Tolland+Man

Case Study - Ancient Human Remains

- Bog Bodies - Lindow Man- Tolland Man - The Iceman - Ice Maiden

Below is the text of a poem by Irish poet, Seamus Heany. And here is [|a photo montage] on YouTube set to Seamus Heaney's reading of his poem.

The Tollund Man
// Seamus Heaney //

Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap.
 * I**

In the flat country near by 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.

I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate
 * II**

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.

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.
 * III**


 * //Here is another Bog Body poem by Seamus Heaney://**

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.

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.

//**Seamus Heaney**//


 * In what ways can these poems add to your understanding of the bog bodies?
 * What do you think is the purpose of these poems?