3/17/2023 0 Comments Peig sayers house![]() They’ve also long been renowned as singers, musicians and storytellers who brought news, tales, songs and music from townland to townland, parish to parish and county to county as they travelled around Ireland. ![]() Historically, Travellers were called Tinkers, a reference to their trade as tinsmiths, and they also made a living through engaging with the settled community by buying and selling animals, or through seasonal farm labour. Irish Travellers, known in their own language as Mincéirs or Pavees and in Irish called ‘An Lucht Siúil or, ‘The Walking People’, are a nomadic ethnic minority in Ireland with a distinct history, culture and identity. Blúiríní Béaloidis 37 is online now, I hope you'll join Pádraig, Éilís and I as we ask 'who was that Peig Sayers'? Pádraig Ó Héalaí, in the beautiful surrounds of the Museum of Literature Ireland and for the first time in front of a live studio audience - something which was a great pleasure for me personally! Thanks to my guests Éilís and Pádraig, to our friends at MoLI for taking such good care of us on the night and especially to all who came along in person and made the evening so pleasant! This podcast also marks the launch of Thar Bealach Isteach / Into the Island, a nine month collaborative exhibition between MoLI and the NFC, which looks at Peig Sayers and the Blasket Island storytelling tradition. For episode 37 of Blúiríní, I was honoured to have been joined by Dr. Now, nearly sixty-five years after her death, we hope to provide a platform through which her tales might find a new audience, one which, it is hoped, may find in her a source of inspiration and insight. This green bench where she used to do the studying will be a domicile for the birds of the wilderness, and the little house where she used to eat and drink, it's unlikely there'll be a trace of it there." For this episode of Blúiríní, instead of focusing on one aspect of tradition, we for the first time dedicate our explorations to one individual Mairéad ‘Peig’ Sayers who, by her artistry and mastery as a storyteller in the oral tradition, skilfully managed to express the wisdom of the many in the wit of the few, and yet whose printed autobiographies (as Irene Lucchitti notes in an article in Folklore and Modern Irish writing) ‘experienced a decline in reputation, suffering critical disdain and schoolyard ridicule in equal measure’. A person here and a person there will say, maybe, 'Who was that Peig Sayers?' but poor Peig will be the length of their shout from them. Someone else will have pastime out of my work when I'm gone on the way of truth. Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people."Long as the day is, night comes, and alas, the night is coming for me too. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone. Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island. Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished. laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him. Peig said of her son Tomas, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers. ![]()
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