Unkown - "Miscellaneous Mathematical Constants, Equations, Derivations..."

William Morris - "Signs of Change"

Bao Gan - "Sou Shen Ji, volume 15 17, 300 A.D."

Thomas Carlyle - "History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 12"

The Aran Islands

J >> John M. Synge >> The Aran Islands



Edited by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com




THE ARAN ISLANDS

BY JOHN M. SYNGE






Introduction





The geography of the Aran Islands is very simple, yet it may need a
word to itself. There are three islands: Aranmor, the north island,
about nine miles long; Inishmaan, the middle island, about three
miles and a half across, and nearly round in form; and the south
island, Inishere--in Irish, east island,--like the middle island but
slightly smaller. They lie about thirty miles from Galway, up the
centre of the bay, but they are not far from the cliffs of County
Clare, on the south, or the corner of Connemara on the north.

Kilronan, the principal village on Aranmor, has been so much changed
by the fishing industry, developed there by the Congested Districts
Board, that it has now very little to distinguish it from any
fishing village on the west coast of Ireland. The other islands are
more primitive, but even on them many changes are being made, that
it was not worth while to deal with in the text.

In the pages that follow I have given a direct account of my life on
the islands, and of what I met with among them, inventing nothing,
and changing nothing that is essential. As far as possible, however,
I have disguised the identity of the people I speak of, by making
changes in their names, and in the letters I quote, and by altering
some local and family relationships. I have had nothing to say about
them that was not wholly in their favour, but I have made this
disguise to keep them from ever feeling that a too direct use had
been made of their kindness, and friendship, for which I am more
grateful than it is easy to say.






Part I





I am in Aranmor, sitting over a turf fire, listening to a murmur of
Gaelic that is rising from a little public-house under my room.

The steamer which comes to Aran sails according to the tide, and it
was six o'clock this morning when we left the quay of Galway in a
dense shroud of mist.

A low line of shore was visible at first on the right between the
movement of the waves and fog, but when we came further it was lost
sight of, and nothing could be seen but the mist curling in the
rigging, and a small circle of foam.

There were few passengers; a couple of men going out with young pigs
tied loosely in sacking, three or four young girls who sat in the
cabin with their heads completely twisted in their shawls, and a
builder, on his way to repair the pier at Kilronan, who walked up
and down and talked with me.

In about three hours Aran came in sight. A dreary rock appeared at
first sloping up from the sea into the fog; then, as we drew nearer,
a coast-guard station and the village.

A little later I was wandering out along the one good roadway of the
island, looking over low walls on either side into small flat fields
of naked rock. I have seen nothing so desolate. Grey floods of water
were sweeping everywhere upon the limestone, making at limes a wild
torrent of the road, which twined continually over low hills and
cavities in the rock or passed between a few small fields of
potatoes or grass hidden away in corners that had shelter. Whenever
the cloud lifted I could see the edge of the sea below me on the
right, and the naked ridge of the island above me on the other side.
Occasionally I passed a lonely chapel or schoolhouse, or a line of
stone pillars with crosses above them and inscriptions asking a
prayer for the soul of the person they commemorated.

I met few people; but here and there a band of tall girls passed me
on their way to Kilronan, and called out to me with humorous wonder,
speaking English with a slight foreign intonation that differed a
good deal from the brogue of Galway. The rain and cold seemed to
have no influence on their vitality and as they hurried past me with
eager laughter and great talking in Gaelic, they left the wet masses
of rock more desolate than before.

A little after midday when I was coming back one old half-blind man
spoke to me in Gaelic, but, in general, I was surprised at the
abundance and fluency of the foreign tongue.

In the afternoon the rain continued, so I sat here in the inn
looking out through the mist at a few men who were unlading hookers
that had come in with turf from Connemara, and at the long-legged
pigs that were playing in the surf. As the fishermen came in and out
of the public-house underneath my room, I could hear through the
broken panes that a number of them still used the Gaelic, though it
seems to be falling out of use among the younger people of this
village.

The old woman of the house had promised to get me a teacher of the
language, and after a while I heard a shuffling on the stairs, and
the old dark man I had spoken to in the morning groped his way into
the room.

I brought him over to the fire, and we talked for many hours. He
told me that he had known Petrie and Sir William Wilde, and many
living antiquarians, and had taught Irish to Dr. Finck and Dr.
Pedersen, and given stories to Mr. Curtin of America. A little after
middle age he had fallen over a cliff, and since then he had had
little eyesight, and a trembling of his hands and head.

As we talked he sat huddled together over the fire, shaking and
blind, yet his face was indescribably pliant, lighting up with an
ecstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit
or malice, and growing sombre and desolate again when he spoke of
religion or the fairies.

He had great confidence in his own powers and talent, and in the
superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world. When
we were speaking of Mr. Curtin, he told me that this gentleman had
brought out a volume of his Aran stories in America, and made five
hundred pounds by the sale of them.

'And what do you think he did then?' he continued; 'he wrote a book
of his own stories after making that lot of money with mine. And he
brought them out, and the divil a half-penny did he get for them.
Would you believe that?'

Afterwards he told me how one of his children had been taken by the
fairies.

One day a neighbor was passing, and she said, when she saw it on the
road, 'That's a fine child.'

Its mother tried to say 'God bless it,' but something choked the
words in her throat.

A while later they found a wound on its neck, and for three nights
the house was filled with noises.

'I never wear a shirt at night,' he said, 'but I got up out of my
bed, all naked as I was, when I heard the noises in the house, and
lighted a light, but there was nothing in it.'

Then a dummy came and made signs of hammering nails in a coffin. The
next day the seed potatoes were full of blood, and the child told
his mother that he was going to America.

That night it died, and 'Believe me,' said the old man, 'the fairies
were in it.'

When he went away, a little bare-footed girl was sent up with turf
and the bellows to make a fire that would last for the evening.

She was shy, yet eager to talk, and told me that she had good spoken
Irish, and was learning to read it in the school, and that she had
been twice to Galway, though there are many grown women in the place
who have never set a foot upon the mainland.

The rain has cleared off, and I have had my first real introduction
to the island and its people.

I went out through Killeany--the poorest village in Aranmor--to a
long neck of sandhill that runs out into the sea towards the
south-west. As I lay there on the grass the clouds lifted from the
Connemara mountains and, for a moment, the green undulating
foreground, backed in the distance by a mass of hills, reminded me
of the country near Rome. Then the dun top-sail of a hooker swept
above the edge of the sandhill and revealed the presence of the sea.

As I moved on a boy and a man came down from the next village to
talk to me, and I found that here, at least, English was imperfectly
understood. When I asked them if there were any trees in the island
they held a hurried consultation in Gaelic, and then the man asked
if 'tree' meant the same thing as 'bush,' for if so there were a few
in sheltered hollows to the east.

They walked on with me to the sound which separates this island from
Inishmaan--the middle island of the group--and showed me the roll
from the Atlantic running up between two walls of cliff.

They told me that several men had stayed on Inishmaan to learn
Irish, and the boy pointed out a line of hovels where they had
lodged running like a belt of straw round the middle of the island.
The place looked hardly fit for habitation. There was no green to be
seen, and no sign of the people except these beehive-like roofs, and
the outline of a Dun that stood out above them against the edge of
the sky.

After a while my companions went away and two other boys came and
walked at my heels, till I turned and made them talk to me. They
spoke at first of their poverty, and then one of them said--'I dare
say you do have to pay ten shillings a week in the hotel?' 'More,'
I answered.

'Twelve?'

'More.'

'Fifteen?'

'More still.'

Then he drew back and did not question me any further, either
thinking that I had lied to check his curiosity, or too awed by my
riches to continue.

Repassing Killeany I was joined by a man who had spent twenty years
in America, where he had lost his health and then returned, so long
ago that he had forgotten English and could hardly make me
understand him. He seemed hopeless, dirty and asthmatic, and after
going with me for a few hundred yards he stopped and asked for
coppers. I had none left, so I gave him a fill of tobacco, and he
went back to his hovel.

When he was gone, two little girls took their place behind me and I
drew them in turn into conversation.

They spoke with a delicate exotic intonation that was full of charm,
and told me with a sort of chant how they guide 'ladies and
gintlemins' in the summer to all that is worth seeing in their
neighbourhood, and sell them pampooties and maidenhair ferns, which
are common among the rocks.

We were now in Kilronan, and as we parted they showed me holes in
their own pampooties, or cowskin sandals, and asked me the price of
new ones. I told them that my purse was empty, and then with a few
quaint words of blessing they turned away from me and went down to
the pier.

All this walk back had been extraordinarily fine. The intense
insular clearness one sees only in Ireland, and after rain, was
throwing out every ripple in the sea and sky, and every crevice in
the hills beyond the bay.

This evening an old man came to see me, and said he had known a
relative of mine who passed some time on this island forty-three
years ago.

'I was standing under the pier-wall mending nets,' he said, 'when
you came off the steamer, and I said to myself in that moment, if
there is a man of the name of Synge left walking the world, it is
that man yonder will be he.'

He went on to complain in curiously simple yet dignified language of
the changes that have taken place here since he left the island to
go to sea before the end of his childhood.

'I have come back,' he said, 'to live in a bit of a house with my
sister. The island is not the same at all to what it was. It is
little good I can get from the people who are in it now, and
anything I have to give them they don't care to have.'

From what I hear this man seems to have shut himself up in a world
of individual conceits and theories, and to live aloof at his trade
of net-mending, regarded by the other islanders with respect and
half-ironical sympathy.

A little later when I went down to the kitchen I found two men from
Inishmaan who had been benighted on the island. They seemed a
simpler and perhaps a more interesting type than the people here,
and talked with careful English about the history of the Duns, and
the Book of Ballymote, and the Book of Kells, and other ancient
MSS., with the names of which they seemed familiar.

In spite of the charm of my teacher, the old blind man I met the day
of my arrival, I have decided to move on to Inishmaan, where Gaelic
is more generally used, and the life is perhaps the most primitive
that is left in Europe.

I spent all this last day with my blind guide, looking at the
antiquities that abound in the west or north-west of the island.

As we set out I noticed among the groups of girls who smiled at our
fellowship--old Mourteen says we are like the cuckoo with its
pipit--a beautiful oval face with the singularly spiritual
expression that is so marked in one type of the West Ireland women.
Later in the day, as the old man talked continually of the fairies
and the women they have taken, it seemed that there was a possible
link between the wild mythology that is accepted on the islands and
the strange beauty of the women.

At midday we rested near the ruins of a house, and two beautiful
boys came up and sat near us. Old Mourteen asked them why the house
was in ruins, and who had lived in it.

'A rich farmer built it a while since,' they said, 'but after two
years he was driven away by the fairy host.'

The boys came on with us some distance to the north to visit one of
the ancient beehive dwellings that is still in perfect preservation.
When we crawled in on our hands and knees, and stood up in the gloom
of the interior, old Mourteen took a freak of earthly humour and
began telling what he would have done if he could have come in there
when he was a young man and a young girl along with him.

Then he sat down in the middle of the floor and began to recite old
Irish poetry, with an exquisite purity of intonation that brought
tears to my eyes though I understood but little of the meaning.

On our way home he gave me the Catholic theory of the fairies.

When Lucifer saw himself in the glass he thought himself equal with
God. Then the Lord threw him out of Heaven, and all the angels that
belonged to him. While He was 'chucking them out,' an archangel
asked Him to spare some of them, and those that were falling are in
the air still, and have power to wreck ships, and to work evil in
the world.

From this he wandered off into tedious matters of theology, and
repeated many long prayers and sermons in Irish that he had heard
from the priests.

A little further on we came to a slated house, and I asked him who
was living in it.

'A kind of a schoolmistress,' he said; then his old face puckered
with a gleam of pagan malice.

'Ah, master,' he said, 'wouldn't it be fine to be in there, and to
be kissing her?'

A couple of miles from this village we turned aside to look at an
old ruined church of the Ceathair Aluinn (The Four Beautiful
Persons), and a holy well near it that is famous for cures of
blindness and epilepsy.

As we sat near the well a very old man came up from a cottage near
the road, and told me how it had become famous.

'A woman of Sligo had a son who was born blind, and one night she
dreamed that she saw an island with a blessed well in it that could
cure her son. She told her dream in the morning, and an old man said
it was of Aran she was after dreaming.

'She brought her son down by the coast of Galway, and came out in a
curagh, and landed below where you see a bit of a cove.

'She walked up then to the house of my father--God rest his
soul--and she told them what she was looking for.

'My father said that there was a well like what she had dreamed of,
and that he would send a boy along with her to show her the way.

"There's no need, at all," said she; "haven't I seen it all in my
dream?"

'Then she went out with the child and walked up to this well, and
she kneeled down and began saying her prayers. Then she put her hand
out for the water, and put it on his eyes, and the moment it touched
him he called out: "O mother, look at the pretty flowers!"'

After that Mourteen described the feats of poteen drinking and
fighting that he did in his youth, and went on to talk of Diarmid,
who was the strongest man after Samson, and of one of the beds of
Diarmid and Grainne, which is on the east of the island. He says
that Diarmid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on
him,--a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmid with the
legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the 'learning' in some
hedge-school master's ballad.

Then we talked about Inishmaan.

'You'll have an old man to talk with you over there,' he said, 'and
tell you stories of the fairies, but he's walking about with two
sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on
four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three
legs when it does be old?'

I gave him the answer.

'Ah, master,' he said, 'you're a cute one, and the blessing of God
be on you. Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man
beyond is back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he
is; he's got his sight and I'm only an old dark man.'

I am settled at last on Inishmaan in a small cottage with a
continual drone of Gaelic coming from the kitchen that opens into my
room.

Early this morning the man of the house came over for me with a
four-oared curagh--that is, a curagh with four rowers and four oars
on either side, as each man uses two--and we set off a little before
noon.

It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving
away from civilisation in this rude canvas canoe of a model that has
served primitive races since men first went to sea.

We had to stop for a moment at a hulk that is anchored in the bay,
to make some arrangement for the fish-curing of the middle island,
and my crew called out as soon as we were within earshot that they
had a man with them who had been in France a month from this day.

When we started again, a small sail was run up in the bow, and we
set off across the sound with a leaping oscillation that had no
resemblance to the heavy movement of a boat.

The sail is only used as an aid, so the men continued to row after
it had gone up, and as they occupied the four cross-seats I lay on
the canvas at the stern and the frame of slender laths, which bent
and quivered as the waves passed under them.

When we set off it was a brilliant morning of April, and the green,
glittering waves seemed to toss the canoe among themselves, yet as
we drew nearer this island a sudden thunderstorm broke out behind
the rocks we were approaching, and lent a momentary tumult to this
still vein of the Atlantic.

We landed at a small pier, from which a rude track leads up to the
village between small fields and bare sheets of rock like those in
Aranmor. The youngest son of my boatman, a boy of about seventeen,
who is to be my teacher and guide, was waiting for me at the pier
and guided me to his house, while the men settled the curagh and
followed slowly with my baggage.

My room is at one end of the cottage, with a boarded floor and
ceiling, and two windows opposite each other. Then there is the
kitchen with earth floor and open rafters, and two doors opposite
each other opening into the open air, but no windows. Beyond it
there are two small rooms of half the width of the kitchen with one
window apiece.

The kitchen itself, where I will spend most of my time, is full of
beauty and distinction. The red dresses of the women who cluster
round the fire on their stools give a glow of almost Eastern
richness, and the walls have been toned by the turf-smoke to a soft
brown that blends with the grey earth-colour of the floor. Many
sorts of fishing-tackle, and the nets and oil-skins of the men, are
hung upon the walls or among the open rafters; and right overhead,
under the thatch, there is a whole cowskin from which they make
pampooties.

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character,
which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of
the artistic beauty of medieval life. The curaghs and
spinning-wheels, the tiny wooden barrels that are still much used in
the place of earthenware, the home-made cradles, churns, and
baskets, are all full of individuality, and being made from
materials that are common here, yet to some extent peculiar to the
island, they seem to exist as a natural link between the people and
the world that is about them.

The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the
local air of beauty. The women wear red petticoats and jackets of
the island wool stained with madder, to which they usually add a
plaid shawl twisted round their chests and tied at their back. When
it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the
waistband round their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy
shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn,
and during the thunderstorm I arrived in I saw several girls with
men's waistcoats buttoned round their bodies. Their skirts do not
come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy
indigo stockings with which they are all provided.

The men wear three colours: the natural wool, indigo, and a grey
flannel that is woven of alternate threads of indigo and the natural
wool. In Aranmor many of the younger men have adopted the usual
fisherman's jersey, but I have only seen one on this island.

As flannel is cheap--the women spin the yarn from the wool of their
own sheep, and it is then woven by a weaver in Kilronan for
fourpence a yard--the men seem to wear an indefinite number of
waistcoats and woollen drawers one over the other. They are usually
surprised at the lightness of my own dress, and one old man I spoke
to for a minute on the pier, when I came ashore, asked me if I was
not cold with 'my little clothes.'

As I sat in the kitchen to dry the spray from my coat, several men
who had seen me walking up came in to me to talk to me, usually
murmuring on the threshold, 'The blessing of God on this place,' or
some similar words.

The courtesy of the old woman of the house is singularly attractive,
and though I could not understand much of what she said--she has no
English--I could see with how much grace she motioned each visitor
to a chair, or stool, according to his age, and said a few words to
him till he drifted into our English conversation.

For the moment my own arrival is the chief subject of interest, and
the men who come in are eager to talk to me.

Some of them express themselves more correctly than the ordinary
peasant, others use the Gaelic idioms continually and substitute
'he' or 'she' for 'it,' as the neuter pronoun is not found in modern
Irish.

A few of the men have a curiously full vocabulary, others know only
the commonest words in English, and are driven to ingenious devices
to express their meaning. Of all the subjects we can talk of war
seems their favourite, and the conflict between America and Spain is
causing a great deal of excitement. Nearly all the families have
relations who have had to cross the Atlantic, and all eat of the
flour and bacon that is brought from the United States, so they have
a vague fear that 'if anything happened to America,' their own
island would cease to be habitable.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are
bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and
think in many different idioms. Most of the strangers they see on
the islands are philological students, and the people have been led
to conclude that linguistic studies, particularly Gaelic studies,
are the chief occupation of the outside world.

'I have seen Frenchmen, and Danes, and Germans,' said one man, 'and
there does be a power a Irish books along with them, and they
reading them better than ourselves. Believe me there are few rich
men now in the world who are not studying the Gaelic.'

They sometimes ask me the French for simple phrases, and when they
have listened to the intonation for a moment, most of them are able
to reproduce it with admirable precision.

When I was going out this morning to walk round the island with
Michael, the boy who is teaching me Irish, I met an old man making
his way down to the cottage. He was dressed in miserable black
clothes which seemed to have come from the mainland, and was so bent
with rheumatism that, at a little distance, he looked more like a
spider than a human being.

Michael told me it was Pat Dirane, the story-teller old Mourteen had
spoken of on the other island. I wished to turn back, as he appeared
to be on his way to visit me, but Michael would not hear of it.

'He will be sitting by the fire when we come in,' he said; 'let you
not be afraid, there will be time enough to be talking to him by and
by.'

He was right. As I came down into the kitchen some hours later old
Pat was still in the chimney-corner, blinking with the turf smoke.

He spoke English with remarkable aptness and fluency, due, I
believe, to the months he spent in the English provinces working at
the harvest when he was a young man.

After a few formal compliments he told me how he had been crippled
by an attack of the 'old hin' (i.e. the influenza), and had been
complaining ever since in addition to his rheumatism.

While the old woman was cooking my dinner he asked me if I liked
stories, and offered to tell one in English, though he added, it
would be much better if I could follow the Gaelic. Then he began:--

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.