1873–1958
One of the last of the traditional storytellers and a major contributor to Ireland’s folklore archive
Peig Sayers was born in Dunquin (Dún Chaoin) on the Dingle Peninsula in the Kerry Gaeltacht. Her father, Tomás Sayers (Mac an tSaoir), was a gifted storyteller. He and his wife, Peig Brosnan (Ní Bhrosnacháin), were survivors of the Great Famine (1845–1849) and they were never far from hardship and bereavement. Peig’s mother gave birth to thirteen children, but buried no fewer than nine of them in infancy. Peig was the youngest of the four survivors.
Ironically for a woman whose work is used in the curriculum to teach Irish, there is confusion about Peig’s level of literacy in Irish. Some tourist literature claims that she spoke Irish as a first language but could write and read only in English (as was often the case at a time when speaking only Irish was regarded as something of a liability). However, in her autobiography, Peig herself states that she learned to read and write both English and Irish while at school.
At fourteen, Peig was a tall, strapping girl and she went to work at one of the two jobs poor country girls were qualified to do: domestic service. Her employers, the Currens, were based in Dingle town and were relations of her father’s. They were kind and she was happy enough in her work, but like all young people Peig wanted to better her circumstances: she wanted to emigrate.
In the 1890s emigration was the most successful business in Ireland. In the years of the Great Famine, emigration had claimed more people than death – about one million – most of whom were young men. After the Famine, emigration continued apace and Ireland became known as a land of the very old and the very young. (This pattern was broken only in the early 1990s when Ireland’s economy began to improve.) People from Dunquin tended to emigrate to the USA, which was seen as the land of opportunity, but this was only possible if a family member or friend sent passage money. Young Peig was full of life and the desire to go, and her oldest friend, Cáit-Jim, promised to send her the fare. However, after months of hopes and plans it became clear that no money was forthcoming. Peig’s door of opportunity had slammed shut in her face.
But another opportunity was about to present itself. At nineteen, she was offered the chance to do the other job country girls were equipped for: the job of marriage. The custom in rural areas was for matches to be arranged by a young woman’s male relatives, usually her father. There was no romance involved, rather the opposite. It was a social and economic contract. The criteria included solvency, reputation, kinship, religion and land, all of which were far more important than love. When Peig was told that a suitable match had been arranged for her, she saw her bridegroom just once before their wedding day when he paid a formal visit to her family home. As she herself said afterwards, when he arrived that day with two other men she was not even sure which of them it was she was marrying.
Peig’s husband-to-be was thirty-year-old Pádraig Ó Guithín from the Great Blasket Island. He married Peig in February 1892 in the church in Dunquin. In an echo of an old Gaelic custom, Peig retained her own family name after her wedding. With the island penchant for nicknames, the tall young woman became known as Peig Mhór (Big Peig).
When she married Pádraig, Peig committed to the lot of a typical islandwoman. If the weather did not make the crossing impassable, as it frequently did, she would sail three miles by curragh to get to the mainland. She would then travel a further twelve miles to attend a wedding or funeral, go to hospital or visit a shop.
On the treeless Great Blasket, Peig’s days would be spent loading turf onto a creel on a donkey’s back and bringing it home, while she carried bundles of heather on her own back. She would scavenge the beach for driftwood to be used as fuel for the hearth.
She would cook – mainly fish and potatoes – bake bread and hand-churn milk for her husband, his parents and his two brothers in the family home. She would fetch water from the well, wash clothes, spin, knit and mend. She would do all her indoor tasks by the light of a paraffin lamp because, in the age of atomic power, electricity still hadn’t reached Great Blasket. She would give birth to ten children on the island with only the local women to help her. In a sad echo of her mother’s experience, five of Peig’s children would die in infancy. The surviving five would emigrate to the USA.
However, there was something that lifted the spirits of Peig and the other islanders on the long, dark winter nights: storytelling. This important form of entertainment was part of the old Irish oral tradition. A dáil, or assembly, would meet at night in a house, and a comedy, mystery or tragedy would slowly unfold. Peig, with her pure Irish and her beautiful embellishments and turns of phrase, was an acknowledged master of the art. She kept hundreds of stories in her phenomenal memory, and she was able to memorise a story that would take a week in the telling after hearing it just once.
In the early years of the twentieth century, as part of the Gaelic Revival, visitors from abroad and the mainland started to arrive on Great Blasket, interested in its culture and in the purity of the Irish spoken there. The visitors included people who saw a stay on the unspoilt island as a necessary part of the Revival, for example, JM Synge, who came in 1905 before visiting the Irish-speaking Aran Islands in Galway. (He wrote Playboy of the Western World as a result of his island experiences.) By 1914, Great Blasket was experiencing an unexpected literary blossoming as its poetry and folklore was written down for the first time. Ironically, it was three English scholars who pioneered the island’s literary renaissance: Robin Flower (known to islanders as Bláithín, or Little Flower), Kenneth Jackson and George Thomson (also known as Seoirse Mac Thomáis).
In 1917 Tomás Ó Criomhthain, another Blasket-dweller, encouraged by the Kerry scholar Brian Ó Ceallaigh, wrote the classic An tOileánach (The Islandman), and paved the way for Peig Sayers. Encouraged by the scholars who recognised her talent, Peig agreed to have some of her stories written down. Peig’s son, known locally as Maidhc File (Mike the Poet), returned from the USA and committed her stories to paper directly as she told them in Irish. Her polished style and skill were such that they were composed perfectly and needed little editing. Jackson and Flower then published them in journals (An Lóchrann and An Claidheamh Soluis), and subsequently released a book called Scéalta ón mBlascaod (Stories from the Blasket).
After years of storytelling, a constant stream of visitors and a steadily growing fame, Peig was persuaded by the Irish scholar Máire Ní Chinnéide and the student Léan Ní Chonalláin to write her autobiography. Peig: Tuairisc a thug Peig Sayers ar imeachtaí a beatha féin (Peig: An account given by Peig Sayers on the events of her own life) was released in 1936, and in 1937 it won the prestigious Douglas Hyde prize.
In 1942 Peig, now nearly seventy years old, and Maidhc File returned to Dunquin, to the townland of Vicarstown (Baile Bhiocáire) where she had been born. Nearly blind, but still receiving visitors, Peig lived to the ripe old age of eighty-five. She is buried in the churchyard in Dunquin. Five years before her death, in 1953, the people of the Great Blasket Island finally admitted that island life was too hard for their ageing population. They evacuated to the mainland and the way of life that Peig had known came to an end forever.