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Homeric Qualities in the Life and Literature of the Great Blasket Island

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

J. V. Luce
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Extract

In the ten years between 1929 and 1939 three remarkable books were produced in a tiny Irish-speaking community of less than one hundred and fifty people living on the Great Blasket, an island off the south-west coast of Kerry. The authors, two men and a woman, were peasants, eking out a scanty living by farming and fishing. They were technically literate in that they had acquired the rudiments of reading and writing at the island school, but for all practical purposes their culture was oral. They certainly had neither opportunity nor inclination for book-reading. Yet out of the resources of their oral culture they produced works of a high literary standard, one of which has (in translation) achieved the status of a ‘World's Classic’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , October 1969 , pp. 151 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1969

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References

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