The Aran Islands (Oxford Paperbacks)

by RobinSkelton (Editor), J.M.Synge (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1979

  $5.23

  The Aran Islands of Aranmor, Inishmaan, and Inishere lie thirty miles from Galway, and so attracted J M Synge that he returned to them time and again. He recounts here his travels and encounters on the islands, telling of magic wells, poteen drinkers, fishing expeditions in currachs, and stories told him by the solemn Pat Dirane, of islanders fallen victim to the druids and the fairies. Synge developed a great and reciprocated affection for these fine-featured people, for the ungovernable eyes and wild jests of the men, and for the dark beauty of the women, dressed in their heavy scarlett wool clothes. He faithfuly records the pathos and strangeness of the life of the Aran peasantry at the turn of the century. The book is illustrated with fourteen of Synge's own photographs depicting rope-making, kelp collecting and drying, threshing, wool-spinning, the horrors of evictions, and many other aspects of island life. 'I had some photographs to show them that I took here last year' which were 'examined with great delight, and every person in them identified.'

• Used

  Paperback
  2008

  $3.35

• New

  Paperback
  1992

  $13.38

  In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World . The Aran Islands , published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas. Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, 'If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two'. Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships - between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.