Peig Mhór, as she was known on the island because of her physical stature, is how Flower refers to her too. Peig Sayers’ home on the Great Blasket Island. It seems to have been the English Scholar and writer Dr Robin Flower, An Bláithín as he was known on the Blasket where he spent the summers between 1910 and the 1930s who discovered Peig.Ī medievalist and deputy keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, Flower was the first to take substantial collections from her, including sound recordings which do not survive. She was not only the daughter of a renowned west Kerry story teller, Tomás Sayers, but Padraig O Guithín her island husband was an accomplished teller of Fenian tales.
Peig herself, Níl Deireadh Ráite reminds us, was steeped in the oral tradition.
To be fair, a true appreciation of the skill involved in the oral storytelling as a highly stylized art that went back to Homer only really began around the time of Peig’s death with the ground breaking work The Singer of Tales, by Harvard scholar A B Lord. They had the longest memories too able to” contact trace” every family history in the parish and beyond.
This is not mere following of fashion, but a return to what was in fact the case: Many of us who grew up in the pre-television which lasted well into the 1970s in some parts, well remember how it was the women who were the storehouses of the past how often it was the woman - always known by her first name - who had a liking for cards and who told the most nuanced fireside stories. There may also be a new appreciation of Peig as a real female and as a female teller of tales. The new digital and social media age, with its acceptance of mixed platforms, has maybe paved the way for a new appreciation of the ancient art of oral storytelling, the format employed in this book tempts us to think. In any case, Peig’s stories were mostly written down and not recorded at all. Made on a wire recorder plugged into the electricity, they have survived while other wax recordings have not. The recordings themselves are remarkable. While the focus traditionally has been on the Blasket “writers” it is arguable if proper deference has never been accorded to the ephemeral spoken or oral tradition of the island certainly not in book form, and certainly not in the kind of multi-platform approach here where the dialogue prompted by live interviewers is included, the whole book is both in Irish and in English and accompanied by CDs of the original recordings. The west Kerry scholar and later senator, author of the highly entertaining Jimín Mháire Thaidgh is among the team of the Irish Folklore Commission to interview and record Peig in hospital in 1952. Peig had no singing voice, but she had “the gift of talk” – caint are barra na teanga as she puts it as Gaeilge, laughing at her "drake’s singing voice" with An Seabhac, Padraic O’ Siochfhradha. These books together also show where all the ideas came from in the Poor Mouth which satirises this style of literature.Interviewed in the Kerry Irish, by people she knew well over the decades, there is a relaxed, almost fireside approach, albeit Peig was for much of the recordings in a hospital bed at St Anne’s in Dublin in 1952. It well worth a read particularly if it is read along with The Islandman, Twenty Years a Growing and the Western Island. It shows what people did to make a living, entertainment, customs of birth, death, marriage, religion and much more. Peig's autobiography gives a fantastic insight into the lives of ordinary people in rural Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century, in this case Na Blascaodaí - the Blascket Islands. Despite being an Irish learner, however, I decided to read it in English just in case and to save my Irish reading for more contemporary reading material! You can see why - it is exceptionally rural and old-fashioned and religion is present all through the text which many people felt associated Irish with all things backward looking and damaged the language.Ĭoming at it as someone from Scotland who didn't have to answer interpretation questions on it and who has a suitably positive and modern view of Irish and Scottish Gaelic (which I speak) I was able to take a more open-minded view on Peig. Generations of school children in Ireland had to read through Peig Sayer's autobiography as a set text in Irish language classes and many therefore hold a negative view of the book as I myself do with Shakespeare and other works of literature I had to study at school.
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