his own hungery self in anger as a young man,” then found food for five when the land rose flooded. His accomplishments widen into the political and martial: he is called a “Willbeforce” at home and in the heather, is linked to pumping the “catholick wartrey” and shocking the Boyne, and is credited with making a fort from his postern and writing F.E.R.T. on his buckler. These turns do not resolve into a single chronology; they intensify the impression of a figure built from echoes of institutions, conflicts, and heroic exaggeration.

Contradiction, Siege, and Escape

Shaun’s description resists any fixed classification. He is “too funny for a fish” and has “too much outside for an insect”; like a heptagonal crystal, he imprisons truths and falsehoods together. His immense presence is paired with “unfitting induments,” and his history is rendered through repeated falls and reversals: he has been shovelled, burned, and submerged, before being hung out by a woman. Even his head contains a quadrant to tell the time, while his relations to authority are expressed through puns on Toler, Long, and Legge.

The final surviving part of the answer casts him as an escape artist and a target of pursuit. He finds coal at the end of his harrow and moss roses behind the seams, then is described as escaping from “all sorts of houdingplaces.” When he opposes barkers, he acts “whiteley” to the shoolbred; the mere appearance of three Germans evacuates him, and a sweep besieges him twice. The sequence leaves Shaun defined less by a settled outcome than by continual transformation under pressure: resourceful, comic, repeatedly beset, and never contained by the account meant to describe him.