On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  But then he crosses out this last sentence. “They have an island,” he writes instead, “and I have an ink-pot.”

  A few months later, in January 1906, Synge got a brief note from the island king in awkward English, thanking him for a letter and pictures Synge had sent. The king forwarded the best wishes of Máire and her younger sister, wrote of the lovely weather, of boats coming back each day stuffed with fish. Reaching Synge at almost the same time was a letter from Berlin, advising him of harsh business realities, of German theater managers disdainful of English plays. “Do let me have the Ms. [manuscript] soon,” he was implored.

  Synge was a man of Dublin, Paris, and Berlin, and of the Aran Islands and the Blaskets, too. He was thirty-four when he came to the island. In his short life, he’d been raised a Protestant by a pious mother, but rejected religion. He had once seriously weighed becoming a musician. He’d led the bohemian life in Paris, with early loves there and in Germany. He’d studied languages in the Sorbonne; written plays performed in Dublin and elsewhere in Europe; formed attachments with Yeats and Lady Gregory—but also with an Araner he gave the name Michael, and with Máire on the Blasket. He was an inveterate student of human personality, an artist of consummate genius who created a whole new language of mixed Irish and English that was entirely his own. He was a complex man, who led a complex life in brain, body, and heart, a friend of fishermen, a creator of immortal art.

  René Agostini, a scholar who wrote of Synge’s relationship to the peasants he met in the Arans and Blaskets, described him as “aspiring to simplicity but incapable of it”—which could just as well describe most of those who would follow Synge to the Blaskets.

  Chapter 2

  The Fine Flower of Their Speech

  [1907]

  The islanders whom Synge met in 1905 could trace their roots on the Great Blasket not to the immemorial past, or even to the Middle Ages, but only to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the arrival from the mainland of fewer than a dozen families. To give them, for the time being, their more familiar English names, they were Kearneys, Guiheens, Dunlevys, Crohans, Sheas, and Keanes, and a little later O’Connors, O’Sullivans, Dalys, and a few others. Island lore and archeological evidence tell of people who lived earlier on the Great Blasket and its smaller neighbors. One was poet and warrior Pierce Ferriter, who gave the town of Ballyferriter its name, and who reputedly stood fast against the English from a protected cove along the northern flank of the island where he could slay them with impunity; he was executed by them in 1653. The vestiges of a small fort halfway back along the ridge of the island attest to still earlier inhabitants, as do the remains of some stone huts perhaps associated with an early Christian monastic settlement. But it was only with the Kearneys, Guiheens, and the others that the first permanent community emerged on the tip of the island that faced the mainland.

  Shards of island history tell of rents paid to distant landlords, of a ship from the Spanish Armada flung on the rocks of Blasket Sound, of other shipwrecks and their cargoes helping islanders get through the Famine. But Synge and subsequent visitors saw little by way of historical remnant. What struck them as they trudged up the zigzag path from the break in the rocks that served as pier was bustling life—children, women, and men setting out in the boats, hunting rabbits, cooking, cutting peat, tending to animals, talking a stream of Irish among themselves. After three miles of open water in a little boat, the visitor was abruptly there, in a stone village dug into the side of the hill that shot up from the sea’s edge, the mainland now seeming inconsiderable and remote.

  The island itself was about three miles long and half a mile wide, shaped like an ineptly cut arrowhead aimed southwest. On its northeast flank (farthest from the point, where it might be affixed to the arrow shaft) stood the village itself, with its twenty-eight houses. That, anyway, is the figure normally given. The roofless ruins today, plaited with outbuildings and low stone walls, don’t make for easy counting.

  But the houses were mere backdrop for the animal strivings of 150 humans, as well as the donkeys, chickens, and sheep that were as much a part of village life. Typically of one or two rooms, the houses were tied together by interlaced paths gradually worn into, or cut into, the sloping ground. From their chimneys issued smoke from fires built from peat gathered on the back side of the island, dried in little stone structures there, then borne across the island on the backs of donkeys laden with wicker panniers. There were no trees, none. There was plenty of living green, but it was all pasturage, over wide stretches of the island, and bog, and a few low bushes.

  It was a place of sheer rock faces, eroding gullies, sharp projections into the sea, seabirds in flight hundreds of feet below, a place of stark contrasts and extraordinary beauty. Vistas could change within a few steps; there was no disguise, no shelter, no privacy granted by copse or wood, only by the spatial irregularities of the island, where the curve of a hill or the descent into a crevasse might abruptly lose you to another’s sight. Several peaks shot up from the landmass. The one to which the village clung rose to more than seven hundred feet. Along the back of the island, you’d encounter two more, reaching higher yet, to almost a thousand feet. A few paths, more or less level, emerged from the village and wrapped around the hill. Depart from these thin ribbons of horizontality and you could imagine rolling or sliding down the sheer slope.

  Yet, however steep, it was a plump pillow of green compared with the cliffs by which the island finally dropped away to the sea. Abruptly, the earth was gone, and there were only the rocks and crashing surf a hundred or two hundred feet below—everywhere along the island’s circumference, mouthfuls of land chomped out by some great sea monster, each its own gnarled universe of rock, softened just a bit with growths of sea pink or other vegetation. Each was alive in the minds of the islanders with its own name: Cuas Fhaill Beag, little cliff cove, on the long north face of the island; or Cladach an Chapair, copper beach, a little to the west, where a wrecked ship had once deposited a load of copper bolts; or Rinn na Croise, point of the cross, on the south. There were scores of them, no hundred yards of shoreline failing to get its own name and coloration in the island’s collective mind.

  In this rhythm of cove and point, there was one exception. Not the village itself, which dropped to the sea much as the rest of the island did, to the wave-lapped inlet where the naomhógs were brought ashore. Rather, it was north of the village and visible from its heights: a cove where the cliffs fell not into the sea but into a soft swathe of fine white sand three hundred yards across. An Traigh Bhan, the islanders called it, the White Strand. It was close to the village, but not quite of it, just below the gentler slope of land where most of the island’s few crops were grown. A stretch of shore that was sweeter, more forgiving, where you didn’t need to watch your footing, as you did everywhere else on the island. Here driftwood washed ashore, seals beached, children ran barefoot in the wet sand.

  In 1907, two years after Synge came and went, the island received a new visitor, a tall Norwegian, Carl Marstrander. “All the bridges to the outside world were … broken,” he would recall of his time on the island. “On this St. Helena I lived for five months in voluntary jail, in a world so different from the one I up to then had been living in.” Young Marstrander had been identified by his professors in Oslo as an unusually gifted student of linguistics. But, visiting the Great Blasket at the age of twenty-three, he’d been thrust into an alien world that, when he came to write about it two years later, still left him befuddled, unsure of what to make of its maddening contradictions.

  “Children of nature,” he termed his island friends, or neighbors, or hosts, or objects of study, or teachers, or whatever they really were. “They are rather unstable in their mind, like a lot of Celts, and one doesn’t have to do much to make them happy.” Sadness never lingered with them, but passed “like the short summer showers in Kerry that come and go. They do not seem to think of a day after today. They do not know,” he wrote, “the
slow patient work which will bear fruit in years to come. But whatever will give them profits at the moment gives them enormous energy.”

  The young Carl Marstrander was an athlete. On the Blasket he’d use a naomhóg mast to demonstrate pole vaulting to the islanders. (Illustration Credit ill.3)

  Marstrander pictured the islanders as forever joking, prone to exaggeration, inexorably drawn to “the strange and horrible.” They were “superstitious and blinded by many prejudices,” prey to demanding priests, yet quick to disregard their pastoral injunctions. One priest, angry at being ignored, cursed them, according to Marstrander, going so far as to offer prayers “that the Almighty might lead your boats into destruction on the sea.” For a few days, at least, the islanders, white with fear, forsook whiskey, gave up dancing and song. Impossible for one priest’s intemperate reproof to exact such a price? No, wrote Marstrander, “the West of Ireland still lives in the dark middle ages.”

  The islanders, he was convinced, were all but incapable of introspection. They were preternaturally social creatures, unable to be at once happy and alone. Evenings brought them together for singing, dancing, and storytelling. “It’s from these evening gatherings,” he wrote, “that I have my most wonderful memories and my most lasting impressions from the Blaskets.” Everyone would climb the path to the house of the king, boys in blue sweaters and heavy boots, girls barefoot and wrapped in shawls. “I have never seen such beautiful and stylish dance as in the Great Blasket. The men are champions. Every beat, every little change in the music, even the smallest, is mirrored in their dance, whether it is by a movement of their foot or a bend of their wrist or knee.”

  He marveled at how, when weatherbound for weeks at a time and unable to fish, they rarely put the time to productive good use, as with handicrafts. They didn’t often cross the sound for Mass, yet their morale was “healthy and high. Particularly is this true of the sex life, which is told boys and girls from childhood.” While their elders looked on benignly, everyone joked about sex, “the boys caressing the girls even in the presence of older people.” Yet they managed to stay pretty much out of trouble.

  There among the islanders on that barren outpost of Europe, Marstrander found a strange, unaccustomed mix of customs and social practices that even in retrospect he could not resolve. “I have never met people who have demanded so little of life,” he wrote. “I am often thinking back on them and get a feeling of great attachment, or pity. I do not know.” Their outward lives were miserable, yet perhaps—he simply couldn’t say for sure—they were happy. “The wet cliffs out there are their whole world. They have no longing for a richer life led under brighter conditions, because they have never known anything better.” He felt bound to them, he wrote after his return to Norway in late 1907, “with the strongest ties of friendship.”

  Blue-eyed, fair, lean, and tall, his erect carriage contriving to make him seem taller still, Marstrander was the son of the principal of a local college whose overfull library was stocked with works on, among other subjects, European linguistics. Young Marstrander took an interest in the field, including Celtic languages, even before enrolling at the University of Oslo, then called Christiania, in 1901. Over the next six years, the faculty came to see him as blessed with a remarkable ear for languages and a deep, developing understanding of them. His special talents, they determined, needed nurturing. One day in early 1907, he was summoned to the study of one of his professors, Sophus Bugge.

  Bugge, seventy-four years old, a comparative linguist, was among those Norwegian scholars and artists tantalized by their country’s ancient ties to Ireland. Just two years before, in June 1905, Norway had pulled free from Swedish rule for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars. Nationalistic fervor swept the country. Interest blossomed in the country’s roots, culture, and very identity—especially in its heroic Viking past, when the original Norwegians, the Norsemen, marauded the coasts of Western Europe, plundering, forming settlements, and mixing with local peoples, including the Celts, forebears of today’s Irish. All this needed study, and Marstrander was to be enlisted in the new work. He was to go to Ireland, Bugge told him, and learn modern Irish; the Old and Middle Irish he’d studied in school were too remote from the way it was spoken now. A special scholarship had been secured for him. Was he ready to go?

  How long did Marstrander weigh his answer? One wonders because of how he later described the scene. He had been named to the Norwegian Olympic team, in pole vault, for the 1908 games in Athens; he was torn about what to do, and said as much to Bugge. (Of course, the 1908 Olympics were held in London, not Athens, so the story loses some veracity.) Bugge would have none of it. Hic Rhodus, hic salta, he replied, referring in Latin to an Aesop’s fable Marstrander would have known: An athlete back from games on the isle of Rhodes boasts of his formidable long jump there and swears he can produce witnesses to his feat. Don’t bother, he’s enjoined, simply repeat it: Here’s your Rhodes; let’s see you jump. Bugge needed an answer then and there.

  Soon, Marstrander was on his way to Dublin, where he was a guest of Richard Irvine Best, secretary of the new School of Irish Learning there. Then he headed west across the barren, mostly flat plain to Galway, and from there reached West Kerry—Kerry, perhaps, because the Donegal and Connemara dialects had been explored, whereas that of West Kerry represented still fertile scholarly ground. In Tralee, he stayed at a place he remembered as the Teetotal Hotel, which “served whiskey from morning till night.” The locals spoke as little Irish as he did.

  After taking the same train across the peninsula as Synge had, he arrived in Dingle. There, by one account, a former islander advised him that if it was “the living Irish” he wanted he should head for the Blaskets. No need for that, someone else told him—there was plenty of Irish to be heard right there in Ballyferriter. Besides, “ ‘there’s not much sense in going into the island and drowning yourself.’ ”

  In Ballyferriter he stayed at Willie Long’s, where, like Synge, he was soon disappointed. “I did not get in contact with the ordinary man,” he wrote, which was necessary if he hoped to learn “the difficult Irish language.” Long, he concluded, was too big a local figure; people were afraid to open up in front of him. Marstrander was treated “like a bust on a pedestal.” Local farmers to whom he was introduced clammed up. Conversations stopped when he entered the room. One scholar has noted how Gaelic League organizers during these years found many people “ashamed to admit they knew Irish,” which was associated with illiteracy and poverty; even in Ballyferriter, Irish was deemed inferior, unsuitable for church, school, or commerce. Once, in a local pub, Marstrander was again assured that Ballyferriter ought to suffice for Irish. No, he said, nodding to a conversation going on beside them in English, “my enemy is just behind my ear.”

  It was time to get out. One day in early August, he packed his bags, hired a donkey to get him to Dún Chaoin, made his way down the steep path to the little quay at the base of the cliff, and was rowed over to the Great Blasket.

  What happened next is today firmly enshrined in Blasket lore, not least because Marstrander so delighted in telling it. On his arrival, he was met by a delegation of villagers. The king welcomed him with an old Irish greeting. Marstrander expressed thanks in his best Irish, Ta buiochas agam ort a Ri, making “an honest attempt to get my tongue right for this unusual sound.” He failed, utterly. Um, yes, the king replied with consummate grace, the Norwegian language was quite a nice one.

  Since at least the late 1800s, scholarly interest had grown in the origins of language, in early Irish texts, in Old and Middle Irish and their origins in a conjectured root language common to most European tongues. Scholars plumbed the sacred texts of the early church. They studied fragments of Irish bardic poetry that had come down through the centuries. Later, the world would marvel at the extraordinary contribution of this small country to English-language literature, theater, and poetry, at Synge, Yeats, Beckett, Shaw, Heaney, Joyce, and the rest of the great Irish pantheon.


  But theirs was written language. Just now, at the time of Marstrander’s visit, English’s grip on the country having tightened for three hundred years, the Irish language was hardly written at all. Virtually no Irish-language literature was being produced. There were a handful of Irish-language newspapers, a few Irish-language scholarly journals. The Gaelic League inspired a degree of fervor, but its achievements, set against the sweep of recent Irish history, were still tenuous and slight. And the few tens of thousands of people, mostly in the west, who spoke Irish daily mostly couldn’t read or write it; this was true on the Great Blasket just as it was in Kerry generally and the other Gaeltacht areas of the country. What was left of Irish was the spoken language—not, it should be said, as a sad second-best to the written, but as something full and rich in itself. It was this Irish that Synge had traveled to the Aran Islands and the Blaskets to learn. Now so did Marstrander.

  To learn the spoken tongue meant learning its vocabulary, of course, but also, with greater difficulty, learning its sounds. Much in Irish would prove daunting to any newcomer, but the words themselves were probably the least of it. Irish is part of a family of Gaelic languages, with strong links to Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Breton, spoken across the English Channel in Brittany. More broadly, it is part of the larger Indo-European family of proto-languages; some of its grammatical features and even vocabulary are shared with linguistic distant cousins, including English, Italian, and Russian. “Two” in English is dva in Russian, due in Italian—and dó in Irish. “Mother” in English is mater in Latin—and máthair in Irish. Scholars have found all sorts of linguistic connections, many of them transformed or misshapen, to Irish’s roots in what some have called Common Celtic. At least when pointed out, then, some Irish words can seem to an English-speaker surprisingly comfortable and familiar. The word patir in early Celtic, “father,” became pater in Latin, but along the way lost its initial “p,” turned into atir, and finally into the Irish athair. Irish, then, was not Korean or Swahili; its kinship with other European languages meant its vocabulary, at least, was not always so fearfully alien.