Aran jumpers: not the first time we've pulled the wool over our eyes

PRESENT TENSE:THE ARAN JUMPER shops of Galway and the islands will have this week cut their prices, cancelled all further orders and gone into Everything Must Go mode before, inevitably and honourably, they will pull the shutters on the business. No more will the Irish offer Aran jumpers to spendthrift American tourists. The game is up. The Aran jumper isn't from Aran at all. It's from Guernsey. Direct the tourists thatta way.

All of which is inspired by the news this week that an Inis Oírr exhibition destroys the long-held idea that Aran jumpers are native to the west coast.

Or, rather, that they are native to a west coast, it just happens to be the west coast of France.

Does this exploding of a myth threaten to erode the valuable tradition of ignoring truth in favour of either giving the tourists a good time or crafting a national identity? Not a bit. Because there are other traditions about the Irish that are untrue, but which they’ve proven capable of ignoring. These include even the most cherished and fundamental element of Irish self-identity: that they are Celts.

The revelation about the Aran jumpers is not news, as such, but simply added evidence to something known for some time: the myth that has been knitted into the Aran jumper is now thicker than the wool.

The item is an adaptation of Guernsey clothing; the clue found in that seemingly quintessential Irish word geansaí (as in jumper or “I had a geansaí load of . . .”), which is only a Gaelicised version of the Channel Island. In knitting circles (ahem) the type of knitted jumper is also known as a gansey.

The supposed tradition was popularised during the first half of the 20th century, and fishermen didn't generally wear the things at all. Nor did they wear unique patterns that would help them be identified in case they drowned. That notion is widely credited to JM Synge's Riders to the Sea, in which a drowning victim is identified by dropped stitches on his jumper.

None of which has had any impact on Aran jumper sales, any more than, say, the Viking Splash Tour has stopped tourists from sporting horned helmets despite this somewhat important fact: the Vikings did not wear horned helmets. Never. Not once.

Horns, if you think about it for a moment, were not practical. In battle, an enemy could easily use it as leverage; on a boat, they would have been pretty awkward to stack; and in an era when medicine was not particularly advanced, accidentally sitting on one would not only have been uncomfortable but potentially fatal.

But you tell that to the tourists next time they roar their way up College Green in their amphibious vehicle, wearing horned helmets as souvenirs of their trip to one of the great Viking towns. Run after them, yelling, "You're perpetuating a historical myth that originated from the set design of Wagner's Ring Cycle! Who looks silly now!"

This is a relatively minor mistake, not peculiar to Ireland and now more convenient to perpetuate than confront. More curious is when the truth challenges a deeper sense of identity. For quite some time, it’s been generally accepted by historians, archaeologists and academics that the proof of a Celtic invasion of western Europe is thin, and that even if there was one, the Irish would be pretty much the least Celtic people of all.

There was no great snuffing out of a Celtic twilight. There are a few pieces of archaeology from the period attributed to the Celts, but nothing compared to what has been found in other countries. In fact, if you want to find the people you could most accurately call Celtic, then you should look in central Europe.

Even the idea of the Welsh, Scots and Irish being Celtic cousins, bound together by a shared heritage, was resisted by the early nationalists who created the Celtic myth in the first place, first to affix themselves as distinct members of the glorious British empire, then to separate themselves from it. The Celtic nations as being “everyone but the English” is a relatively recent concept.

Effectively, much of the Irish identity is a construct, a fiction, made up to make everyone feel a bit better and a bit less English. And it worked. Even now, most people don’t know this any more than they know the Vikings wore domed, unquestionably hornless helmets.

The Celtic myth, in fact, has become so central to the identities of the Irish, Scots and Welsh that it has arguably become self-fulfilling.

The people believe themselves to be different, express their differences and flog those differences to tourists to such an extent that the cultural myth has become stronger and more lucrative than the historical truth. Unravelling that would take some doing.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty