On an Irish Island

by Robert Kanigel

  Its pronunciation, though, was another story.

  All languages have their distinctive sounds, even before you can make sense of them; every journeyman actor invoking a cruel German Kapitän or snooty French waiter capitalizes on that fact. A set of the mouth, a play of the tongue, French nasality and rolled “r”s, guttural German, musical Italian. Clichés, certainly, but they emerge from characteristic sounds. English has forty-four distinct sounds, or phonemes; Irish, depending on the dialect, has sixty—which, absent firm command of the phonetic alphabet, can be difficult to describe and classify. There could be a whispery twang to Irish. There were sounds reminiscent of the Scottish loch, and variations-on-a-nasal-theme that might remind you of gargling, vowels getting lost in the back of the throat never to return. Even ears new to the language would never confuse it with German, say, or English. You could listen to Irish in full flight and come away certain that none of its consonants—and none of its vowels, either—were quite like anything you’d heard before. In later years, a brilliant French linguist visiting Dún Chaoin and the Blaskets would write that, although her Irish was improving, “when I compare it with the splendid soft language of this place, I get disgusted and pessimistic.”

  Before coming to the Blaskets, Carl Marstrander had been pronounced a gifted linguist by his professors. He would go on to a lifetime’s career in the field. He already had some English, and good German, as well as his native Norwegian. He had studied Old Irish. He could probably point out Scandinavian influences on the language; “shoe” is bróg in Irish, brok in Old Norse. On the mainland, he’d already had several weeks’ exposure to spoken Irish. But none of it seemed to do him much good. “After a fortnight in Ballyferriter,” he would write, “I could hardly understand more than the usual hello and goodbye.” Indeed, right there in front of the villagers on his first day on the island he had been unable to express the simplest greeting, could not get my tongue right for this unusual sound.

  “The speech is like a big river flowing from the lips of these islanders,” he would write. “The ends of words and small words almost disappear in the ordinary day-to-day language.” His knowledge of the written language helped him little. For nine hundred years, written Irish had remained largely fixed, representing the language as it had once been spoken; but in that time, spoken Irish had veered off. Who, Marstrander wondered, on “hearing the word drar, [would] think of the written dearthair,” or hearing dreafu think of driosūr?

  Irish consonants took two quite different forms, resulting in two nearly complete sets of sounds for each. “Broad” and “slender” were the terms customarily used to describe the difference, both intimately linked to the vowel sounds to which they were applied. In English the “c” in “call,” and most other words in which it is followed by the vowels “a,” “o,” or “u,” sounds different from the “c” in “cell,” and in other words with the vowels “e” and “i.” In Irish, most consonants went through such a shift. With some of them, like “b,” “m,” or “p,” broad or slender determined whether the lips were relaxed or tensed. With others, like “d,” “n,” or “t,” the difference resided in whether the tongue was pressed against the upper teeth or against the hard palate. Fiendishly complex sound-changes that Irish grammarians labeled eclipsis and lenition figured in as well. Pronunciation was more than usually entwined with grammar and meaning; words sounded different depending on their role in a sentence, the differences significant enough that, reduced to print, they had to be spelled differently, too. “Horse” is capall. “Horses” is capaill. “The horse’s hooves” is crúba an chaipaill. “The horses’ hooves” is crúba na gcapall. And all these horse words sounded different.

  Was everyone to gather “at the top of the big cliff”? Well, top was barr, cliff was faill, and big was mór. But you’d hear nobody say “err baur un fayll moore,” which is about how ar barr an faill mór would sound if anyone were saying it. Nobody would say it, of course, because it was wrong. Thanks to the peculiar rules governing the genitive case, all the familiar words shape-shifted into new forms, the phrase becoming ar bharr na haille móire—which, resplendent now in a whole new necklace of sound, would come out “Err vaur na halla mora.”

  In the end, most consonants, depending on whether they were flanked by a “broad” vowel, meaning “a,” “o,” or “u,” or a “slender” vowel, “e” or “i,” or whether they were “lenited” by virtue of the word’s role in the sentence, could be sounded in up to four different ways, the tongue moving up, down, and around the palate, the sound aspirated, or trilled, or sometimes disappearing altogether. A “d” could sound close to an English “th” or more like a regular “d,” or else a “y,” or something like a growled “gr.”

  These mysteries Marstrander was determined to penetrate.

  Marstrander arrived on the island on a Sunday, briefly lolled about the village, inquired where he might stay for the night, and was directed to the king’s house. Why, he was asked the next day, had he left Ballyferriter? Not enough Irish there, too much English, he replied; as an islander put it later, “His business was to get the fine flower of the speech,” and the best Irish was presumably right there on the Great Blasket.

  Who, he asked the king, could teach him?

  He knew just the man, the king said. His name was Tomás Ó Criomhthain, pronounced something like “o-krih-in,” and in English rendered as O’Crohan. Like everyone else on the island, he made his living from the sea, but, unlike most everyone else, he could read and write Irish. And of course he spoke it—beautifully, correctly, precisely.

  Marstrander approached him. Did he know English?

  Not much, replied Ó Criomhthain.

  Fine with him, said the Norwegian.

  And so it began. For two or three hours a day they’d meet, from seven or so to ten in the evening, in Marstrander’s room in the king’s house, talking, reading, and writing Irish. Toward the end of his stay, Marstrander advised Ó Criomhthain that he’d not be able to spend so long on the island as he’d hoped: Could they meet more often, perhaps twice a day? By now it was fall, the days growing shorter, Ó Criomhthain’s time out on the boat at night longer. But he agreed, apparently squeezing in a session around midday. “We’ll manage,” said Ó Criomhthain. “I won’t refuse you.”

  After two months, Marstrander composed a letter in Irish in which he declared that spending time like this with the islanders was the surest way to learn the language. He was “improving moderately. I could now express what I wish in Irish, which pleases me, for I had hardly any word when I left Dublin.”

  He kept lengthy vocabulary lists. He drew (or had drawn for him) rude sketches, their features identified in Irish: A fear, or man, rows a bád, or boat, across quiet waters. A sliabh, or mountain, rises behind him. He learned not just from Tomás but from everyone. Socially, a great gap existed between the university-educated Norwegian and these peasant fishermen. “Marstrander bridged this gap,” it was said of him when he died in the 1960s, “simply by acting as if it didn’t exist.” Later, he’d impress his colleagues as an immaculate dresser, a lavish entertainer, and a natural aristocrat. But on the island, he fell in with the villagers, fishing with them, cutting turf on the hills, riding the donkey home at night. He “had little spare flesh on him but he was as healthy as a salmon,” Ó Criomhthain’s son Seán would say of him. He liked to show off his pole-vaulting skills. “He would catch hold of a naomhóg mast,” Seán recalled, “make a dash, take a running jump, stick the end of the mast into the ground and rise as high as the tops of the houses”; by one surely exaggerated account, he vaulted himself over the houses.

  Around the village he was An Lochlannach, the Viking, a particular hit among the old women, as well as among the boys, whom he taught athletic skills; sometimes he’d gather half a dozen of them together, clamber aboard their joined hands, and then, on the count of three, have them heave him into the air. Exploring the island, he learned of its superstitions and folktales, like t
hat of a female spirit, or púca, that lived under a seaward cliff and “charms the young ones with her tempting voice.” After five months, he wrote, he was “accepted like one of their own, as an Islander.”

  “A fine man,” Ó Criomhthain would call him, “with the same manner to low and high.” Whatever Marstrander’s private, more nuanced views of his island friends were, he treated them as if their language and culture mattered. After all, they could do something, speak Irish, that Norwegians couldn’t do, that Englishmen couldn’t do, that even most other Irish couldn’t do. Blasket Irish, they came away half convinced, wasn’t just Irish, but the best Irish, the purest. Marstrander lent them stature. They were fishermen? Yes, but something in how they lived was precious and rare.

  More than Synge’s brief visit, Marstrander’s laid the ground for the unlikely literary phenomenon that was to blossom on the Blaskets. “It was Marstrander who started the whole thing,” declared Bo Almqvist, Swedish folklorist and Blasket scholar, a century later, at a celebration of Marstrander and Ireland’s Viking links in Dún Chaoin. Marstrander was a student of myth, yes, but also a creator of myth. He “convinced the people of the island that they were a special people.” Without Marstrander, Almqvist added, “there would hardly be a Blasket culture, and no Blasket writings.”

  Around Christmas, Marstrander returned to Norway. He and Ó Criomhthain corresponded for a while. He asked his teacher to compile a list of island flora and fauna—birds and eggs, bog grass and meadow foxtail, each with its name in Irish—and sent him the paper he’d need to do it. With the help of an Irish-language teacher then visiting the island, Ó Criomhthain obliged. Marstrander sent him money—Ó Criomhthain would call it “yellow gold”—and later, probably at Christmas 1910, a pipe. After this flurry of activity, however, their correspondence lapsed. “I haven’t heard anything from him,” Ó Criomhthain would write in the late 1920s, “for many a long day.”

  Marstrander, we might say today, was launched on his career trajectory, destined to become among the most distinguished linguists of his day. In Oslo, he won a scholarship in comparative linguistics and continued his Celtic studies. By 1909, he was back in Ireland, the holder, at an astonishingly young age, of a coveted position with the new School of Irish Learning in Dublin.

  The school was the brainchild of Kuno Meyer, an energetic little German with a great mustache and a passion for all things Irish. An “evangelist for the Irish language,” someone would call him. He had spearheaded the emerging field of Celtic studies first while on the Continent, then through his appointment at University College, Liverpool.

  For the ten years after Douglas Hyde’s 1892 speech calling for the de-Anglicization of Ireland, the Gaelic League had done much to foster a resurgence of the language. Among its innovations were local festivals in celebration of Gaelic culture; a feis included dancing and singing competitions, sporting events, and prizes to schoolchildren for proficiency in spoken Irish. The culmination of the year came with the annual oireachtas, a much-anticipated Ireland-wide feis. And it was at one of them, in 1903, held in the Concert Hall of the Rotunda in Dublin’s Parnell Square, that Meyer made a long, impassioned plea, in English, for the formation of a new school of Irish learning and literature.

  Meyer, forty-four, described the League-inspired revival of interest in Irish language and culture as “one of the most remarkable and unexpected national movements of our time.… It is one of those almost elemental phenomena, the suddenness and force of which seems to carry everything before it.” This, of course, was bald overstatement, a pep talk for an audience already won over to the cause. “Wherever one goes now,” he continued, “one finds men and women, young and old, able to speak and read and write Gaelic; it is taught in the schools; ancient customs are revived; papers are springing up; Irish literature is being printed; the interest in the history and traditions of the country and the race is widening and deepening.”

  But this pretty picture, he allowed, was blemished. Many remained indifferent to Celtic studies. Those wishing to acquire “the spoken language in all its idiomatic force, and with all its dialectical varieties,” had few places to turn. Needed was the encouragement of serious Irish scholarship. The language movement should give students of the language access “to the higher regions of study and research” and so “bring about a second golden age of Irish learning,” rivaling, presumably, the Middle Ages, when little Ireland served as scholarly incubator for all of Europe.

  Six weeks later, a new School of Irish Learning was already taking shape in Dublin. Meyer was its first director.

  Right from the start it succeeded, drawing students and scholars from around Europe. For a time located in a three-story house at 33 Dawson Street, down the street from Trinity College and virtually across from the Lord Mayor’s residence, the school offered training in linguistics, philology, and textual studies. Five years after its founding, one of its key figures, Osborn Bergin, left. Marstrander was named to replace him.

  Marstrander taught his first class in April 1910, and that summer three more—in Old Irish, Middle Irish, and the Tain Bo Cualinge, a legendary tale with pre-Christian roots. At one point in the summer, he and his students gathered for a garden party at the home of a Mrs. Eason. When they rounded up everyone for a photograph, Marstrander sat near the center. Arrayed around him were men in jackets, high-collared shirts, and ties, and women in great broad-brimmed hats and light summer frocks. Just behind Marstrander stood a boyish-looking man actually two years older than he, his straight dark hair parted crisply to the side, Robin Flower.

  Carl Marstrander and Robin Flower met at the School of Irish Learning in Dublin in 1910. In this photo taken at a garden party for teachers and students that summer, Marstrander sits near the center, fourth from the left, Flower almost directly behind him. (Illustration Credit ill.4)

  It was probably within days of the party at Mrs. Eason’s that Flower wrote a colleague at the British Museum that he was making good progress with Irish. By now, “infixed pronouns, the vagaries of the copula, vocalic changes and the like have no terrors for me.” But it was Marstrander himself who was leaving the deepest imprint on him.

  I am working under the finest scholar and one of the most admirable men I ever met in my life, Carl Marstrander, a Norwegian of extraordinary abilities, who knows all the languages of the earth (Sanskrit, Armenian, Phrysian and the like), is the finest comparative philologist and my very good friend. I could exhaust myself in eulogy and leave the rudiments of his praise unshaken. I praise God for him daily.

  Four years earlier, Robin Flower had been named assistant keeper in the Manuscripts Department of the British Museum; “keeper” was English parlance for what Americans would call “curator.” Soon after settling into this august preserve of imperial culture, he had taken on an ambitious new project. The Museum held a great store of Irish manuscripts, ancient tracts, and poems in Old and Middle Irish, which no one had ever worked all the way through. An earlier scholar, Standish Hayes O’Grady, had begun to catalogue them in the 1880s. A seven-hundred-page fragment of his work had been printed and bound for use around the Museum. But it had never been published, the project as a whole languished, and Flower had proposed to finish it.

  The Old Irish he’d need to tackle the venerable texts, someone later observed, was “by common consent the most difficult of the Indo-European tongues.” On his own, Flower began taking Irish lessons, but progressed little and asked for help. In June 1910, he was awarded three weeks’ leave and fifteen pounds for expenses, to go to Dublin and attend lectures at the School of Irish Learning.

  The school left him fairly giddy. “What human beings Celtic students are! They have a grace from God, the gift of eternal youth.” As for Marstrander, “I dine with him every night after the classes,” his letter continued. “It’s a good life. I am taking lessons in modern Irish and am making progress.” And, oh, one more thing, he wrote: after Dublin, if several practical difficulties could be resolved, he proposed
to visit the Blasket Islands.

  He had heard about them, of course, from Marstrander—the purity of the Irish spoken there, the islanders and their hard lives, all doubtless enriched and embellished; Marstrander, Bo Almqvist has suggested, was “a bit of a trickster” and, like any good teacher, he could spin a story. Whether in class, or over beer and wine at dinner, Marstrander told Flower of his arrival on the island and the laughably miscued Irish between him and the king. Folklorists today report surprisingly similar stories, at other cultural and linguistic divides, going back centuries, but Flower was hearing it for the first time. To him, Marstrander was larger than life, like a soldier back from the front replete with war stories, improbable tales from the edge of the known world. Flower lapped them up. Two months later, like Synge and Marstrander before him, he was in the home of the island king.

  Robin Ernest William Flower was born in Leeds, England, in 1881, son of a portrait painter who’d for a time served in the American Civil War as a Confederate soldier; he eventually deserted and made his way to Canada, then returned to England. Marmaduke Flower was his name, and he had ancestral ties to Northern Ireland. Robin’s mother, Jane, though born in Yorkshire, came from a Galway, Ireland, family. Robin Flower himself graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford, but after graduation he foundered, apparently suffering some sort of breakdown; his health was never robust. He spent time in Cologne, Germany, and in the Orkneys, applying for this or that position. Finally, in 1906, the call came from the British Museum. He never left it.