A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter D

dinnsheanchas

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The Irish tradition of place-name lore, a vast body of verse and prose explaining the mythological or legendary origins of Ireland's placenames, binding landscape to narrative and memory.

Detailed Definition
Dinnsheanchas (lore of places) is one of the most distinctive features of Irish literary culture, reflecting a world in which every hill, river, and ford carried a story explaining its name. The great prose and verse compilations of dinnsheanchas, preserved in medieval manuscripts, constitute both a geographical encyclopedia and a mythological narrative. For Irish poets, the tradition meant that the landscape was never merely physical but always storied, layered with the traces of heroic and divine action. Seamus Heaney's engagement with placenames in his poetry is perhaps the most celebrated modern extension of the dinnsheanchas impulse into contemporary verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Dinnsheanchas preserves the lore attached to specific place names; Through dinnsheanchas, poets explain why certain locations bear particular names; The dinnsheanchas connects present landscape with mythological events of the past; Each hill and river has its dinnsheanchas recording significant occurrences; Loss of dinnsheanchas means losing layers of meaning embedded in geography; Contemporary writers revive dinnsheanchas to reclaim indigenous knowledge of place.
Additional Notes
Dinnsheanchas is the body of lore explaining the origins and meanings of place names, linking geography to mythology and history. In poetry, it serves to animate the landscape, making every hill and river a story. Poets use dinnsheanchas to assert indigenous knowledge and connection to the land, countering colonial renaming. It provides a rich source of allusion and metaphor, allowing poets to invoke entire narratives through a single place name. Studying dinnsheanchas reveals the deep interconnection between language, land, and memory in Irish culture.
Also Known As
place-name lore topographical legend lore of places
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