12/05/2026
Some forgotten history from the Emerald Isle
She told her stories with her hands.
The English scholar Robin Flower of the British Museum, who came to the Great Blasket Island for the first time in 1910 and returned almost every summer for the next thirty years, wrote them down precisely. A small clap of the palms to cap a phrase. A flash of the thumb over the shoulder to mark a mystery. A hand hushed to the mouth for mischief.
She could not read or write the language she was speaking.
She had been born Máiréad Sayers — called Peig after her mother — in the small Kerry townland of Vicarstown, near Dunquin on the western tip of the Di**le Peninsula, on March 29, 1873. Her father, Tomás Sayers, was a master storyteller of the Kerry Gaeltacht. The neighbors gathered at the family hearth in the evenings to listen to him. Peig sat by the fire and listened. She absorbed every word. Every gesture. Every perfectly timed pause.
The British colonial education system actively discouraged the Irish language. Speaking Irish in the schoolyard could be punished. Reading and writing Irish was not taught at all.
She had hoped, at nineteen, to follow her friend Cáit to America. The promised passage money never arrived. Her brother arranged a marriage instead — to Pádraig Ó Guithín, a fisherman twelve years her senior from the Great Blasket Island.
On February 13, 1892, she crossed the three miles of open Atlantic between the Kerry coast and the island.
She lived there for the next fifty years.
The Great Blasket was home to approximately one hundred and fifty people. There was no priest. No doctor. No teacher for long stretches. The islanders lived on potatoes, fish, and what could be carried in a currach across three miles of cold water.
Peig bore eleven children. Six of them died before her — three in infancy, her daughter Siobhán of measles at eight, her son Tomás at twenty when he fell from a cliff while gathering heather in 1920. Her husband Pádraig died not long after.
In the evenings, when the neighbors gathered in her cottage for the airneáil — the traditional house-visiting that was the island's evening entertainment — she sat by the peat fire and she spoke.
The Norwegian linguist Carl Marstrander heard her speak in 1907. He told Robin Flower of the British Museum to come and listen. Flower came. He learned fluent Munster Irish in order to understand her. He spent the next thirty years writing her stories down by hand.
In 1936, two visiting Dublin teachers persuaded Peig to dictate her own life story to her son Mícheál. The book was published the same year. It opened with a line that became, for the next three generations of Irish schoolchildren, one of the most famous opening lines in the language:
I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge.
Peig won the Duais an Chraoibhín, the highest prize at the Oireachtas na Gaeilge literary competition, in 1937.
The author had never read it.
In 1938 the Irish Folklore Commission sent a young collector named Seosamh Ó Dálaigh to record her stories systematically. He spent the next fourteen years writing them down by hand, in pencil, sentence by sentence as she spoke. The final count was approximately four hundred and thirty-two distinct tales, filling more than five thousand manuscript pages.
In 1942 she left the island for the mainland. The Blasket was already dying. The Irish government formally evacuated the last twenty-two residents in 1953.
Peig Sayers died on December 8, 1958, in a hospital in Di**le, at eighty-five.
For the next four decades, every Irish secondary school student in the Republic was required to read her autobiography as a compulsory examination text. Generations of Irish teenagers grew to hate the name Peig.
The book they hated was not the book she had told. The Dublin editors of the 1936 manuscript had quietly stripped out most of her savage humor, her earthy observations, her irreverence, and her sharp comic timing — replacing the woman Robin Flower had recorded with a pious peasant who fit the romantic ideal of Catholic Gaelic Ireland.
The real Peig — the one Marstrander heard, the one Flower wrote down for thirty years, the one Ó Dálaigh's pencil followed across five thousand pages — is in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin.
She is funnier than the schoolchildren were ever told.
