In Wicklow and West Kerry illustrated

by J.M. Synge

Collection of articles and narratives about travelling in counties Wicklow and Kerry. Originally published in 1912.

Genres: Ireland, Travel, History, Essays, Nonfiction, Literature

111 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.

Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view.

Reviews

[Pam]

I’m not exactly sure why this book was published. J. M. Synge was primarily an Irish playwright of the late 19th and early 20th century and died young, a few years before this was first published. His chosen subject was the common, real people of rural Ireland. I read that he lived on the Aran Islands for several years researching its landscape, language and people and wrote a book about that experience too.

In this book he travels (mostly walks) two areas of Ireland and again talks with people he meets and soaks up the language and landscape. West County Kerry at that time was mostly Irish language speaking. It’s not a travel book really. As much as anything, the book seems like a personal journal with notes to self. He spends lots of time chatting people up about their lives, their remembrances of the famine, folk stories and interesting gossip about their neighbors. One thing that comes up a lot is their thoughts about relatives and friends that have left for opportunities in America.

Synge ran with the Lady Gregory/W. B. Yeats crowd, was a socialist, nationalist, populist and romantic by disposition. There is no theme here. I’d call it sketches. You could say Mark Twain wrote sketches too, but his ended up as polished stories and novels. Synge’s book on Wicklow and West County Kerry lacks that. There is a very small unsigned preface (one paragraph) that says some pieces were printed in a literary journal and some in the Manchester Guardian. His description of a week or so on Blasket Island must fall into that category. I liked it much better than the rest.

I’d recommend this to people wanting a small picture of rural Ireland around the turn of the 20th century as well as anyone interested in Synge and the Irish Dramatic Movement.

[Paul]

Shows Synge in full folklorist/social historian mode. Delightful and all too brief

[Bruce]

Pleasurable reading; like drinking good sun tea in the summer! Definitely don't want to speed read!

[Stephen A. Matthews]

This is an account of John M Synge’s travels in and around County Wicklow and County Kerry. I enjoyed the latter tales/stories the most - perhaps more akin to the Synge tales of Aran - that is, his experiences living and traveling in the West of Ireland. The Wicklow tales are more structured in that there are several short chapters with a single main theme. The Kerry tales are one long chapter with many loosely connected (even unrelated) tales told back-to-back-to-back. Again, the Kerry tales are laid out in much the same way as the Aran island tales. Much of both sets of tales (from east and west Ireland) are based on Synge’s encounters with people while walking, riding in carts or on trains in the regions in question. He recounts his fellow travelers’ tales and these provide insights into the lives of the individuals and the peoples of Ireland. Poverty, hard work, ill health, drinking, death, famine, migration (to US mainly), and resilience are major themes that appear throughout the book. When I was reading I was constantly looking at Google Maps and examining the places that Synge describes. It was interesting to see how in some of the more remote parts of County Kerry that some of the buildings/villages are today mere shells of their former selves and while their are local museums and laudable efforts to preserve the hertiage of the Kerry folk one does get a sense that something is lost or more hopefully just hanging on. Synge’s writings are one way their stories and lives are being preserved for current and future generations.