Skellig Michael is a rock jutting 217 meters straight out of the Atlantic swell some 14 km off Ireland’s westernmost coast. It bears the brunt of what the Gulf Stream throws at the mainland, so it is fiendishly hard to land on. Nevertheless, it’s been visited since Celtic times by the odd persevering pilgrim — druids were drawn to the impossible fresh-water spring on its cliffs, and in the 6th century, a hermit went to live on its grassy summit, closer to God. A few more pilgrims stayed, and thus Ireland’s most fabled hermitage came to be. There were never more than a handful of monks present, but over the centuries they built a warren of beehive huts at the summit, and carved steps into the cliffsThey held out until the 13th century, when climate change forced them to abandon the monastery. Detailed histories of the island can be found here and here..

Skellig Michael is on the left, further away. Little Skellig, a bird sanctuary, looms on the right.

Until Irish monks discovered Iceland in the 9th century, Skellig lay at the edge of the world. Ships rounding Ireland had to pass by it or flounder founder on its cliffs. Vikings took an interest, and raided the monastery in 812, and again in 823. In 993, the viking Olav Trygvasson visited, was impressed, and came away baptised. He went back to Norway, became King Olav I, and forcibly converted his country to Christianity. Norwegians, then, have Skellig to thank for their religionScilly Islanders are under the impression Olav was baptised on their islands. Both Scilly and Skellig (Sceilig in Irish) are derived from the Gaelic word for rock. But it’s Skellig that had the hermits, and it’s Skellig that induces the fear of God in people. Vikings would have had coddled Scilly islanders for breakfast. The original account (including a mistranslation of Sceilig) is here (scroll down to para. 32). It’s gripping reading, what these vikings got up to..

This is Little Skellig, close up. The white specks are thousands of birds.

Almost a thousand years later, a Norwegian returned the favor. Thirty kilometers to the North of Skellig, some 5 km off the end of Dingle peninsula, lie the Blasket Islands, Skellig lookalikes save for the largest, Great Blasket, a long narrow ridge with grassy slopes. It too is often made unapproachable by the Atlantic swell, but for hundreds of years it supported a hamletful of fishermen farmers.

This community was perhaps Ireland’s remotest. By the turn of the 20th century, most of Ireland had switched to English, but Blasket Islanders still spoke Irish, though their numbers were thinning. In 1907, the Norwegian linguist Carl Marstrander visited Great Blasket and soon had the islanders convinced they were a living treasure of language and folklore. He proved to be the proverbial grain of sand in the oyster; the villagers began to write, and the result was a splendid and prolific literary harvest. Marstrander and his protégés got to the island just in time; the village was abandoned in 1953.

The northwest coastline of Great Blasket Island, looking southwest towards America.

I visited both Skellig and Great Blasket last week. I wasn’t able to set foot on Skellig — the swell was too great on the appointed day — but the island was certainly imposing. George Bernard Shaw’s own account of his visit finds him grasping for words, so I won’t even attempt my own rendition, at least not until I set foot on the island, next time. As our little boat bobbed in the wash of the waves crashing against the rocks, the three most annoying of the 12 passengers threw upNo, Felix, I wasn’t one of them., to my great satisfaction. One of them was an unpleasant German who had previously been snarky about my picture-taking, in German to his wife, but I had understood him perfectly. The captain merely smiled and looked away — at 35 euros a head, I wouldn’t mind rinsing landlubber vomit off my boat either. Perhaps Skellig is closer to God.

The Blasket Islands seen from Dunquin, the closest village on the mainland.

Great Blasket Island is on the verge of being discovered by mainstream tourism. There is a visitor center in place on the mainland, and a 3-room hostel and cafe are open for the duration of the summer, when the island is serviced by a small ferry. For now, many of the visitors are daytrippers of a literary bent; they’ll navigate the abandoned village, book in hand, retracing the steps of the characters they’ve read about. Some come for a few days, erecting tents in the husks of abandoned cottages, in search of shelter, and a little horizontal space on this diagonal island.

The northwest coastline of Great Blasket Island, looking northeast towards the Dingle peninsula.

My own appreciation of the islanders’ literary feats came after I visited. The day I was there, I merely clambered around the island, seeking more and more incredible views. Now that I’ve read Peig’s stories, and Eibhlis’s letters, and as I’m in the middle of The Islandman, their lives are being evoked with an immediacy that few books I’ve read can muster. The whole collection forms a web of narratives spanning generations, sharing characters, yet each with an honest, distinct perspective.

So there you have it: An island of Irish monks and an island of Irish writers, both intimately linked to Norway. It’s stranger than fiction.

Dublin has the best bookstores I’ve ever seen. They’re like the London specialty ones, but cheaper. In this town, the section for books by local writers holds vast swathes of the English-language corpus. And these stores litter the city, interspersed by traditional cafés like Bewley’s where people really sit and read for hoursAnd I thought Ireland was all about the pubs..

All this literary splendor is lost on summer’s most ubiquitous Dubliners — schoolkids from Italy and Spain, sent by la mama to learn English in a Catholic country, lest they be corrupted by Protestantism and notions of divorce. From what I can tell, their exposure to English amounts to the daily ordering of a Big Mac Menu from the McDonalds on Grafton Street, where these hormonal hordes congregate for lunch.

But they cannot avoid exposure to some of the greatest Irish fiction, because it is found on Dublin bus timetables. These have no connection whatsoever to actual bus appearances. When buses do appear, they arrive in clots, and then they are frequently half full by New York standards, which means the driver decides no more passengers could fit, so he guns it past the busstop. Even if his bus is empty, he might still decide to drive by you if you fail to hail sufficiently eagerly. Should you be fortunate enough to actually catch a bus, don’t try to get off via the back door, they don’t actually work. If you do something New Yorkish like yelling “back door!” when they refuse to open, or perhaps try to follow the instructions (“Push to open,” no mention of emergencies), you will be reprimanded by the driver.

I also discovered today that Dublin barbers are very good. Here they actually seem to know what to do with a bald pate in need of mowing. In Stockholm, barbers study my head quizzically, then peck at it haltingly with miniature tools, as if short hair requires small measures. In Dublin, it is shorn with confidence.

The worst thing I could say about Dublin is that visually, it is probably the EU’s least impressive capitalProbably, because I have yet to visit Helsinki. And Luxemburg is certainly in the running.. But I really don’t mind the lack of eye candy; I suspect it is because Dubliners have never been materialists. In any case, the labors of its favorite sons are much more impressive than a monument or two. Anyone can build a monument.

This may explain the relative unease that has greeted the latest “modern” monument in Dublin — a 120-meter high metal spike, in a renovated part of town, that the locals have yet to fully adopt. It is a piece of public architecture tailor-made for deconstruction. It is tall, and strong, yet it seems the planners were unsure how much of a statement it should make. The spike has a brushed-metal sheen, and in the typical overcast skies it all but disappears. It projects ambivalence, above all else, but this may be apt: The go-go 90s and all this talk about the Celtic Tiger are a notable departure from the traditional image the Irish have of themselves. They are not yet comfortable in the role of EU wunderkind, because it is a success measured by criteria such as GDP growth and per capita income, not the traditional criteria Ireland excels at: per capita great writers; net cultural exports.

Dubliners autoanalyse themselves, of course, and rather articulately so:

“The Irish are the blacks of Europe, Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the North Siders are the blacks of Dublin … so say it loud — I’m black and I’m proud!”

So says Jimmy in the 1991 film The Commitments. The prosperity of the intervening decade must have softened this self-image somewhat. I remembered Jimmy’s line while watching the East German nostalgia comedy Good Bye Lenin! at the excellent Irish Film Center,The center is in Dublin’s Temple Bar, as in the neighborhood, not the bar. I’m sure many more New Yorkers have been confused. and it struck me that recent Irish experience must have more in common with that of the Eastern Europeans. Newfound wealth, spread unevenly, is worn uneasily, with much fretting about maintaining an identity forged amid privationGood Bye Lenin!, while funny enough, could have benefited from a thicker slathering of British comic timing. The film is primarily a cathartic exercise for ex-East Germans, though, with us as incidental audience. My main peeve: Using the musical score from Amélie to heighten the emotional appeal is merely distracting. Get your own score, I say..

Dublin is now among the world’s most expensive cities. In the eurozone, it ranks second only to Milan; in the EU, it is fourth after London and Copenhagen. 21st in the world, it climbed from 73rd last year. Take a moment, then, to permanently sever the connection you have in your mind between the words “Ireland” and “cheap”.

Despite the material successes in Ireland’s recent history, the Irish above all remain geniuses at intangibles — dance, music, but especially the narrative form. Take a great English writer, and there’s a good chance he’s Irish. Shaw, Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Swift, Beckett, Trollope, Heaney, and many others… For a nation of under 5 million, that amounts to punching way above its weight.

The following is perhaps a stretch, and I am too new to Ireland to back it up, so I would appreciate constructive criticism/flamings, butI’m off to Dingle peninsula tomorrow for 5 days of hiking, so it is entirely possible my first exposure the West coast demolishes the basic premise of this post.: my hunch is that the deft hand with which the Irish handle a yarn is a skill passed on from Celtic times, where culture’s core revolved around great mythic sagas. Christianity, when it reached Irish shores, also took on a reverence for ancient texts. My theory, then, is that in traditional Irish culture the narrative takes precedence over the visual. And when the Irish have excelled at visual arts — when they illuminated those monkish tomes — it was done in the service of a narrative. The end result: More great writers than painters. Dublin as a feast for the mind, rather than the eyes.

My experiences in Ireland so far have come to revolve around two major themes: Battling the great Irish bandwidth famineThis famine is at least partly responsible for the recent dearth of posts, though it appears to be nearly at an end; more about this in a coming post., and discovering the inverse relationship between cost and worth in Ireland.

Felix and Michelle bore the brunt of this latter realization when they visited for a week. It was with them that I witnessed the more galling aspects of the Irish tourism industry. We paid 7 euros each for a tour of the old Jameson distillery, for which we were shown a video that involved a lot of Irish water, then shown around an indoor whiskey themepark by Jenny, a Quebecois student guide whose cheery delivery could not quite mask her disdain for us.

We paid 7.50 euro each for a gander at the Book of Kells at Tritinity College Library. At that price, you get a MoMa’s worth of art elsewhere. Here, you get to navigate a multimedia warren of fun facts about monks before you are let into a dark room which may or may not be showing you a page of the book in question — it could very well have been the curator’s copy of Dubliners.

In the Oscar Wilde family home, a tour costs exactly 2.54 euros. For that price, we were herded into the study, where we were subject to a cruel and unusual video seemingly edited by Lenny from Memento. After multiple pans of every conceivable object in the house, including the tastfully appointed carpark, there was absolutely no need to actually see the house.

By the end of their stay, we got an inkling that perhaps we should avoid paying exhibits. After a long walk along the cliffs above St. Kevin‘s cell at Glendalough, we visited the remarkable monastic village, at no charge. But it was after Felix and Michelle left that I found the cultural gems in Dublin, and they were all free.

The Chester Beatty Library is an ideal museum. Focused, well-curated, bite-sized, and with some serious money thrown at it. It contains a massive collection of books and manuscripts bequeathed by an Irish-American millionaire, which the curators use to illustrate the history of writing, illustration and printing. It’s fitting that the museum should be in Ireland; it echoes the role Irish monks performed when they collected and preserved ancient texts.

Then there is the modern wing of the National Gallery of Ireland, an annex with Mondrian-inspired architecture (well, OK, minus the colors &mdash monochrome Mondrian) that houses the remarkably fresh and new-to-me work of contemporary Irish painters. By now, I have become sufficiently leery of paying for exhibits that when I was offered the opportunity to pay 10 euros for a special exhibit by a Swiss painter that sounded as inspiring as, well, Swiss art, I avoided it. I don’t regret it yet.