![]() None has any copyright notice, but Beatha Pheig Sayers, although written in the first person, is actually credited to Maidhc. It also seems that she might not have had much occasion to write after her schooldays, so she might have lost the facility (indeed, in her later years, she is reported as saying that she had forgotten much of her English). It seems to me a reasonable judgement that she learned to write in school, probably in English only. Others make the wider claim that she was illiterate.īut it seems to widely accepted that she did not actually write the books attributed to her: she dictated the content. Some assert that she was illiterate in Irish (something I already mentioned as a phenomenon in that place at that time) inviting the inference that she was literate in English. ![]() There are signs of the same few short paragraphs being recycled in many places. If you google on "Peig Sayers illiterate" you will score a lot of hits, but on looking through the first few pages I don't see anything that has a convincing ring of authority. On balance I think the argument that she could write is convincing and unless a school roll books appeared and she was not in them we need to accept her version. It would be nice to think her son Michael who took down her stories owned the copywrite. Through the course of this marriage, Peig had 10 children, though only 5 survived to adulthood those that survived later emigrated to America (except for Michael, who later returned). Together, they moved back to the island, and celebrated their wedding (though the festivities were dampened by the joint wake of her beautiful niece). This turned out to be one of the wisest decisions she had made, for she fell madly in love with her husband, Peats Guinean, at first sight. ![]() ![]() She trusted her brother whole-heartedly, and when he advised her to marry this man from the Great Blasket Island, she put her apprehensions and fears of isolated and dangerous island life aside and accepted the proposal without even seeing her future husband ( Peig, pg. Once this obligation had been completed, Peig received news from her beloved brother that a match was to be made. I think there are some descendants in the US, around Springfield, Massachusetts, the preferred destination for Blasket Island emigrants. Maidhc was the only one in the country in the latter days of her life, and he had no family. I think that there are no direct descendants of Peig left in Ireland. Much of the rest of the material went into another book, Beatha Pheig Sayers which is, in my opinion, a nicer and less miserable read. There was, in fact, too much material for one book, so what many people encountered in school was an editor's selection. I remember reading somewhere Maidhc's version: " we wrote a book". The books (there is more than one book attributed to her) were actually written by her son Maidhc, but she provided the content. Some people back in that area in those days were literate in English, even though it was a second, school-learnt language, but unable to read or write in their first language. So far as I know, there is nothing extant that is written in her hand. There are doubts about Peig being literate. There probably is a lot of unpublished material etc. Peig herself was bi-lingual and literate and probably a bit of a spoofer which a seanachai should be.
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