Dingle Vikings

I loved typing that title. What a funny combination of words, but really, today I am talking about Vikings in Dingle. This picture (above) is me interacting with the Ogham Stone on top of Slea Head. I went to the Dingle peninsula with my Gaeilge class. The Irish language department paid for our bus fare and our conference fee. We just had to pay for accommodation! What a great way to support students, huh? I was glad to benefit from their generosity, and the trip was great. However, I had learned my lesson last weekend, and I booked a B&B at a farmhouse two miles from the student hostel. That turned out to be a good move because when I checked in with one of the young people who stayed in the hostel, they were, indeed, drinking heavily, screaming, and running around until 5:00 am. My young informant told me that she was so tired that she went to bed early while they were still screaming. She went to bed at 4:00. Personally, I got home at the elderly person's early hour of 1:00 am and slept to the sound of the atlantic ocean caressing the cliffs just below the farmhouse.

The conference was great. There were about 150 people there, the majority of whom were native speakers of Irish. I got to practice all my little social formulas like "please", "thank you", and "pleased to meet you." I also got to practice my literacy with "chugat" and "uiatch" (push and pull on the doors). Nothing like experiential learning, I tell you. The lectures were mostly in Irish with simultaneous translation in English on headphones. It was a little disorienting to hear a woman's voice speaking in my ears while a man stood lecturing at the podium, but after a minute of disorientation, it was sort of cool to utterly adjust ones gender norms.

The lectures dealt with the influence of Scandinavian culture in the western isles of Ireland. Many place names and words for money and fishing are of Scandinavian origin in Gaeilge. There was much discussion of the "plundering" that the norse did in reference to the monasteries, and there was much mention of the battle of Contarf where Brian Boru sent the Viking's packing for about 15 years, but really the focus was more linguistic than anything else. One 89 year old gentleman, who did not speak Gaeilge, asked for the microphone for three minutes, and in four minutes he gave a little polemic about how silly it was to speak of "plundering" as if that was all the scandinavians did. He mentioned the economic centers of Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and Cork (which remain the economic powerhouses of Ireland today), and he mentioned that the stereotype of a man with horns on his head burning everything in sight was a terrible stereotype and a minority of the good people who came to stay and assimilated into Irish culture. He was really quite het up. He was very politely received by the Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish members of the audience. Then the next lecturer got up after that and gave a lecture about about the "plundering vikings."

The social aspects of this conference were quite different from the other academic conferences I have been to. First it was very small, so everybody sort of knew everybody else. Also, Dun Chaoin, the town, is very very small. The center of town is Kruger's Pub, where everybody went to after the conference ended, where they all proceeded to drink heavily. I learned a lot by sitting next to these slowly inebriating scholars and listening to them expound in the corner of the pub. There was lots of music too. There were two uillean pipers, one guitar, two fiddles, one accordian player, and one concertina player. There was also a man who did sean nos dance to a few tunes, and another young man who sang an aire. In general, they played and all the patrons continued their conversation. The noise level was astounding as people spoke over the music. However, when there was a solo, like the sean nos dance, a fiddle solo, or the singing of the aire, then whole pub went silent and listened. The level of communitas among all these people was very high.

After listening to all this talk of the Blasket islands, I wanted to get out and contemplate the landscape of the lectures, so Sunday morning I walked out on the Slea Head. Those pictures are posted on my snapfish site. I have posted how to get to my snapfish page in the post just before this, if you want to see pictures of Slea Head and Dingle. It was raining a little, and the wind was up. It was great to be out in the grey day admiring the moss, listening to the sea, and thinking about viking longships coming up the bay. Here is a sign that gives you all the options you have at Slea Head: parking for plundering vikings, and a picnic with a view. You don't get that combination of choices just everywhere...