Robin Flower

Robin Ernest William Flower (1881 - 1946) was an English poet and scholar, a Celticist and translator from the Irish language. He is commonly known in Ireland as Bláithín.

Life

He was born in Meanwood in Yorkshire, and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford.^[1] He worked from 1929 as Deputy Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum,^[2] and, completing the work of Standish Hayes O'Grady, compiled a catalogue of the Irish manuscripts there.

He wrote several collections of poetry, translations of the Irish poets for the Cuala Press, and on Blasket Island. He first visited Blasket in 1910, at the recommendation of Carl Marstrander, his teacher at the School of Irish Learning;^[3][4] he acquired there the Irish nickname Bláithín (little flower).^[5] He suggested a Norse origin for the name "Blasket".^[6] Under Flower's influence, George Derwent Thomson and Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson made scholarly visits to Blasket.^[7]

His ashes were scattered on the Blasket Islands.

Works

As a scholar of Anglo-Saxon, he wrote on the Exeter Book^[8] He identified interpolations in the Old English Bede, by Laurence Nowell.^[9][10][11] His work on Nowell included the discovery in 1934, in Nowell's transcription, of the poem Seasons for Fasting.^[12][13]

He translated Tomás Ó Criomhthain, who was his teacher on Blasket in Irish,^[14] and wrote a memoir, The Western Island; Or, the Great Blasket (1944), illustrated by his wife Ida.^[15] The essay collection The Irish Tradition (1947) is often cited, and was reprinted in 1994; it includes Ireland and Medieval Europe, his John Rhŷs Memorial Lecture from 1927.

References

• Robin Ernest William Flower (1948) Sir Harold Idris Bell

Notes

External links

• Robin Flower at www.pgil-eirdata.org
• Translation of Pangur Bán, a poem about by an 8th (? 9th) Century Irish monk and his cat