On an Irish Island (7 page)

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 that 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.

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.

Flower was the consummate bibliophile, a compulsive consumer of the written word. Island photographs of him sometimes show him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, hand thrust into pants pocket, looking very much the man of the world. But one of him from around 1910 shows him as he more often was, reading, sitting back in what looks like a tufted leather high-back chair. His head was forever in a book. While still in school, his son Patrick recounted later, he’d head off for the woods on his bicycle, his cat Appleby perched in a
string bag suspended from the handlebars, reading as he rode. When he was twelve, a school friend recalled, “
his pockets always bulged with cheap magazines”; late to class, he’d be seen “trying to read and run at the same time,” working his way up from boys’ fiction to Swinburne, Shelley, and Keats. When sometimes
a teacher would search his pockets, his classmates were left rapt in wonder at how much reading matter he’d managed to stuff into them.