News was swapped, and the news often gave the lead for the night's subject, death, fairies, weather, crops.' All was grist to the mill, the sayings of the dead and the doings of the living, and Peig, as she warmed to her subject, would illustrate it richly from her repertoire of verse, proverb and story. ‘I wish I had the ability to describe the scene in Peig Sayers's home in Dunquin on a winter's night when the stage was set for the seanchaí’, writes Seosamh Ó Dálaigh to me… ‘When the visitors arrived (for all gathered to the Sayers house when Peig was there to listen to her from supper-time till midnight) the chairs were moved back and the circle increased. Rodger's 'Introduction' to An Old Woman's Reflections (1962, xii-xiv), the translation by Seamus Ennis of her autobiographical account, Machtnamh Seana-Mhná (1939): The storytelling occasions when Peig, seated in front of the fire, in her home in Baile Bhiocáire, entranced her audience, were vividly recalled by Seosamh Ó Dálaigh in his diary accounts of his collecting sessions with her and in W. This was the context in which Peig Sayers narrated tales while she lived on the Island, and afterwards in Baile Bhiocáire, Dunquin, after her return to the mainland in 1942. The custom of house visiting provided a structure for night-time entertainment of which storytelling was a part. In the remote, windswept Great Blasket Island lying in the Atlantic Ocean off the south-west coast of county Kerry, entertainment continued to be community based for as long as the island remained inhabited. Photograph of Peig Sayers as she was in the 1950s Kerry County LibraryEnlarge image An Blascaod Mór and Baile Bhiocáire, Dunquin, Co.
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