An Old Woman's Reflections

by Peig Sayers, Séamus Ennis (Translator)

Overview

Peig Sayers was ‘the Queen, of Gaelic story-tellers’. She was born in the parish of Dunquin in Kerry and married into a neighbouring island, the Great Blasket, where she spent most of her life. Students and scholars of the Irish language came from far and wide to visit her. She was, as Robin Flower wrote in The Western Island, ‘a natural orator, with so keen a sense of the turn of phrase and the lifting rhythm appropriate to Irish that her words could be written down as they leave her lips, and they would have the effect of literature with no savour of the artificiality of composition’.

Her Reflections are a collection of her fireside stories, most of them tales of her friends and neighbours on the Great Blasket, the island that also produced Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Tears A-Growing and Tόmas ό Crohan’s The Islandman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789122374
Publisher:	Borodino Books
Publication date:	09/03/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	547,425
File size:	849 KB

About the Author

PEIG SAYERS (1873-1958) was an Irish author and widely regarded as one of the best traditional Gaelic storytellers.

She was born Máiréad Sayers in 1873 in the townland of Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, the youngest child of Margaret “Peig” Brosnan and Tomás Sayers, himself a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to Peig. She was taken out of school at age 12 and worked as a servant for the Curran family in the nearby town of Dingle for two years. She then spent the next few years as a domestic servant working for members of the growing middle class produced by the Land War. Originally intending to join her best friend in America, Peig moved to the Great Blasket Island in 1892 after marrying Pádraig Ó Guithín, a fisherman and native of the island. The couple had 11 children, of whom six survived.

In the 1930s, Máire Ní Chinnéide, a Dublin teacher and regular visitor to the Blaskets, urged Peig to tell her life story to her son Micheál, resulting in the 1936 publication of Peig’s famous autobiography Peig. She went on to dictate 350 ancient legends, ghost stories, folk stories, and religious stories to Seosamh Ó Dálaigh of the Irish Folklore Commission.

She died in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland on 8 December 1958.

SÉAMUS ENNIS (1919-1982) was an Irish musician, singer and Irish music collector. He was most noted for his uilleann pipe playing and is widely regarded as one of the greatest uilleann pipers of all time. He is recognised for having preserved almost 2,000 Irish songs and dance-tunes as part of the work he did with the Irish Folklore Commission. From 1958, he worked as a freelance performer, translator and broadcaster in Ireland, Britain and America.