On an Irish Island (6 page)

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 t
old 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.

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.