George Derwent Thomson

George Derwent Thomson (Irish: Seoirse Mac Tomáis; 1903 in Dulwich, London – 3 February 1987 in Birmingham) was an English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language.

Thomson studied Classics at King's College, Cambridge where he attained First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently won a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin. At TCD he worked on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and began visiting Na Blascaodaí in the early nineteen-twenties. He became lecturer and then Professor of Greek at NUI Galway.

He moved back to England in 1934, when he returned to King's College, Cambridge, to lecture in Greek. He became a professor at Birmingham University in 1936, the year he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. Thomson pioneered a Marxist interpretation of Greek drama. His Aeschylus and Athens (1941) and Marxism and Poetry (1945) won him international attention. In the latter book he argued a connection between the work song and poetry; and that pre-industrial songs were connected to ritual.

Thomson befriended, and was an important influence on Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his theory of the genesis of occidental thought in Ancient Greece through the invention of coining.

He first visited Na Blascaodaí (the Blasket Islands) off the west coast of Ireland in 1923. Mac Tomáis, as he quickly became known to the islanders, had attended rudimentary Irish classes at a Conradh na Gaeilge branch in London before he went to Cambridge. When he arrived on the island, he immersed himself in the language. In six weeks of walking around, talking with Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and others, Mac Tomáis achieved near complete fluency in the language.

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