Sayers, Peig (1873–1958)

Irish storyteller. Born Máiréad (Margaret) Sayers in Vicarstown, Dunquin, County Kerry, Ireland in March 1873 (exact date unknown but christened on March 29); died in Dingle, County Kerry, on December 8, 1958; youngest child of Tomás Sayers and Máiréad Ní Bhrosnacháin (Margaret "Peig" Brosnan) Sayers; educated at Dunquin National School; married Pádraig Ó Guithín (Patrick Flint), in February 1892; children: two daughters, four sons.

Swedish folklore scholar Bo Almqvist maintains that it would be hard to find Peig Sayers' match as a storyteller anywhere in the world. According to family tradition, the Sayers family was originally of English origin but by the mid-19th century had become completely gaelicised, dispossessed and poor, ekeing out a living in the remote southwest of Ireland. Her father Tomás Sayers was a renowned storyteller who passed on many of his tales to his youngest child Peig. His own life had been marred by tragedy. He had lived through the Great Famine of the 1840s but after his marriage to Peig Brosnan of Castleisland their first nine children had died in infancy. The Sayerses then moved to the town-land of Vicarstown, near the village of Dunquin at the westernmost tip of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, in late 1872. Six months later in March 1873 their last child was born. She was always known as Peig, after her mother.

The Dingle Peninsula was an area of outstanding scenic beauty and, by the time of Peig's birth, one of the last bastions of the native Irish language. (These Irish-speaking areas, called the Gaeltacht, were gradually being eroded by the spread of English.) The region was also being eroded by emigration for it was one of the poorest in Ireland and still very much dependent on potatoes as a staple food. America was a magnet for its young people, and there was a long-established process of chain migration whereby emigrant relatives and friends would send the passage money back to other relatives and friends in Ireland. As the youngest child, Peig was cherished by her parents; she was particularly close to her father whom she described as a quiet, sensible man. When she was seven, the family peace was disturbed by her brother Sean's new wife who came to live with them. Her sister-in-law was bad-tempered and took out her anger on Peig and her father. At age 12, Peig was taken out of school and went to work as a servant for the Curran family who were merchants in the nearby town of Dingle.

Sayers was lucky in that she was treated well by her employers. In her autobiography, she writes that after two years with the Currans she became ill and returned to Vicarstown, though she does not describe the illness. She and her best friend, Cáit Boland , talked often of emigration, as most of their contemporaries had by now left for America. Then Boland went, promising to send back fare money to Sayers as soon as possible. In the meantime, Peig, expecting the fare within a year, took a job as a farm servant, a notoriously hard form of work. Four years later, Boland wrote Sayers telling her that she had had an accident and would not be able to send the money. This was a major blow. Sayers returned to Vicarstown where her brother arranged a marriage for her with Pádraig Ó Guithín, from Great Blasket Island. The Blaskets, a group of islands some miles off the Dingle Peninsula, were places of great beauty in summer, but in winter they were bleak, desolate, exposed to the Atlantic winds, and often cut off for weeks at a time by the dangerous winter tides. Though arranged, the marriage was happy, and Peig soon made close friends on Great Blasket. She and Pádraig had eleven children, of whom six survived. In summer, the unspoiled, almost archaic way of life of the islands attracted many visitors, including students of the Irish language from Britain and Europe. The Norwegian scholar Carl Marstrander visited the island in 1907 and was deeply impressed with Sayers. Shortly afterwards, Marstrander met the young English scholar, Robin Flower, who was working on Irish manuscripts at the British Museum, and urged him to visit the Blaskets. Flower fell in love with them and their people and visited almost every year for the rest of his life. He became a fluent Irish speaker and was keenly appreciative of Peig Sayers' stories and tales. It was largely through Flower's writings that the academic world was alerted to Sayers' storytelling gifts.

But life on Great Blasket was becoming more difficult. Sayers later described the year 1920 as the worst of her life: her second-youngest child was killed in a cliff accident and by the end of that year two of her other children had emigrated to America. Her husband died in 1921. One by one the rest of her children set out for America in the 1920s. Though her son Micheál left in 1930, he soon returned and earned his living by sheep-rearing and writing poetry. A Dublin teacher, Máire Ní Chinnéide , who was a regular visitor to the Blaskets, urged Peig to tell her story to Micheál. He then sent the manuscript pages to Ní Chinnéide in Dublin who edited them for publication. Peig was published in 1936. A second volume, Machnamh Sean-mhná (An Old Woman's Reflections), also edited by Ní Chinnéide, was published in 1939. The indefatigable Flower urged the head of the Irish Folklore Commission to send a full-time collector to speak to Peig. Thus in 1938, Seosamh Ó Dálaigh (Joseph Daly) arrived; he would spend several years recording 350 ancient legends, ghost stories, folk stories, and religious stories of Peig's on an Ediphone cylinder. Ó Dálaigh recalled that Sayers' forte was the short tale: "from the opening of the narrative one would have no idea where the tale might turn."

By this time the Blaskets were in terminal decline and many islanders left during the Second World War. Peig, her son and her brother-in-law went back to live near Vicarstown on the mainland at the end of 1941. After a bad fall in the late 1940s, her health deteriorated, and she spent the last eight years of her life in the Dingle Hospital. She was remembered by one of the nuns there as "very stately and very dignified." A further volume of autobiography, Beatha Pheig Sayers, was published posthumously in 1970.

Sayers' legacy has been complex. For generations of Irish schoolchildren for whom Peig was a compulsory set text in the Irish curriculum, her image is negative and, as perceived in the books, her existence seemed to consist of hard work, grief and resignation to the will of God. It was also presented in official circles as the authentic picture of Gaeltacht life, which it certainly was not. These perceptions were helpful neither to the reputation of Sayers herself nor to the language she loved. Scholars have also made the important point that the books were not written by Peig but were reminiscences which she dictated to others; they also observe that the autobiographical genre was not suited to her mode of traditional storytelling. Plans for full publication of her stories (most of which have never been published) are in preparation and should provide the basis for a fairer assessment of her legacy.

sources:

Flower, Robin. The Western Island. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945. New ed. 1973.

Sayers, Peig. Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island. First published in Irish in 1936 and translated from Irish by Bryan MacMahon. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1973.

——. An Old Woman's Reflections. First published in Irish in 1939 and translated from Irish by Seamus Ennis with an introduction by W.R. Rodgers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

The Voice of Generations: The Story of Peig Sayers. Radio Telifís Éireann (Dublin) documentary, December 8, 1998.

Deirdre McMahon , lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland