Synge’s Aran Islands: Irish Culture, Folklore, and Daily Life
John Millington Synge’s Aran Islands Journey
At the turn of the 19th century, Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge made numerous visits to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. He had been encouraged to make his first visit in 1897 by his friend, William Butler Yeats, who told him: “Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.”
The Author’s Expectation and Reality
I wanted to read this book because I had imagined it to be one of those authentic travelogues that would tell me what it was like to live in a remote place at a time when tourism was not commonplace. And that, my friends, is pretty much exactly what I got, along with a healthy dose of fairy stories and some wonderful descriptions of breathtaking scenery.
Context: Synge’s Life and Legacy
As Tim Robinson points out in the introduction, the book is completely self-sufficient in the sense that Synge never explains why he went to the Aran Islands nor what impact it was to have on the rest of his life. But we know now that he spent his first summer there shortly after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, then completely untreatable. After his final visit, some five years later, he achieved extraordinary success with his play The Playboy of the Western World, first published in 1907, the same year The Aran Islands was published. He died just two years later.
Life on the Aran Islands: Synge’s Observations
The Aran Islands records the day-to-day lives of Irish peasants living in small fishing communities on one of the most rugged and windswept islands in the world. Here is Synge’s first impression of the island as he wanders along its “one good roadway”:
Connecting with the Island People
While a great deal of this book is about the landscape, the terrain, and the ever-present roaring sea, it is also about the people whom he befriends along the way. Here, huddled around turf fires, he not only perfects his Irish but collects stories and folklore from local residents. On his first visit, he meets a blind man who believes in the “superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world.”
Harsh Realities and Primitive Culture
Synge also records the harsh conditions in which the island’s tiny population lives and the difficulties that confront them in terms of feeding and clothing themselves adequately. His description of poverty-stricken villagers is, at times, heartbreaking. But he also enjoys experiencing the primitiveness of the culture, such as sailing on the ocean in a curagh—“a rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea”—and using handmade articles from natural materials—cradles, churns, baskets, and the like—which “seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world around them.” I particularly loved his descriptions of the island’s fashions.
The Impact of Progress on Island Life
Because Synge makes several visits over a five-year period, he is able to notice small changes to the culture with each visit he makes. Take this example, written during his fifth and final visit, in which he realizes that progress has made its mark, and not necessarily in a good way:
The Aran Islands: A Timeless Account
The Aran Islands is a fascinating account of another culture in another time confronted by development, or, as the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition so eloquently puts it, “the passionate exploration of an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism.” Not necessarily an easy read, but an enjoyable one nonetheless.