Clíodhna O’Sullivan on Irish Myth, Magic, and Her Hidden Fire

In Her Hidden Fire, Clíodhna O’Sullivan draws on Irish language, folklore, and landscape to shape the magical world of Domhain. To celebrate the release, she reflects on how Ireland’s culture and storytelling traditions inspired her fantasy setting.

Guest post written by Clíodhna O’Sullivan, author of Her Hidden Fire. 

Her Hidden Fire is an Irish-inspired fantasy: my ten-second pitch is that it’s searing, sexy, and if you’ve ever felt used or exploited, I hope it makes you feel seen. In the book, a servant girl, Éadha discovers she has a coveted magical gift – the ability to channel magic, that lets her draw crops and raise from the ground, fly and fight dragons. The problem is no one wants or expects her to be gifted – but if her best friend Ionáin isn’t gifted, he and his noble Family will lose everything. So at the moment of Ionáin’s Reckoning, when she sees he’s about to fail, she has to make a fateful decision: let him lose everything or trick everyone into thinking he’s gifted by secretly giving him her power.

I was really lucky to be able to draw on the Irish language, culture and landscape to create the world of Domhain – the setting of the book. It kind of felt a bit like cheating, using things I already knew and loved, but I hope it also helps to make it feel a bit more authentic!

Old Irish (aka stealing cool old names)

Lots of the names in the book are based on an ancient version of Irish called Ogham (a bit like Tolkien used Old English in the Lord of the Rings). Ogham is a tree-based language, based on symbols you can still see today cut into thousand-year old standing stones. The symbol at the start of each chapter is the Ogham symbol for the character, to tell you whose POV you’re reading.

Turning real life castles into dark magic academies (whether they want to or not).

Most of the places in the book are based on real places in Ireland: there’s a real Lambay island off the east coast, and I took one of my favourite castles, Ardgillan Castle in north Dublin, and airlifted it over to Lambay to be the dark magic academy run by the Masters. It’s a beautiful but kind of forbidding looking castle, so it wasn’t hard to imagine Masters doing their dark spells in there. I also grew up looking at the Blackstairs Mountains, so there was no way I wasn’t going to use them in the story – isn’t ‘Blackstairs’ just the coolest name for a mountain range?

Irish YA books

And of course I’m very lucky that Ireland has a really rich, wild folklore that really encourages you to let rip with the fantastical elements – there’s nothing I could write that hasn’t been done wilder and more weirdly in some Irish folktale, not to mention being able to see the wonderful YA writers working in Ireland today.

I absolutely adored Tangleweed & Brine by Deirdre Sullivan (no relation!). It’s a dark retelling of fairytales, and has the most beautiful cover and story illustrations by Karen Vaughan. I basically follow people around trying to get them to buy it.

Another popular YA series is Knights of the Borrowed Dark by Dave Rudden and I’m looking forward to Brigid by Kim Curran, a radical fantasy retelling of the story of our most famous female saint.