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Island Home: The Blasket Heritage
A look at the literary traditions of a small Island community in Ireland.
- GenresHistory
154 pages, Paperback
First published June 24, 1988
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About the author
George Derwent Thomson
29 books12 followersGeorge Derwent Thomson (Irish: Seoirse Mac Tomáis) was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 2, 2017
A Kerryman, who married into a family from the Great Blasket Island, gave me Island Home when I was in Ireland—this was one of the most touching gifts that I have ever received. His name is Donachu, transliterated from the Irish. He teaches Irish at a local school in Dingle, County Kerry and, in addition to teaching my classmates and me a few Irish words and phrases, he spoke to us about the Blasket Island storytellers—Tomás O’Crohan, Maurice O’Sullivan, Peig Sayers, and others—whose work he has studied closely. Donachu shares with me an admiration for these remarkable authors writing at the edge of the western world; upon learning that I was a Classics major at university, he insisted that I take his copy of Island Home, written by a twentieth century English classicist, George Thompson, who befriended Maurice O’Sullivan and learned the Irish language. I am deeply appreciative of his generous gift.
George Thompson, an authority on Aeschylus and the study of Greek, saw much of Homer in the Blasket Island storytellers. “The Blasket books have certain features in common with the Homeric poems,” he writes. “Those poems took shape out of shorter lays which had been transmitted orally over many centuries, and thanks to an exceptionally favourable combination of historical conditions the transition from speech to writing was effected so skillfully that many characteristic features of oral recitation were carried over into written literature.” Thompson maintains that more or less the same process was at play on the Blasket Island, which, in the early twentieth century, experienced a literary explosion beginning with the publication of The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan. With the encouragement of scholars such as Robin Flower and George Thompson, a small group of islanders devoted themselves to learning to read and write Irish, the only language that they spoke, whose rhythmic qualities were well-suited to their creative endeavors.
So far as I know, Thompson is the first scholar to take seriously the notion that Tomás and his successors were writing prose poetry that incorporated many of the same literary techniques used by Homer, such as “the use of ornamental epithets and set passages repeated without variation to describe recurrent situations,” and “extended passages descriptive of natural phenomena, all constructed on similar lines, with nothing to distinguish them from poetry proper except the lack of metrical form.” For Thompson—and I concur entirely— “if Odysseus was a hero, so was Tomás.” Indeed, “the scene of the Odyssey is laid in Ithaca, a rugged island in the far west. Its ruler, Odysseus, […] is not ashamed to work with his hands. […] He is a sea-captain, carpenter and stonemason, and can do a day’s mowing in the fields as well as any man.” Tomás of the Great Blasket Island describes himself in nearly the same terms.
I believe that there is much more scholarly work to be done with respect to this intriguing comparison. Island Home, in addition to serving as a primer on the history of the Blasket Islands and its inhabitants, is a robust foundation upon which classicists captivated by the poetic nature of The Islandman and Twenty Years A-Growing should build. “The poetical qualities inherent in Blasket speech are due to memories, conscious or unconscious, of the art of poetry as it had been practised over a period of more than a thousand years,” Thompson writes. In other words, for the Blasket islanders, speech is, in a sense, necessarily poetic. This is a bold claim, and one that perhaps demands more evidence. It is, however, an assertion with which I am inclined to agree. Despite the more than twenty-five hundred years between them, Homer and the Blasket writers are similarly dependent, in their poetic composition, on a culture based on oral transmission, whose mythic tales inspired their own epics.
George Thompson, an authority on Aeschylus and the study of Greek, saw much of Homer in the Blasket Island storytellers. “The Blasket books have certain features in common with the Homeric poems,” he writes. “Those poems took shape out of shorter lays which had been transmitted orally over many centuries, and thanks to an exceptionally favourable combination of historical conditions the transition from speech to writing was effected so skillfully that many characteristic features of oral recitation were carried over into written literature.” Thompson maintains that more or less the same process was at play on the Blasket Island, which, in the early twentieth century, experienced a literary explosion beginning with the publication of The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan. With the encouragement of scholars such as Robin Flower and George Thompson, a small group of islanders devoted themselves to learning to read and write Irish, the only language that they spoke, whose rhythmic qualities were well-suited to their creative endeavors.
So far as I know, Thompson is the first scholar to take seriously the notion that Tomás and his successors were writing prose poetry that incorporated many of the same literary techniques used by Homer, such as “the use of ornamental epithets and set passages repeated without variation to describe recurrent situations,” and “extended passages descriptive of natural phenomena, all constructed on similar lines, with nothing to distinguish them from poetry proper except the lack of metrical form.” For Thompson—and I concur entirely— “if Odysseus was a hero, so was Tomás.” Indeed, “the scene of the Odyssey is laid in Ithaca, a rugged island in the far west. Its ruler, Odysseus, […] is not ashamed to work with his hands. […] He is a sea-captain, carpenter and stonemason, and can do a day’s mowing in the fields as well as any man.” Tomás of the Great Blasket Island describes himself in nearly the same terms.
I believe that there is much more scholarly work to be done with respect to this intriguing comparison. Island Home, in addition to serving as a primer on the history of the Blasket Islands and its inhabitants, is a robust foundation upon which classicists captivated by the poetic nature of The Islandman and Twenty Years A-Growing should build. “The poetical qualities inherent in Blasket speech are due to memories, conscious or unconscious, of the art of poetry as it had been practised over a period of more than a thousand years,” Thompson writes. In other words, for the Blasket islanders, speech is, in a sense, necessarily poetic. This is a bold claim, and one that perhaps demands more evidence. It is, however, an assertion with which I am inclined to agree. Despite the more than twenty-five hundred years between them, Homer and the Blasket writers are similarly dependent, in their poetic composition, on a culture based on oral transmission, whose mythic tales inspired their own epics.
August 2, 2023
Having recently read the other book that talked about the European scholars who were drawn to the Blasket in the 20th century, I wanted to read this to hear directly from George Thomson about it.
He was working on this book when he died, so it may not be in the final form he intended, but it's interesting. Being extremely learned in European literature, he makes many comparisons between the way the Blasket islanders wrote and spoke, and ancient Greek or early Irish literature. None of these are things I would ever have noticed, but his examples are illuminating.
I don't know if they have the icky "noble savage" genre of thought in Europe, I'm kind of wary of that happening in cases like this, but Thomson's respect for the islanders is too great for that, and he doesn't romanticize their challenging livelihoods.
The profile of Thomson that is included in the book fills out the portrait of this interesting man and his relationship to the islanders.
He was working on this book when he died, so it may not be in the final form he intended, but it's interesting. Being extremely learned in European literature, he makes many comparisons between the way the Blasket islanders wrote and spoke, and ancient Greek or early Irish literature. None of these are things I would ever have noticed, but his examples are illuminating.
I don't know if they have the icky "noble savage" genre of thought in Europe, I'm kind of wary of that happening in cases like this, but Thomson's respect for the islanders is too great for that, and he doesn't romanticize their challenging livelihoods.
The profile of Thomson that is included in the book fills out the portrait of this interesting man and his relationship to the islanders.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews