IRISH-IN-UK-L Archives

From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: [Irish-in-UK] Blasket Islands/Kerry - Robin FLOWER/YorkshireScholar & Poet (1881-1946) O'GRADY
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:18:08 -0700

SNIPPET: Robin FLOWER (1881-1946) was born at Meanwood, Yorkshire. After a
distinguished undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Oxford, Flower
joined the British Museum (now the British Library) in 1906 as an assistant
to the Department of Manuscripts. He was to spend the rest of his working
life in the Museum, becoming Deputy-Keeper in 1929, until his premature
retirement of ill-health in 1944.

Robin FLOWER was a scholar poet who lived out his years in a rigorous
journey to define the nature and terrain of the culture of the medieval
world. Fortunately his journey took him to the heart of Irish culture both
in its manuscript translation and to that portion which survived
miraculously in the Irish-speaking areas of the west of Ireland at the
beginning of the twentieth century.

In 1910 Robin FLOWER came to the Blasket Island (off the coast of Co. Kerry
in SW Ireland) to study the spoken language and culture of the island
community, having decided to complete the cataloguing of the vast collection
of Irish Language manuscripts in the British Museum. This task had been
commenced by Standish Hayes O'GRADY (1832 - 1915), who was not able to
complete it because of illness. Flower corrected and extended O'GRADY's
text, and catalogued the manuscripts for the second volume.

FLOWER's undertaking was mammoth and necessitated him to learn Irish in its
old, medieval and modern forms. His decision to go to Dublin in 1910 to
study Old Irish, and thereafter to learn the living language, was crucial to
the formation and elaboration of the mind of this most distinguished
medievalist. His thorough knowledge of the literature of the Middle Ages',as
his friend Séamus Ó Duilearga, founding-father of the school of Irish
folklore, wrote at his death, 'enriched his sensitive appreciation of the
unique character of early and medieval Irish literature, as also the orally
preserved literature of the Gaeltacht which for Flower was part of the Irish
culture-heritage...'

When Robin FLOWER came to the Blasket Island in 1910, he took lodgings at
the house of Pádraig Ó Catháin. Ó Catháin (Peats Mhicí) was the island's
'king' - Ri an Oileáin. Carl Marstrander, the Norwegian linguistics scholar
who taught Old Irish to Robin Flower in Dublin, had lodged there in 1907 and
suggested to Flower that he might stay there also and meet the king's
brother-in-law, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and perhaps learn modern Irish from him
as Marstrander had done.

He lived on the Island sixty years
And those years and the Island lived in him,
Graved on his flesh, in his eyes dwelling,
And moulding all his speech,
That speech witty and beautiful
And charged with the memory of so many dead.
'Tomas', The Great Blasket, 1924

The islanders befriended FLOWER and gave him a pet name, Bláithin, from the
Irish word for Flower. Bláithin stepped into the life of the island where to
this day he is part of the collective memory of the survivors of the
Diaspora who now live on the mainland facing the island, or at Hungry Hill
in Boston, Mass.

The letters Flower received from the islanders for over forty years are now
among the Flower collection of papers kept in the Department of Irish
Folklore, University College, Dublin.

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• [Irish-in-UK] Blasket Islands/Kerry - Robin FLOWER/YorkshireScholar & Poet (1881-1946) O'GRADY by "Jean R." <>