Just as Horslips kick-started my regard for the Rúraíocht around about 1973/4, I should be able to almost pinpoint my first interest in Aodh Mór Ó Neill to some time around 1969/70.
I was still at Hilden Primary School at the time; a mill-school perched on the edge of the River Lagan, and part of the self-sufficient social infrastructure of linen mill, canal, workers' and managers' houses, social hall and children's play park that might have marked the redbrick vista as a suitable case study for an industrial archaeologist rather than the spark that drew my 10 year old's imagination towards the last great Gaelic heroes of pre-Plantation Ireland.
The BBC in Belfast broadcast a radio series at the time, 'Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland', a miscellany of history, drama and other cultural content that might be difficult to wedge within the stats/measurement mania of the modern curriculum. Anyway, this excellent series included a run of programmes on Ulster in the 16th and 17th Centuries (and that's not so long ago, after all).
The life and wild times of Shane O'Neill and Sorley Boy MacDonnell, then Red Hugh's escape from Dublin Castle and the best part, Hugh O'Neill and the Nine Years War, confounding Elizabeth I and the Battle of the Yellow Ford.
I don't know now who were the radio actors who played out and made real for me these seismic episodes that moulded our received world but I suspect they were the jobbing actors who plied their trade of an evening in the small theatre world of Belfast or who landed the occasional made-for-TV drama.
For all I know, maybe some of the actors took the TDYNI school jobs as a necessary evil, paying the rent while they cut their thespian teeth on O'Casey or Sam Thompson. That would be a pity because, for my part, those school programmes (55 years ago!) stirred my imagination to the extent that the echoes still rumble on in these pages.
I couldn't have been the only child to have been so entranced so, if I had been one of those actors, I would treasure that impact as a greater accolade than all the Oscars or Tonys or whatever it was they never 'won'.
Anyway, here's where the living history of Aodh Mór leaked out into Blood from a Shadow.
I say Betty lives on Roumania Street, but that Street was actually on the Falls, not the Shankhill, and isn't there anymore anyway. The 1911 census records that relatives of mine lived at that very address.
They were originally from Mullyleggan in Armagh, that's where I said the American Civil War McAnespie letters were sent to.
Mulyleggan is the townland where Hugh O'Neill's army completed the rout of Bagenal's army at the Battle of the Yellow Ford in 1598.
Mullach Liagáin -the hill of the standing stone.
My fictional Davan could be on the Callan River, where O’Neill drew the English army to disaster.
In Rome, Mon. Artie McCooey arranges for Maknazpy to stay in the Columbus Hotel, close to the Vatican. I think it was in Seán O Faolain’s ‘The Great O’Neill’ that I read O’Neill resided in that building when he was in exile.
The knights of the Holy Sepulchre do still use part of the building, and are somehow still involved in Jerusalem, and John McCormack was one of their Knights (and does sing in Citizen Kane).
Maknazpy is taken to St Pietro in Montorio - that's where O'Neill and his family and supporters are buried, in front of the altar, to the left. If you are ever in Rome, go up there for a look. There is usually a blue carpet covering their burial slabs when a wedding or special service is on, but they will lift it to let you see the O'Neill and O'Donnell gravestones.
Duffin remarks on the Tempietto at San Pietro, 'nothing like it in the States, except maybe Vegas' - actually is an exact replica in upstate NY, Franciscan university of St Bonaventure.
The Battle of the Yellow Ford took place on 14th August, 1598. This was the high point in O'Neill's war against Elizabethan England: at the end of that day no-one could have been confident that the Ulster forces would eventually be defeated and the Gaelic world would be usurped. In military terms the English forces were vanquished - six infantry regiments, cavalry and artillery, some 4,000 troops in all - either lost on the Armagh battlefields or evacuated after surrender and negotiation.
Blackbirds and Huguenots
Nibbing at their whiskey in Sarah's house refers to the 9th century Irish monk's poem, The Blackbird. Then later, the image of the blackbird drinking blood in the snow comes from the Deirdre saga.
The later Cavehill scene was a bit of a clumsy reference to Heaney's 'Digging'.
The 'If God be for us, who can be against us?' tapestry in the old woman's house was from something I remember back in the early/mid 70's. I recall various Unionists/Loyalists using this as their justification, when the world seemed to be against them
Her 'mean abode' is from an old Belfast rhyme which lauded the quality of Belfast Linen, and the inherent sectarianism wasn't a problem.
The thing about the Turkish property scam not being phony and 'having a ring of truth to it' is from the story that the American slang word came from early English settlers who had experience, in the west of England, of buying merchandise of dubious quality from Irish traders. The absence of real gold in a ring/fáinne to be bought from an Irishman became synonomous with fake -phony.
The bit where he promises revenge 'blood for blood without remorse' - lines from an old 1798 song, used to hear this in Kelly's in Short Strand, Belfast.
In the apartment, Con notices the dates marked, with little notes inscribed around the margins - Irish language first written in margins of Latin religious texts by monks when they were doodling, making the Irish language the first European language, after Greek and Latin, to be written down. Also, Detective Dart had a golden hologramed notebook - same idea.
Before the final action, a ring of silver polished the horizon – ‘Fáinne geal an lae’, daybreak.
Green grassy slopes of (Dutch) Van Cortlandt Park - loyalist song, 'On the Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne'.
When Gallogly brings the cops to the hideout, the grunge has to stamp his foot on the 'narrow ground' – historian ATQ Stewart's description of plantation Ulster
The numbers in the car park where the Mossad are cornered;
521AD - birth of St Colm Cille
530AD - date of Brendan Voyage (maybe), first time we staked our claim in America
631AD – Battle near Moira, early O'Neill factions establishing power. They dug the place up in c19th to build a railway, apparently found thousands of bodies.
There is/was a British army regiment with a social club on the Shankill Rd, and they share the 69th's 'Faugh a Ballagh' warcry (and did display a banner with that motto some time ago).
Marconi's mother was from the Jameson whiskey family. He successfully tested the radio up at Ballycastle - Rathlin Island. The weapon smuggling Roger Casement has connections with that area, and there is a monument to him up there.
The Rock Bar is the Rock Bar on the Falls Rd in Belfast.
Grogan's Bar is in At Swim Two Birds.
Rudy's Bar in Hell's Kitchen is where the Drinking Liberals started (the Baron is the large statue of a pig that stands guard outside Rudy's door (it is actually a pig - this isn't a euphemism).
The cigarette lighter commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall is a CIA souvenir, you can buy it on their website.
There is a historic area called Huguenot Street in New Paltz- I was born in Huguenot Drive, named after the French linen workers who established the trade in the Lagan Valley and thereby Hilden Primary School - so couldn't let that one go by.
Macho Matrioshkas
Since so many of the references I slipped into the text hinted at the 'Otherworld' of pre-Christian Ireland, I decided to even the balance by introducing a ration of scientific and mathematical terms. That was great, except that I didn't know anything about them and thus condemned myself to many hours of labour. Here are some of them, that I half understand.
When Cora kills, 'plumed comet globules riocheted' - cometary globules look like comets but aren't, actually a new star forming
Infinite chaos is there somewhere, but not the computer game, thinking of the butterfly effect.
Before the Quds are shot, the crowd are a phalanx of bunched waves - bunched photons in coherence theory - how we see the world, or make the world 'fit' our perception
Snow and wind double helixed - do Maknazpy's genetic instruction include a Cú Chulainn-type super power?
Random elements and rational code, again perception isn't universal
Flux suspended is electrodynamic suspension or magnetic levitation - another form of magic.
Macho halo is Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Object, or MACHO, a general name for any kind of astronomical body that might explain the apparent presence of dark matter in galaxy halos - which sounds better than WIMP, another proposed form of dark matter.
Matrioshka eggheads (Blue Mosque) is "matrioshka brain" - concentrated on sheer capacity and the maximum amount of energy extracted from its source star, The idea of the matrioshka brain violates none of the currently known laws of physics, although the engineering details of building such a structure would be staggering, as such a project would require the "disassembly" of significant portions (if not all) of the planetary system of the star for construction materials.
I was thinking of the energy of religious conviction or cultural chauvinism.
Random fractals - A fractal is a mathematical set that has a fractal dimension that usually exceeds its topological dimension.
When the Quds couple are killed the world spins beneath their feet, reference to early Islamic science - something like that is how the prophet can be everywhere, he stays still and the world moves beneath him.
Also, Cora wipes her blood spattered shoes on her victim, and Con's son uses sole of his shoe to submerge him in dream - a symbol of Islamic/Arabic disrespect.