Aran of the Saints
In what was to prove a recurring theme, the history of the Aran Islands begins with the arrival of a restless idealist seeking spiritual renewal amid the wilds of the Atlantic. Little is known for certain about St Enda (qv). Active in the late fifth/early sixth centuries, he renounced his inheritance, a minor kingdom along the Leinster-Ulster borderlands, to practice a transgressive foreign cult that was then fashionable among privileged youths keen on annoying their older relatives. He exiled himself to the western seaboard at a time when Irish ascetics were assiduously, if not to say competitively, scouring the most remote, inhospitable parts of the country for suitable hermitages.
His monastic outpost was at Killeaney on the east of Inis Mór, the largest of three storm lashed chunks of limestone standing parenthetically athwart Galway Bay. In the context of early Christian Ireland, these islanded purgatories (Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr) constituted prime real estate. The ancients, moreover, regarded isolated islands as otherworldly places and the Aran Islands would have exerted a particular fascination, perched as they were on the map’s edge, the next stop being the mythical land of Tír na nÓg. The sense of Aran serving as a gateway to something sacred or magical is borne out by the ‘Navigatio Brendani’, which has St Brendan (qv) visiting to receive Enda’s blessing before embarking on adventures that take in numerous enchanted islands (and perhaps America). Aran also presents as a place of religious refuge and divine revelation in the life of St Gobna(i)t (qv), who after fleeing to Inis Oírr experienced a life-changing vision there.
Enda gets the usual quota of miracles and announces himself by voyaging to Inis Mór on a large stone. He then quickly sees off the local pagan king, establishes a monastic rule that was considered severe even by Irish standards and mentors an impressive cast of future ecclesiastical celebrities, including St Ciarán (qv), St Jarlath (qv) and St Finnian (qv). Ireland’s earliest saints were not always worthy of the name, often behaving more like figures from Celtic mythology, and this was especially true of Enda who feuded enthusiastically with those other monks setting up for themselves on ‘his’ island. Aran folklore depicts him as a short-tempered martinet, even having him cast one of his more uppity disciples, a young St Colum Cille (qv), off a clifftop. Enda proved easier to love from a distance, and the fame of ‘Aran of the saints’ turned the islands into medieval Ireland’s most popular pilgrimage destination. Demand for churches, sanctuaries and hostels was such that Aran experienced a late medieval building boom, the remains of which are evident to this day.
Aran of the scholars
Following centuries of obscurity, the islands were rediscovered in the nineteenth century by antiquarians, drawn by its impressive ruins. George Petrie (qv) was the first significant visitor in the early 1820s, accumulating the knowledge that would allow him to revolutionise the study of Ireland’s ancient monuments. John O’Donovan (qv) and Samuel Ferguson (qv) followed at intervals, and the reputation and influence of these and other scholar-intellectuals generated growing interest.
In 1857 the dam burst when some seventy members of the British Association and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) descended on Inis Mór for an academic jolly unlike any other. The RIA’s secretary William Wilde (qv) (father to Oscar (qv)) organised the event and gave impromptu lectures, as the party moved from landmark to landmark. It proved a formative experience for the young Margaret Stokes (qv), who went on to become a leading authority on Ireland’s early Christian art and architecture. Proceedings climaxed with a banquet on the second evening in the ruins of Dún Aonghasa, an Iron Age fort crumbling into ‘an amazing eminence of the sea with cliffs of stupendous magnitude’. Amid much well-lubricated speechifying, Eugene O’Curry (qv) enjoined the bemused locals to conserve their architectural heritage.
These academics were for the most part protestant unionists and from this perspective they were summoning demons. For in reacting against their urban, cosmopolitan milieu, they idealised the simplicity of the islanders and of their way of life, while exalting them as racially pristine aboriginals untainted by the waves of invaders that periodically swept the mainland. It mattered not that genetic samples taken in the 1950s eventually exploded this theory: Irish nativists had found their new Mecca; it was the same as the old one.
From the 1890s ardent young nationalists and artistic dreamers flocked to the Aran Islands every summer to learn Irish, find creative inspiration and peer into their nation’s soul. Not necessarily in that order: Gaelic League luminary Agnes O’Farrelly (qv) had such shaky spoken Irish that she terrified a local boy by telling him he was going to hell (ifreann) rather than to mass (aifreann). So many cultural sightseers came that Lady Gregory (qv) wrote ‘I felt quite angry when I passed another outsider … I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and the seaweed gatherers’. St Enda would have understood.
Many of these new pilgrims were earnest zealots of the old school. In her memoirs, Inis Mór centenarian Bridget Dirrane (qv) recalled teenage summers spent serving tea to Patrick Pearse (qv) and Thomas MacDonagh (qv), as they excitedly planned their Easter 1916 rising. But Aran also attracted free spirits fleeing middle-class constraints: for Cesca Trench (qv) and others, it meant being able to go barefoot, swim, dance on the sand and wear peasant dress. It was also an opportunity to meet likeminded individuals of the opposite sex and same social class, an opportunity seized by the novelist Mary Butler (qv) and the historian Helena Concannon (qv) who both met their husbands on the islands. The islands’ inaccessibility and the mild inconveniences attendant on staying there helped strike just the right note of penitential exclusivity.
Aran in literature
There were notable Aran sceptics, some of a literary bent. The Anglo-Irish writing duo Edith Somerville (qv) and Violet Martin (qv) took a typically arch view in 1896 by observing: ‘To us nurturing a sulky flame in a gloomy pile of turf, the Simple Life resolved itself into two words: good servants.’ A much more melancholic line was taken by another Ascendancy author Emily Lawless (qv) whose Inis Meáin-set novel, Grania (1893), told the story of a fiery, independent-minded peasant woman ground down by her bleak surrounds and by an exploitative, do-nothing husband. (The main character, Grania O’Malley, is named after the celebrated sixteenth century pirate Gráinne (Grace) O’Malley or ‘Granuaile’ (qv) who plundered Aran in 1590). Although her Grania can be egregiously genteel, Lawless often succeeds in imaginatively bridging the gulf in lived experience between author and fictional creation – such initiatives still being permissible in those benighted times. Mercifully, she eschews the standard Victorian practice of having Irish characters speak in hokey Hiberno-English.
In his short story ’The Dead’, James Joyce (qv) included a conversation where Gabriel Conroy (loosely based on Joyce) is invited to the islands by Miss Ivors (loosely based on the Aran-besotted Gaelic Leaguer Kathleen Cruise O’Brien (qv)). Conroy declines and upon further questioning denies any interest in learning Irish or that it is his language, at which Miss Ivors brands him a West Briton. Joyce was uncomfortable with the romantic primitivism evoked by the Aran Islands, the more so because he recognised its power. On a trip home to Ireland in 1912, he visited the islands and published an article about it. His tone was fairly neutral. He had already found his muse in Edwardian Dublin (in Irish terms, the Aran Islands’ physical and spiritual antithesis), and he was not about to have his head turned.
The tensions between art and cultural nationalism define the career of the playwright John Millington Synge (qv) who put in five consecutive summers on Inis Meáin from 1898 after W. B. Yeats (qv) urged him to go to the Aran Islands ‘and express a life that has never found expression’. His masterworks, ‘Riders to the sea’ (1904) and ‘The playboy of the western world’ (1907), did just that by poeticising the hybrid dialect spoken by a people who thought in Irish even as they spoke in English. Determinedly ignoring the extent to which the islands were modernising rapidly, he projected his private angst and socialist politics onto its inhabitants, doing more than anyone to consolidate the popular view of them as quasi-sacrificial symbols of communal suffering and, ultimately, of national redemption. Yet ‘Playboy’, which transplanted Synge’s islanders to Co. Mayo, in also highlighting that ‘great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed’, and with salty language to boot, outraged urban bourgeois nationalists wedded to a heroic vision of Ireland’s western peasantry.
In the twentieth century Aran finally began speaking for itself, though its native writers struggled to find their true voice. Whereas Thomas O’Flaherty’s (qv) journalism highlighted the desperate poverty of communities such as Aran, his short stories cannot resist presenting life there as a picturesque adventure. The unflinchingly naturalistic short stories and novels of his brother Liam O’Flaherty (qv), however, represents the best and most realistic works of fiction set on the islands, doing much to dispel the enveloping mists of Celtic revival romanticism. Yet Liam O’Flaherty’s use of the islands as a metaphor for delineating lonely and isolated characters echoed Lawless and Synge in speaking more to his own alienation than to reality.
So too with the Irish language poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin (qv). Shielded during his upbringing from the harsher physical aspects of life on Inis Mór and then traumatised by his move from a tight-knit rural community to anonymous desk-bound drudgery in Dublin, he reacted initially by lyricising Aran in a near-numinous vein. Synge’s shade would have nodded approvingly at his description of the islanders ‘ag labhairt filíochta i ngan fhios dóibh féin’ (speaking poetry unknown to themselves). Ó Direáin’s later works took a more cold-eyed view of his birthplace and acknowledged that his poetic sensibility had always made him something of an outsider there. The Irish state preferred to draw upon his earlier poems for its secondary school Irish curriculum.
The image of Aran
A combination of ideology and aesthetics has made the Aran Islands the most visually recorded part of Ireland. The interest in images of Aran first became clear with the popularity of Frederic Burton’s (qv) tear-jerker ‘The Aran fisherman’s drowned child’ (1841). Depicting the islanders in an exoticised manner, this painting typified the nineteenth-century European romantic idiom. Burton had never been to Aran and the clothing and the cottage interior are more suggestive of Connemara. But prints of a painting entitled ‘The Connemara fisherman’s drowned child’ would not have sold nearly as well.
Aran’s potential was not fully tapped in artistic terms until 1905 when the aura of rugged self-reliance emanating from Jack Yeats’s (qv) ‘The man from Aranmore’ birthed a nationalist archetype. It was in reaction to the burgeoning nativist iconography surrounding the west of Ireland in general and Aran in particular, that William Orpen (qv) painted ‘The holy well’ (1916), which showed nude pagans being transformed into fully clothed Christians on an island abounding in monastic ruins. This satirical work missed its mark, mainly because Orpen was, as usual, more interested in celebrating the naked female form.
The figure in Aran fisherman’s garb surveying the scene looks exactly like Orpen’s student Sean Keating (qv), who was by then obsessed with the islands. Throughout his long and successful career Keating turned to Aran for inspiration. Adopting an Orpenesque style (minus the erotica) for decidedly non-Orpenesque political purposes, he constructed a visual identity for the new Irish state based around quaintly dressed hardy men and fair colleens set against an Atlantic backdrop.
Man of Aran
The islands’ visual apotheosis came in 1934 with the release of the film, Man of Aran. It was directed by Robert Flaherty (qv), an American documentary maker whose acclaimed ethnographies were not so much faithful snapshots of remote communities as idealised reconstructions of their past. Ensconcing himself in Inis Mór’s ‘big house’, he lived in grand style throughout the two-year shoot even bringing in a cordon bleu chef. This contrasted with the backwardness that he went out of his way to find everywhere else. Flaherty’s preconception derived from his reading of Synge and like Synge and many others he saw there what he wanted to see, the layers of mythologising building on each other. The much-embellished published reminiscences of local raconteur Pat Mullen (qv), Flaherty’s indispensable assistant on the shoot, added yet another sediment, highlighting how Aran dwellers have often been complicit in the dramatisation of their lives.
Man of Aran’s most famous scenes show the islanders hunting sharks, which they had not done for generations, and rowing a currach in mountainous seas, when they would never have gone out in such weather. No humans were harmed in the making of the film, though Flaherty admitted ‘I should have been shot for what I asked those superb people to do’. Lauded by the rulers of the Irish Free State for endorsing their mantra of national self-sufficiency, Man of Aran was received in other quarters as implicitly fascist but has since transcended such interpretations to become an acknowledged classic.
From the middle of the last century, Aran’s mystique has become a much marketed, some would say shop-worn, commodity, and nothing encapsulates this more than that incarnation of contrived authenticity, the Aran sweater. The white knitted sweaters worn by Aran fishermen dated only to the turn of the twentieth century, but within a generation the improvised patterns were being passed off as ancient Celtic symbols. Through her Country Shop in Dublin Muriel Gahan (qv) played an important role from the 1930s in initiating the sale of specifically Aran branded sweaters and in encouraging the development of its local production into a skilled craft, which eventually involved almost all the women on the islands.
Padraig Ó Síocháin (qv) was the latest in a long line of questing self-starters to fetch up in Aran and he began exporting the sweaters in the 1950s, whetting foreign demand with his line in commercially savvy cod mysticism. Sales boomed in the 1960s once the internationally popular folk group, the Clancy brothers (qv), delivered God’s own product placement by embracing the Aran sweater as a sartorial trademark, ultimately making it a hoary cliché of Irishness. That the look resonated strongly with Irish Americans only intensified the cultural cringe felt by many in the old country, which was by then striving desperately to be new.
For all the baggage that it now carries, Aran and its mythos have become too lucrative to be dispensed with – witness the hordes of tourists that have pilgrimaged there in ever increasing numbers in recent decades – and remain too integral to the nation’s historic sense of itself to be overlooked. It helps too that there is enough substance to the story, enough natural beauty, great art and genuine history for the Aran Islands to endure as a source of inspiration, fascination and enchantment.