Well hello again.
There’s a lot to catch up on here. I’m really sorry for the delay… everyday seems to be an adventure of some sort. I can’t get my pictures uploaded from my camera yet, so I’ll come back and sprinkle my posts with them after I get that working. Until then, my descriptions will have to do. Where should we begin?
Starting from July 10th. I took the bus into Douglas to meet with a guy named Brian Stowell. The bus here is a double-decker, and it takes the 20 minute drive from Castletown to Douglas at about 9:30, and goes through a just-wide-enough bridge in the forest glen (Quick note: “glen” comes from the Manx “glan.” It’s one of three English words with Manx heritage… Can you guess what “s’mie shen” became in English? The answer will be in the next post). The bridge is called the Fairy Bridge, and you’re supposed to say “mogrey mie monjavegger” (“good morning, fairies”), or you’ll have bad luck in Douglas.
Douglas starts on the cliffs of Man and slides gently into the Irish sea, traced by the bay that snakes around its periphery. I climbed up past the House of Tynwald to 13 Brittany Street, on the topmost ridge of Douglas. The rain was pouring down while I knocked on the door, and an older, bearded fellow let me in.
He explained to me that he was a nuclear physicist by profession, and had been forced to retire at 60 (he wanted to make sure I didn’t think he was lazy). Brian was involved with the restoration of Manx after it’s death in the 1950s to 1960s, and learned Manx from one of the oldest living speakers when he was a kid. I asked him all sorts of questions (all on tape, the details of which will appear in the project I’m doing for my independent study). I can tell you, however, that he wrote his notes in Manx regarding the locations of the nuclear reactors, assuming no one would be able to decode it. Was he correct to assume such a thing? Well, a nuclear reactor disappeared one day, and ended up a few weeks later in Pakistan. He laughed after telling me this, as if it were funny.
July 11th: I went to the Liverpool students’ excavation site at Rushen Abby (shown below from the outside).
Rushen Abby is the oldest Abby on the Isle of Man, and it’s almost inconceivably large in comparison to most Abbies. The students dig for artifacts there; in fear of hordes of treasure-seekers, I’m actually forbid from saying whether or not they’ve found anything valuable, such as lots of gold and precious stones.
I met with the manager of the dig site, Ray. He focuses on oral tradition and the perception cultures have of their world, and he researched Manx oral tradition before and after the Viking influence, and before and after British influence. Again, an interesting interview!
I then set off to find recordings of original Manx, as well as books on the language. Part of my mission here was to take documentation on the language to the US for the first time. Mission accomplished: I’ve found the original recordings of classic Manx, before its brief death, as well as other tomes on the language. The only things I have yet to find are the Manx version of the Bible and the Chronicle of Man and the Sundreys, an ancient history of the Isle of Man. I plan to bring these back for the Harvard-Westlake library, giving H-W the largest collection on Manx Gaelic in the US (at least, that I know of).
July 12th: I went up to Douglas again to visit Adrian at Manx Radio. He was helping to dub an animated movie from the UK, Friends & Heroes, into Manx to encourage kids to learn the language. He figures (rightly, I think) that seeing Manx products that look as professional as English ones will encourage Manxmen to learn the language. To help dub, they got a 12-year-old, Ruben, who attends an all-Manx school in St. Johns to lend his voice.
I really couldn’t believe that I was hearing real, fluent Manx come out of a 12-year-old. He learned it naturally, and is completely bilingual: I recorded the conversations in the dubbing process to document the way Ruben used English words in Manx freely. I’m heading to St. John’s on Tuesday to interview some of these native-speaking children and ask them and their Manx-speaking teachers a few questions as I try to piece together the picture of Manx today. I’ll try to get a DVD of the show so I can post a clip up here!
I then went to the Manx Heritage foundation to research Brittany Gill’s heritage. Here are the facts I had, as scribbled in my notebook:
Brittany’s mother’s mother’s father was named Oscar Albert McQuinn, who may or may not have lived on the Island, and was born c. 1890. His father was named Thomas McQuinn, who was a sea captain, and his mother was named Ellen Curphey, a relative of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands.
The MHF has records upon records on microfilm chronicling every death on the Island since 1610.
If someone was buried on the island, they’re documented. Brittany said that Thomas was a sea captain. If he’s like most sea captains on the Island, he was “buried” at sea: the proverb here is, “in the end, all things come from and go to the sea.” Thomas didn’t show up in the record. Ellen Curphey did, though! She was born right here in Castletown in the 1850s, and died about 1930.
A nice long life, it sounds like. Unfortunately, Oscar was not buried on the Island, so there is no record of him. However, the last name “Gill” may actually come from the Isle of Man. I’m not sure how much Brittany knows about the heritage on her dad’s side, but I’m going to do some more digging around to see what I can pull up. A new mystery begins, perhaps.
Well, I’m off to show my new Liverpudlian roommate around Castletown. Later then!
