An Old Woman’s Reflections

Book excerpt: Peig Sayers was ‘the Queen, of Gaelic story-tellers’. She was born in the parish of Dunquin in Kerry and married into a neighbouring island, the Great Blasket, where she spent most of her life. Students and scholars of the Irish language came from far and wide to visit her. She was, as Robin Flower wrote in The Western Island, ‘a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they would have the effect of literature with no savour of the artificiality of composition’. Her Reflections are a collection of her fireside stories, most of them tales of her friends and neighbours on the Great Blasket, the island that also produced Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Tears A-Growing and Tόmas ό Crohan’s The Islandman.