No. 38, Bog Poems - The Sorcerer's Apprentice

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (July 2011)
thesorcerersapprenticeonline.wordpress.com/
Bog Poems
by
Seamus Heaney

– Grauballe bog, Jutland, Denmark.
On an island in the ocean there is a sacred grove, wherein
lies a consecrated chariot, draped in robes, which only the
priest may touch. He perceives the presence of the goddess
in the innermost shrine, and with great reverence escorts
her in her chariot, which is drawn by female oxen. Then
follow days of rejoicing, and in every place she deigns to
visit, and which offers her hospitality, the festival is
celebrated. No-one goes to war, no-one takes up arms, and
every iron object is locked away: only then do they
experience peace and quiet, only then do they know and
love them, until the goddess wearies of the society of
mortals and the priest takes her back to her temple.
Afterwards, the chariot, the robes, and – if you believe it –
the divinity herself are washed in a secret lake. Slaves
perform this rite, and are immediately drowned in the same
lake. From this arises fear of the mysterious and a sacred
ignorance of what only those who perish may see.
– Tacitus, Germania (c. 98 A.D.)

– The Tollund man (c. 400 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark.
I
BOGLANDS
1969/1972
†
Before going on to look at the nature of some of the
individual deities and their cults, one can perhaps
bridge the gap, as it were, by considering a symbol
which, in its way, sums up the whole of Celtic
pagan religion and is as representative of it as is,
for example, the sign of the cross in Christian
contexts. This is the symbol of the severed human
head; in all its various modes of iconographic
representation and verbal presentation, one may
find the hard core of Celtic religion. It is indeed a
kind of shorthand symbol for the entire religious
outlook of the pagan Celts.
– Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (1967)

BOGLAND
for T. P. Flanagan
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening –
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up,
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
– Door into the Dark (1969)
THE TOLLUND MAN
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog

Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
– Wintering Out (1972)
NERTHUS
For beauty, say an ash-fork staked in peat,
Its long grains gathering to the gouged split;
A seasoned, unsleeved taker of the weather,
Where kesh and loaning finger out to heather.
– Wintering Out (1972)

II
BOG POEMS
1975
†
‘Bog’ is one of the few borrowings in English from
the Irish language: the Irish word means ‘soft’, and
one of its Irish usages has survived in the Hiberno-
English as ‘soft day’. Where I grew up, however, we
called the bog ‘the moss’, a word with Norse origins
that was probably carried to Ulster by the Scottish
planters. I am pleased that the Irish, English and
Northern European points of reference in these
poems were already implicit in the linguistic quick of
‘bog’ and ‘moss’.
– Seamus Heaney, Bog Poems (1975)

– The first ever photograph of a Danish bog man (1892),
Nederfriderikmose, Jutland, Denmark.
BONE DREAMS
I
White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch
and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass:
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in
the sling of mind
to pitch it
and follow its
drop into speech.
II
Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue’s
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions,

Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen
to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.
III
In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found bān-hūs,
its fire, benches,
wattle and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered a while
in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron
of generation
swung at the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.
IV
Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone’s lair
is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady’s head
like a crystal
and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant
carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine,
move towards the passes.
V
And we end up
cradling each other
between the lips
of an earthwork.

As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles’ paving,
the turning stiles
of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,
I begin to pace
the Hadrian’s Wall
of her shoulder, dreaming
of Maiden Castle.
VI
One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole
a big-boned coulter
but there it was,
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.
I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur of his head.
Those little points
were the eyes. And feel
the shoulders.’ I touched
small distant Pennines,
a pelt of grass and grain
running south
– Bog Poems (1975)

– Haraldskjaer bog, Jutland, Denmark.
COME TO THE BOWER
My hands come, touched
by sweet briar and tangled vetch,
foraging past the burst gizzards
of coin-hoards
to where the dark-bowered queen
whom I unpin
is waiting. Out of the black maw
of the peat, sharpened willow
withdraws gently.
I unwrap skins and see
the pot of the skull,
the damp tuck of each curl
reddish as a fox’s brush,
a mark of a gorget in the flesh
of her throat. And spring water
starts to rise around her.
I reach past
the riverbed’s washed
dream of gold to the bullion
of her Venus bone.
– Bog Poems (1975)

BOG QUEEN
I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.
My body was braille
for the creeping influences:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled at my feet,
through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots
pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and sockets.
I lay waiting
on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground
dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.
My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and Phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts’
soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
Like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs –
the soaked fledge,
the heavy swaddle of skins.
My skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.
Which they robbed.
I was barbered
and stripped
by a turf-cutter’s spade
who veiled me again
and packed coomb softly
between the stone jambs
at my head and my feet.
Till a peer’s wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
a slimy birth-cord
of bog, had been cut
and I rose from the dark,
hacked bone, skull-ware,
frayed stitches, tufts,
small gleams on the bank.
– Bog Poems (1975)

– Head of the Windeby girl (c. 100 A.D.), Schleswig-Holstein.
PUNISHMENT
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain’s
exposed and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
– Bog Poems (1975)
THE GRAUBALLE MAN
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

– Hand of the Grauballe man (c. 290 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark.
Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?
And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus’s.
I first saw his twisted face
in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,
but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
– Bog Poems (1975)

– Head of the Roum girl (c. 400 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark.
TÊTE COUPÉE
Here is the girl’s head, like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
– Bog Poems (1975)

– Huldre bog, Jutland, Denmark.
KINSHIP
I
Kinned by hieroglyphic peat
on a spread-field
to the sundered victim,
the love-nest in the bracken,
I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
the black spade-marks,
the layered secrets
of process and ritual;
I love the spring
off the ground,
each bank a gallows drop,
each open pool
the unstopped mouth
of an urn, a moon-drinker,
not to be sounded
by the naked eye.

II
Quagmire, swampland, morass:
the slime kingdoms,
domains of the cold-blooded,
of mud pads and dirtied eggs.
But bog
meaning soft, borrowing
windless falls of rain,
the pupil of amber.
Ruminant ground,
digestion of mollusc
and seed-pod,
deep pollen-bin.
Earth-pantry, bone-vault,
embalmer of sacrifice
and staked murders,
tanner of sunlight.
Insatiable bride.
Sword-swallower,
casket, midden,
floe of history.
Ground that will strip
its dark side,
nesting ground,
outback of my mind.
III
I found a turf-spade
hidden under bracken,
laid flat, and overgrown
with a green fog.
As I raised it
the soft lips of the growth
muttered and split,
a tawny rut
opening at my feet
like a shed skin,
the shaft wettish
as I sank it upright
and beginning to
steam in the sun.
And now they have twinned
my obelisk:
among the stones,
under a bearded cairn
a love-nest is disturbed,
catkin and bog-cotton
tremble as they set up
the cloven oak branch.
I stand at the edge of centuries
facing a goddess.

IV
This centre holds
and spreads,
sump and seedbed,
a bag of waters
and a melting grave.
The mothers of autumn
sour and sink,
ferments of husk and leaf
deepen their ochres.
Mosses come to a head,
heather unseeds,
brackens deposit
their bronze.
This is the vowel of earth
dreaming its root
in flowers and snow,
mutation of weathers
and seasons,
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
I grew out of all this
like a weeping willow
inclined towards
the appetites of gravity.
V
The hand-carved felloes
of the cart-wheels, buried
in turf mould,
the curve of the tail-board,
the socketed cribs –
all come together
and I have retrieved
a ritual chariot.
I deified the man
who rode there,
god of the waggon,
the hearth-feeder.
I was his privileged
attendant, a bearer
of bread and drink,
the squire of his circuits.
When summer died
and wives forsook the fields
we were abroad,
saluted, given right-of-way.
Watch our progress
down the haw-lit hedges,
my manly pride
when he speaks to me.

– Cart in Rappendam Fen (c. 100 A.D.), Zealand, Denmark.
VI
And you, Tacitus,
observe how I make my grove
on an old crannog
piled by the fearful dead,
in a desolate peace.
Our mother ground
is sour with the blood
of her faithful,
they lie gargling
in her sacred heart
as the legions stare
from the ramparts.
Come back to this
‘island of the ocean’
where nothing will suffice.
Read the inhumed faces
of casualty and victim;
report us fairly,
how we slaughter
for the common good
and shave the heads
of the notorious,
how the goddess swallows
our love and terror.

– Bog Poems (1975)
BELDERG
‘They just keep turning up
And were thought of as foreign’ –
One-eyed and benign,
They lie about his house,
Quernstones out of a bog.
To lift the lid of the peat
And find this pupil dreaming
Of neolithic wheat!
When he stripped off blanket bog
The soft-piled centuries
Fell open like a glib:
There were the first plough-marks,
The stone-age fields, the tomb
Corbelled, turfed and chambered,
Floored with dry turf-coomb.
A landscape fossilized,
Its stone wall patternings
Repeated before our eyes
In the stone walls of Mayo.
Before I turned to go
He talked about persistence,
A congruence of lives,
How, stripped and cleared of stones,
His home accrued growth-rings
Of iron, flint and bronze.

So I talked of Mossbawn
A bogland name. ‘But moss?’
He crossed my old home’s music
With older strains of Norse.
I told how its foundation
Was mutable as sound
And how I could derive
A forked root from that ground,
And make bawn an English fort,
A planter’s walled-in mound.
Or else find sanctuary
And think of it as Irish,
Persistent if outworn.
‘But the Norse ring on your tree?’
I passed through the eye of the quern,
Grist to an ancient mill,
And in my mind’s eye saw
A world-tree of balanced stones,
Querns piled like vertebrae,
The marrow crushed to grounds.
– Bog Poems (1975)
III
RETURN TO TOLLUND
1996/2006
†
The Tollund man and many of the other bog men,
after their brief time as god and husband of the
goddess, fulfilled the final demand of religion: they
were sacrificed and placed in the sacred bogs, and
by their deaths consummated the rites which
ensured luck and fertility for the agricultural
community in the coming year. At the same time,
through their sacrificial deaths they were
themselves consecrated for all time to Nerthus,
goddess of fertility – to Mother Earth, who in return
so often gave their faces her blessing, preserving
them through the millennia.
– P. V. Glob, The Bog People (1969)

– The path to Tollund bog, Jutland, Denmark.
TOLLUND
That Sunday morning we had travelled far.
We stood a long time out in Tollund Moss:
The low ground, the swart water, the thick grass
Hallucinatory and familiar.
A path through Jutland fields. Light traffic sound.
Willow bushes; rushes; bog-fir grags
In a swept and gated farmyard; dormant quags.
And silage under wraps in its silent mound.
It could have been a still out of the bright
‘Townland of Peace’, that poem of dream farms
Outside all contention. The scarecrow’s arms
Stood open opposite the satellite
Dish in the paddock, where a standing stone
Had been resituated and landscaped,
With tourist signs in futhark runic script
In Danish and in English. Things had moved on.
It could have been Mulhollandstown or Scribe.
The by-roads had their names in them in black
And white; it was user-friendly outback
Where we stood footloose, at home beyond the tribe,
More scouts than strangers, ghosts who’d walked abroad
Unfazed by light, to make a new beginning
And make a go of it, alive and sinning,
Ourselves again, free-willed again, not bad.
– The Spirit Level (1996)

– Head of the Tollund man (c. 400 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark.
THE TOLLUND MAN IN SPRINGTIME
Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping time in myself, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
To you and yours, out under seeding grass
And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,
Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.
I reawoke to revel in the spirit
They strengthened when they chose to put me down
For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat:
Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight,
Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun,
Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.
~
Scone of peat, composite bog-dough
They trampled like a muddy vintage, then
Slabbed and spread and turned to dry in sun –
Though never kindling-dry the whole way through –
A dead-weight, slow-burn lukewarmth in the flue,
Ashless, flameless, its very smoke a sullen
Waft of swamp-breath . . . And me, so long unrisen,
I knew that same dead weight in joint and sinew
Until a spade-plate slid and soughed and plied
At my buried ear, and the levered sod
Got lifted up; then once I felt the air
I was like turned turf in the breath of God,
Bog-bodied on the sixth day, brown and bare,
And on the last, all told, unatrophied.

My heavy head. Bronze-buffed. Ear to the ground.
My eye at turf level. Its snailskin lid.
My cushioned cheek and brow. My phantom hand
And arm and leg and shoulder that felt pillowed
As fleshily as when the bog pith weighed
To mould me to itself and it to me
Between when I was buried and unburied.
Between what happened and was meant to be.
On show for years while all that lay in wait
Still waited. Disembodied. Far renowned.
Faith placed in me, me faithless as a stone
The harrow turned up when the crop was sown.
Out in the Danish night I’d hear soft wind
And remember moony water in a rut.
~
‘The soul exceeds its circumstances.’ Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim . . . In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.
~
Cattle out in rain, their knowledgeable
Solid standing and readiness to wait,
These I learned from. My study was the wet,
My head as washy as a head of kale,
Shedding water like the flanks and tail
Of every dumb beast sunk above the cloot
In trampled gaps, bringing their heavyweight
Silence to hear on nosed-at sludge and puddle.
Of another world, unlearnable, and so
To be lived by, whatever it was I knew
Came back to me. Newfound contrariness.
In check-out lines, at cash-points, in those queues
Of wired, far-faced smilers. I stood off,
Bulrush, head in air, far from its lough.
~
Through every check and scan I carried with me
A bunch of Tollund rushes – roots and all –
Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell
Broom cupboard where I had hoped they’d stay
Damp until transplanted, they went musty.
Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,
The drowned-mouse fibres withered up and the whole
Limp, soggy cluster lost its bouquet
Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm
And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off
Or mix it in with spit in pollen’s name
And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,
I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit
And spirited myself into the street.
– District and Circle (2006)

– The goddess Nerthus (500-350 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark.
NOTE
I felt it imperative to discover a field of force in which,
without abandoning fidelity to the processes and
experience of poetry, it would be possible to encompass the
perspectives of a humane reason and at the same time to
grant the religious intensity of the violence its deplorable
authenticity and complexity. And when I say religious, I am
not thinking simply of the sectarian division. To some extent
the enmity can be viewed as a struggle between the cults
and devotees of a god and a goddess. There is an
indigenous territorial numen, a tutelary of the whole island,
call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the Poor Old
Woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever; and her
sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a
new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell,
William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose
godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar resident in a palace
in London. What we have is the tail-end of a struggle in a
province between territorial piety and imperial power.
Now, I realize that this idiom is remote from the
agnostic world of economic interest whose iron hand
operates in the velvet glove of ‘talks between elected
representatives’, and remote from the political manoeuvres
of power-sharing; but it is not remote from the psychology of
the Irishmen and Ulstermen who do the killing, and not
remote from the bankrupt psychology and mythologies
implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster Protestant.
The question, as ever, is ‘How with this rage shall beauty
hold a plea?’ And my answer is, by offering ‘befitting
emblems of adversity’.
– Seamus Heaney, Feeling into Words (1974)

The question Heaney addresses here was posed by
Shakespeare in Sonnet no. 65, where he answers with the
hope ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright’. But
for an answer closer to home Heaney turned to his
predecessor, William Butler Yeats, in the poem Meditations in
Time of Civil War, which he wrote during the Irish Civil War
of 1922-23. Nearly half a century later, and searching for a
response to the recent re-eruption of the centuries-old
adversity, Heaney found some of these emblems in P. V.
Glob’s The Bog People, a book that was published in English
translation in 1969, the same year the sectarian killings
began in Northern Ireland. In this book, which is a study of
the bodies of Iron-Age men and women found preserved in
the peat-bogs of Jutland, hanged, strangled, drowned,
decapitated or with their throats cut, the author argues that
these were ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, who
required new bridegrooms to lie with her each winter in her
sacred ground, in the bog, to ensure the renewal and fertility
of the land for the agricultural community in the coming
spring. Heaney saw in this sacrifice an ancient and mythical
image of what he understood to be the religious dimension to
the killings and deaths, past and present, in the long history
of Ireland’s political struggle for sovereignty. Specifically,
Heaney drew a connection between the sacrifice of the bog
people to the goddess Nerthus and the political martyrdom of
the Irish people to the cause whose emblem and mythical
symbol is Kathleen Ni Houlihan. In Yeats’ 1902 play of the
same name, the old woman who personifies Ireland lures a
young groom away from his impending marriage to fight for
her, and his subsequent death in the revolt against British
colonial rule serves to rejuvenate her as a beautiful young
woman with, he writes, ‘the walk of a queen’.
The poems in this collection fall into three groups. The
first contains those of Heaney’s discovery of the bog as a
metaphor for Irish identity and his initial response to Glob’s
book, when he first made the comparison between the
landscape of his home and that of Jutland. These appeared
in two separate collections of his work, Door into the Dark
(1969) and Wintering Out (1972), the latter published in the
same year as Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday. The second
group of poems are those of Heaney’s extended engagement
with the bog bodies following his subsequent visit to Jutland
in 1973, which he described as a ‘pilgrimage’. These were
published by Rainbow Press in May 1975 in a limited edition
under the title Bog Poems, and again that same month in the
next collection of his poems, North (1975), in which they vary
in certain words, order, lineation, punctuation, and, in one
poem, the title (Tête Coupée being altered to Strange Fruit).
Finally, the third group of poems are those written on
Heaney’s return to Jutland – first in September 1994, just
after the IRA ceasefire; then again, thirty years after his first
visit, in his imagination. These appeared in The Spirit Level
(1996) and District and Circle (2006).
Despite these visits to Jutland, Heaney placed as much if
not greater emphasis on the role played by the photographs
in Glob’s book, which he called ‘unforgettable’. When set side
by side with his poems, as they are here, it becomes
apparent how closely individual poems correspond to
particular images – so much so that their writing appears to
be inspired more by Heaney’s initial exposure to these
photographs rather than his subsequent pilgrimage. He
himself wrote that the photographs of these dead bodies
blended in his mind with those of killings committed in
Northern Ireland, and it was this that first suggested a

comparison between the two. And while not exhausting their
range of references, this close correlation between text and
image allows the reader of Glob’s book to identify the bodies
and objects to which Heaney refers in his poems.
The Tollund Man, about whom Heaney wrote first and
last in the bog poems, was discovered in 1950 in the peat
bog of the same name in Jutland. He was found naked
except for a leather cap, a girdle about his waste, and a
noose around his neck. The position of the rope indicates
that he was killed by hanging rather than strangulation, but
Glob argues that the presence of the noose left around the
victim’s neck was also the sign of his consecration to the
goddess as her bridegroom; for the neck-rings or torcs worn
by Celtic and Germanic Iron-Age peoples are evidence of the
cult of the goddess – from the bronze, silver and gold torcs
worn by high-ranking figures through to those, too heavy to
wear around any neck, that were made at great expense
expressly in order to be sacrificed to the goddess.
The ‘dark-bowered queen’ of Come to the Bower is the
body of a 50 year-old woman found in 1835 in Haraldskaer
bog, Jutland, that was long supposed to be that of the Norse
Queen Gunhild. According to legend rather than historical
fact, she was enticed to Denmark by King Harald, who had
her murdered and her body sunk in the bog that for long
bore her name – Gunnelsmose. Like many of the bog bodies
she was fastened into the peat by wooden stakes and
branches to prevent her spirit from wandering after death.
The body in Bog Queen is that of a high-ranking woman,
thought at the time to be a Danish Viking, that was
excavated in 1781 from the bog at the foot of Drumkeragh
Mountain in County Down, Ireland. After the local
community had taken her rich clothes and jewellery, she was
reburied by the peat-cutter who had found her. One of the
earliest documented finds of a bog body, the account of her
discovery was left by Lady Moira, the wife of the local peer,
who later purchased a plait of the bog queen’s hair.
The naked, shaved and blindfolded girl of Punishment is
the so-called Windeby girl, who was found in 1952 in
Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany – so-called, because
subsequent DNA analysis has confirmed that she was in fact
a young man; that her head was not shaved for adultery but
probably decomposed through exposure to the air; and that
her blindfold was more likely to have been a headband for
his hair. But whatever its true identity, Heaney saw in this
body an image of the Catholic girls who were shaved, tarred
and feathered by Irish women as punishment for consorting
with British soldiers, accounts of which were published by
the Irish press in 1971. Most likely drowned, this body too
was held down with birch branches and a large stone.
In that same year, the body of The Grauballe Man was
found in Nebelgård Fen, Jutland, naked, with his throat cut
from ear to ear. Like the Tollund man, the contents of his
stomach, in which there was no trace of summer or autumn
fruits, indicated that he was sacrificed during the winter
months, most likely at the winter solstice festival, the
purpose of which was to ensure the coming spring. His skin
had been turned almost black by the preservative properties
of the bog-water, which has the same effect as tanning, the
hands and feet being exceptionally well preserved. Like those
of the other bog bodies, these showed little sign of wear or
labour, indicating that the consorts of the goddess were
chosen from the higher ranks of the bog communities.
The girl in Tête Coupée was a female decapitee, around
20 years old, who was found in 1942 in the Roum bog,

Jutland. No other parts of the body where found, suggesting
that the head was deposited as a sacrificial offering together
with other artefacts that were found later in the same bog.
The ‘ritual chariot’ unearthed in the fifth of the poems in
Kinship was a cart found sacrificed in 1941 in Rappendam
Fen, Zealand. When the Roman historian Tacitus visited the
Germani tribes in the First Century A.D. he left a written
account of their religious practices in his Germania, where
he records that a shrine containing the goddess was carried
from place to place in just such a chariot during the festive
season. It is this divine presence that is manifested in the
‘cloven oak branch’ to which Heaney refers in the third of the
Kinship poems, and which was found in the bog at Foerlev
Nymølle, Jutland, in 1961. Nine feet in length, it dates to the
early Iron Age, when it was worshipped as the goddess
Nerthus to whom the bog people were sacrificed. The human
intervention in the natural form of the wood is minimal:
some light carving at the top of the legs to accentuate the
curvature of the hips, and a hole gouged out at the parting of
the two branches to designate the vulva. Rather than giving
her material form, this is an act of recognition of what is
already present – the manifestation of the goddess in nature.
As the opening of the poem titled Nerthus suggests (‘For
beauty, say . . . ’), this, above all, is what Heaney offers as an
emblem of adversity befitting beauty’s plea: ‘ . . . an ash-fork
staked in peat / Where kesh and loaning finger out to
heather’. Loaning is a lane or path leading to open ground;
and Kesh, from Irish Ceis, is a small wicker bridge, and thus
the name of a village built on the Kesh River in County
Fermanagh, Northern Ireland; but the word also has links to
Long Kesh, the Royal Air Force station that was the site of
the notorious Maze Prison in which Irish paramilitary
prisoners were incarcerated. Residing in both cloven oak
branch and ash-shafted pitchfork, the goddess watches over
Iron-Age Jutland and modern-day Ireland alike.
Finally, therefore – although it doesn’t appear in Glob’s
book – Belderg is a village dating from the 5th Century B.C.
in County Mayo, Ireland, which Heaney visited in 1972,
finding a heather bog full of the quernstones with which the
ancient agricultural community ground their grain.
The head of the Tollund man is all that survives of him,
the decision having been made, when he was found, not to
preserve the rest of the body; but it is far and away the best-
preserved head of the bog bodies. Glob attributes this to the
blessing of the goddess to whom he was consecrated for all
time. It was the face of the Tollund man, and in particular as
it appears in the first of the photographs in Glob’s book, that
reminded Heaney of the faces he grew up with in Northern
Ireland, leading him to see in it the face of his distant
ancestors. Tacitus wrote that it was only during the winter
festival that the bog people experienced ‘peace and quiet’,
ending their wars and putting away their weapons; and one
can see in this moment of suspended time the sovereignty for
which both Irish political struggle and Heaney’s own labour
as a poet aimed. If his response to the plea that did not stifle
its rage was to offer emblems of its adversity, their goal is a
similar cessation of hostilities and the restoration of a
unified and independent Ireland under the guardianship of
the goddess. The ‘springtime’ of the Tollund man to which
Heaney refers in the last of his bog poems is the time in
which the body of the victim, containing its last meal of grain
and seeds, would germinate in the bog, thereby renewing the
cycle of life for the community. Poetry is that festival, and its
celebration here looks forward to the Irish Spring.

– The Broddenbjerg god (500-350 B.C.), Jutland, Denmark. All photographs
are from the English translation of P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (1969).

Back cover: ‘The Sorcerer’, c. 13,000 B.C. Rock painting and engraving.
Caverne des Trois Frères, Montesquieu-Avantès, Ariège.