On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel Read Free Book Online

years to come. But whatever will give them profits at the moment gives them enormous energy.”

    The youngCarl Marstrander was an athlete. On the Blasket he’d use a
naomhóg
mast to demonstrate pole vaulting to the islanders.
( Illustration Credit ill.3 )
    Marstrander pictured the islanders as forever joking, prone to exaggeration, inexorably drawn to “the strange and horrible.” They were “superstitious and blinded by many prejudices,” prey to demanding priests, yet quick to disregard their pastoral injunctions. One priest, angry at being ignored, cursed them, according to Marstrander, going so far as to offer prayers “that the Almighty might lead your boats into destruction on the sea.” For a few days, at least, the islanders, white with fear, forsook whiskey, gave up dancing and song. Impossible for one priest’s intemperate reproof to exact such a price? No, wrote Marstrander, “the West of Ireland still lives in the dark middle ages.”
    The islanders, he was convinced, were all but incapable of introspection. They were preternaturally social creatures, unable to be at once happy and alone. Evenings brought them together for singing, dancing, and storytelling. “It’s from these evening gatherings,” he wrote, “that I have my most wonderful memories and my most lasting impressions from the Blaskets.” Everyone would climb the path to the house of the king, boys in blue sweaters and heavy boots, girls barefoot and wrapped in shawls. “Ihave never seen such beautiful and stylish dance as in the Great Blasket. Themen are champions. Every beat, every little change in the music, even the smallest, is mirrored in their dance, whether it is by a movement of their foot or a bend of their wrist or knee.”
    He marveled at how, whenweatherbound for weeks at a time and unable to fish, they rarely put the time to productive good use, as with handicrafts. They didn’t often cross the sound for Mass, yet their morale was “healthy and high. Particularly is this true of the sex life, which is told boys and girls from childhood.” While their elders looked on benignly, everyone joked about sex, “the boys caressing the girls even in the presence of older people.” Yet they managed to stay pretty much out of trouble.
    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 toNorway 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, Europeanlinguistics. 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