The Gaelic Revival
With the burgeoning fascination for all things Gaelic from the 1890s onwards, the Aran Islands, along with the Blaskets, became the subject of great sociological and linguistic enquiry, the most famous of their literary visitors being J.M. Synge. His writings brought the islands to the attention of other intellectuals involved in the Gaelic Revival , and the notion of a surviving community of pure Gaels provided fuel for the Nationalist movement. Ironically, this notion may have been misconceived. The distinct physical type found on Aran - the dark skin, large brow and Roman nose - is, some argue, the legacy of the Cromwellian soldiers who were left on the islands. The islands themselves have produced many fine writers: Liam O'Flaherty from Inishmore wrote several acclaimed novels, most notably the Informer (1925) and Famine (1937), while Gaelic poet Mairtin O'Direain wrote twentieth-century verse describing the hardship of island life ag coraiocht leis an gcarraig lom ("wrestling with the bare rock"). In 1934, Robert Flaherty made his classic documentary Man of Aran , which recorded the ancient and disappearing culture he found here. (The film can be seen during the summer in Halla Ronain, Kilronan.) While the folklore and traditions recorded in the film have obviously declined, currachs - light wood-framed boats covered formerly with hide, now with tar-coated canvas - are still used for fishing and for getting ashore on the smaller islands when the ferry can't pull in, and you may even witness, as in the film, a man fishing with a simple line off the edge of a 200ft cliff. Fishing and farming are still very much a way of life on Inishmaan, while tourism is the major earner on Inishmore and Inisheer. This means that, though their purpose will change, knowledge of these customs will not vanish, and tourism may even help ensure the language survives, as Irish provides the islanders with a curtain of privacy against the visitors.
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