Observing linguistic evolution in an Irish archipelago

This article describes the results of a research project carried out over a period of 25 years on the spoken Irish Gaelic of the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Ireland. It combines microdialectology with sociolinguistics and investigates a wide range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variables. In addition to revealing complex patterns of geolinguistic variation involving small local areas on the main island and on neighboring islands, it also shows the clear influence of age, gender, and individual creativity on the patterns of variation.

Interplay Between Coastal Elevation and Wave Height Controls the Occurrence of Coastal Boulder Deposits in the Aran Islands, Ireland

Coastal boulder deposits (CBD) are wave-emplaced supratidal accumulations that record extreme inundation on rocky coasts. They are poorly understood but are of growing importance as we seek to better understand the extremes of wave power on coastlines. The Aran Islands, Ireland, host CBD in varying settings ranging from sheer cliff tops to wide shore platforms, and at elevations to about 40 m above sea level. Deposits are known to be active during strong storm events and provide a unique opportunity to examine relationships between wave energy, setting, and CBD occurrence. We use topographic elevation (Z) and offshore 100-years significant wave height (Hs,100) to calculate a dimensionless elevation Z* = Z/Hs,100 at 25 m intervals all along the Atlantic-facing coasts of the Aran Islands, and record whether CBD were present or absent at each location. The data reveal universal CBD presence at locations with low dimensionless elevations and near-monotonic decreasing frequency of CBD occurrence as Z* increases. On the Aran Islands, CBD are restricted to locations with Z*<3.13. For high elevation deposits it appears that unresolved local factors may be the major determinants in whether CBD will form. This approach can be applied at any CBD-bearing coastline and has the potential to change the way that we think about these deposits. Evaluation of dimensionless elevations at CBD locations around the world will help build broader understanding of the impact local shoreline conditions have on CBD formation. Determining these relationships contributes to the ongoing need to better understand interactions between extreme waves and rocky coasts.

Life on the margins

The Congested Districts Board was set up in 1891 to ameliorate the living conditions of some of the poorest people in Ireland living on the western seaboard. A remarkable number of writers emerged from these areas to create first-hand accounts of life on the margins. The fiction of Patrick McGill, Seamus Ó Grianna, and Peadar O’Donnell graphically evokes the politics of poverty in Donegal. The romantic image of the Aran Islands, cultivated by Synge, is somewhat surprisingly echoed by the Irish language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin and the fiction writer Liam O’Flaherty, both of whom came from Aran. The life of fishing and farming just above subsistence level is graphically evoked in the Blasket Island autobiographers, Tomás O’Crohan, Maurice O’Sullivan, and Peig Sayers.

‘An Initiated Mystic’

Opening with an anecdote about Synge’s attempts at telepathy, and using much archival material, this chapter reveals Synge’s engagement with occultism, showing it to be not only pervasive but integral to his work. Although Synge as occultist has never been granted credence in studies of the writer, he read widely in occult literature, covering theosophy, magic, telepathy, and other pseudosciences. This reading coincided with Synge’s engagement with socialism, and the two interests were closely linked. Focusing principally on Synge’s major prose work The Aran Islands (1907), the chapter draws on numerous drafts, along with Synge’s ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Étude Morbide’, to show that Synge made recourse to occult mysticism in response to moments of fragmentation, where modernity becomes most pressing and disruptive. In this way, the first chapter introduces Synge as a mystical thinker and a leftist writer whose works were a nuanced and self-reflexive reaction to modernity. It also introduces the key methodology of the book as a whole, mobilizing Synge’s archives and reading diaries, and bringing to light new source materials in order to illuminate the processes of influence and authorial revision at work behind his texts. Using works by Madame Blavatsky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Annie Besant, William Morris, W. B. Yeats, Laurence Oliphant, and others, this chapter places Synge back into the context of fin de siècle occultism, and in doing so reveals the roots of his synthesis of mystic and political thought.

‘From the Congested Districts’

While travelling in the ‘Congested Districts’ of Mayo and Connemara with Jack Yeats in early summer 1905, on commission for The Manchester Guardian, Synge wrote a short vignette which he later added to the fourth part of his as-yet-unpublished prose narrative, The Aran Islands. The vignette in question takes the form of an inserted ‘set piece’ in which a crow is found trying to smash a golf ball. Here, the manuscript reveals the effects of the Guardian commission in confirming Synge’s oppositions to modernization in the west of Ireland and in prompting an increasing irony towards his earlier Romanticism. Taking this ‘set piece’ as its starting point, this chapter mobilizes Synge’s reading in socialism, and his correspondence and drafts for the Guardian commission, to demonstrate the writer’s socialist proclivities and to chart their nuances. Drawing on the earlier chapters of the book, this chapter shows that Synge’s socialism is rooted in nature and mystical experience, and in thought patterns borrowed from Spencerian evolutionism: he opposes modernization when it takes on a homogenizing form which he perceives as anti-nature. By showing that for Synge the aesthetic is politicized, and the political aestheticized, this chapter also registers a recalibrated Synge, evolving a more modernist response to his own notoriety. It concludes by positing the revision of his subsequent article, ‘The People of the Glens’, as a measure of an increasingly ironic sensibility, leading into the elaborate ironical, political structures of his final completed play, The Playboy of the Western World.

‘I am of Them’: Tom O'Flaherty's Socialist Fictions and the Irish Free State

Tom O'Flaherty's unpublished novel Red Crom's Island is a distinctly political potboiler that envisions the Gaeltacht as a potential centre for leftist revolutionary activity. By comparison, O'Flaherty's two Anglophone short stories collections, Aranmen All and Cliffmen of the West, seem to eschew socialist politics in favour of ethnographic depictions of the Aran Islands. When read in conjunction, however, the novel appears to be a source for the short fiction, which prompts a reevaluation of the politics at work in both collections. In this article, I argue that reading the unpublished and published work in tandem with archival correspondences involving officials from the Irish Free State reveals the ways in which O'Flaherty sought to articulate the necessity of socialist values for the survival of the Aran Islands at a time in the 1930s when anti-Communist sentiment and distaste for socialism was on the rise in Ireland.

Abjection and the Irish-Greek Fir Bolg in Aran Island Writing

This chapter analyses the reception history of the Fir Bolg, a legendary Irish people who sought refuge in Greece, were enslaved there, rebelled, and returned to Ireland where they were driven to the Aran Islands by invaders. The complex range of engagement with the Fir Bolg by Victorian and Celtic Revivalists, by anthropologists, diarists, travellers, writers, poets, and by scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is deeply entangled with identity politics in Ireland. Cast as abject figures the Fir Bolg are trapped in the primitivism of island writing that uses antiquity, including comparisons to Homeric islanders, to enshrine the past. But the Fir Bolg could be mobilized as revolutionary within the political discourse of Aran islanders, and the marked silence of J. M. Synge on the Fir Bolg (and on Homer) may activate their revolutionary potential. The Fir Bolg become resurgent under erasure.

Oceans Apart: Amitav Ghosh, John Millington Synge, and Weak Comparison

This article compares John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) and Amitav Ghosh's In An Antique Land (1992), travelogues, histories, and anthropological investigations of maritime societies. Both books tell of a world marked by syncretism and synthesis, and deep and unbroken time, and their narratives are fractured, fragmented, temporally promiscuous, and logically paratactical. In comparing these two books, the article asks what it means, and what it could yield, to read together two accounts of oceanic lives from opposite ends of the twentieth century and from distinct continents and oceans? What emerges is the outline of a ‘speculative practice of weak comparison’ that allows us to extend how we understand the contexts of an object of study called ‘Irish’ literature. By rethinking the scale of Irish literature, the article concludes, we necessarily decentre Ireland, and find opportunities to disaggregate Irish literature and its Irishness, setting a new agenda for comparative studies of Ireland that range widely in space and time.