THE TOLLUND MAN BY SEAMUS HEANEY

THE TOLLUND MAN BY SEAMUS HEANEY

 

INTRODUCTION

1

The Tollund Man lived during the late 5th century BC and/or early 4th century BC, during the amount characterised in Scandinavia because the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was buried during a wetland on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark. Such a find is thought as a bog body. he's remarkable for the actual fact that his body was so well preserved that he gave the impression to have died only recently.

On 6 May, 1950, the Højgård brothers from the tiny village of Tollund were cutting peat for his or her tile stove and kitchen appliance within the Bjældskovdal bog, 10 km west of Silkeborg,Denmark. because the two brothers worked, they suddenly saw within the peat layer a face so fresh that they may only suppose that they'd chanced on a recent murder. They immediately notified the police at Silkeborg.

The Tollund Man lay 50 metres aloof from firm ground, his body arranged during a foetal position, and had been buried under about two metres of peat. He wore a pointed skin cap on his head fastened securely under his chin by a hide thong. There was a smooth hide belt around his waist. Otherwise, he was naked. His hair was cropped so short on be almost entirely hidden by his cap. He was almost clean-shaven, but there was very short stubble on his chin and upper lip, suggesting that he had not shaved on the day of his death. There was a rope made from two leather thongs twisted together under alittle lump of peat beside his head. it absolutely was drawn tight around his neck and throat so coiled sort of a snake over his shoulder and down his back.

Underneath the body was a skinny layer of moss. Scientists know that this moss was formed in Danish peat bogs within the early Iron Age, therefore, the body was suspected to own been placed within the bog approximately 2,000 years ago during the first Iron Age. Subsequent C14radiocarbon dating of Tollund Man’s hair indicated that he died in approximately 350 BC. The acid within the peat, together with the dearth of oxygen underneath the surface, had preserved the soft tissues of his body.

Examinations and X-rays showed that the man’s head was undamaged, and his heart, lungs and liver were well preserved. He wasn't an old man, though he must are over 20 years old because his wisdom teeth had grown in. The Silkeborg Museum estimates his age as 40 and height at 161 cm, comparatively short-statured even for his time. it's likely, however, that the body has shrunk within the bog.

He was probably hanged using the rope around his neck. The noose left clear marks on the skin under his chin and at the side of his neck but there was no mark at the rear of the neck where the knot was found. thanks to skeletal decomposition, it's impossible to inform if the neck had been broken.

The stomach and intestines were examined and tests meted out on their contents. The scientists discovered that the man’s last meal had been a form of soup made up of vegetables and seeds, some cultivated seeds and a few wild: barley, linseed, ‘gold of pleasure’, knotweed, bristlegrass, and camomile.

There were no traces of meat within the man’s gastrointestinal system, and from the stage of digestion it had been obvious that the person had lived for 12 to 24 hours after this last meal. In other words, he had not eaten for each day before his death. Although similar vegetable soups weren't unusual for people of this point, two interesting things were noted:

1. The soup contained many alternative varieties of wild and cultivated seeds. Because these seeds weren't readily available, it's likely that a number of them were gathered deliberately for a big day.

2. The soup was made up of seeds only available near the spring where he was found.

At first, Tollund Man was believed to be an upscale man who had been ritually sacrificed, but recent analysis suggests that he may simply are a criminal who was hanged and buried within the bog.

The body is currently kept within the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark.

2

Tollund Man’ is that the best example of Heaney’s approach in his poetry. it absolutely was perhaps his first attempt at conflating (blending) his sense of Glob’s Jutland rituals along with his own sense of mythic and modern Irish history. Heaney had read Glob’s book The Bog People’. ‘The ‘Tollund Man’ is one among the recovered bodies featured by Glob in his book. He was a victim sacrificed to Nerthus, within the hope of securing an honest crop from the land, and it's during this sense that the speaker describes him, ‘Bridegroom to the goddess’. The speaker imagines the killing of the Tollund Man and his subsequent burial within the bog as a sort of violent love-making between victim and goddess, during which Nerthus, ‘opened her fen’, preserves the victim’s body by immersing it in her sexual ‘dark juices’. When the Tollund Man is dug up, many centuries later, the turf cutters discover,

His last gruel of winter seeds

Caked in his stomach.

As a sacrificial victim to the goddess of germination, he carries the potential of germination (‘gruel of winter seeds’) within himself instead of within the pockets of the young fighters in ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ whose graves sprouted with the barley from seeds in their pockets after they fell.

In the second section of the poem the connection between Jutland and Ireland is formed explicit. Both places have had their innocent .victims. Ireland also has killings that have a particular ritualistic dimension to them. within the last stanza the speaker recalls an event during which bodies of 4 young Catholics, murdered by Protestant militants, were dragged along a railway line in an act of mutilation:

‘Tell-tale skin and teeth

Flecking the sleepers

Of four young brothers, trailed

For miles along the lines.’

The speaker imagines that, if he addresses a prayer to the Tollund Man (‘risking blasphemy’ as a Christian by aligning himself with pagan rituals), then perhaps the potential for germination and regeneration inherent within the Tollund Man’s sacrifice, and in his very body (‘winter seeds’) could be released, not within the victim’s native Jutland, but in contemporary Ireland. it'd ‘make germinate/The scattered, ambushed/ Flesh’ of the sacrificial victims.

In the final section of the poem, the speaker imagines a visit to the Museum in Aarhuswhere the Tollund Man has been in display. Though the names of the regions he passes through (Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard’) are alien to him, and therefore the local language unintelligible, he fancies that, as an Irishman burdened with the burden of his country’s history, he will feel a kinship with a landscape that has witnessed similar conflict and killings.

The poem shows that the sacrificial death of the Tollund man is related to ritual and this seems to be reflected within the dead body’s restful pose, which could be a contrast to the terrible maiming and unrest of the victims in contemporary Irish society. The Tollund man’s body has been preserved and is aligned with a saint (saint’s kept body’).

The body is continually related to the planet (‘peat-brown head’, ‘mild pods’) and fertility (‘His last gruel of winter seeds’). the planet is represented as female and sexual: ‘And opened her fen,/Those dark juices working’) and it's this that has preserved and elevated him to a saint.

He is seen as a bridegroom to the bride-goddess Earth, a sacrifice that may bring some good, some alleviation of pain (though after all he has been violently killed), unlike the death of the four young brothers who are killed shamefully, which resulted in mere more turmoil and bloodshed.

The last lines reveal the state of mind of the speaker. The terrible paradox of both feeling lost and unhappy while ‘at home’, show the correspondences between Neolithic Jutland and modern Ireland further as acknowledging the phobia and loss that's an everyday occurrence in his world, though there's still resignation but rather a desire for peace that underlies the ultimate lines and also the whole poem.

Heaney doesn't venerate the Tollund Man as king or martyr, but as victim. His vowed journey to Aarhus in Jutland recalls the Catholic custom, of pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine, sometimes featuring the miraculously preserved body of the saint. Heaney’s ‘saint’ has had a short period of glory, but has been violently killed ‘for the land’. To the poet, he stands for country people killed for his or her allegiance to eire, a suggestion which is symbolically rendered because the embrace of the earth-goddess. The gold ‘tore’ (collar), worn by Celtic royalty, is likened to the arms of the goddess encircling the bridegroom’s neck, but the metaphor reminds us that this embrace may be a strangulation, the noose of the victim bridegroom.

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

Heaney has examine the bog people of Jutland in Glob’s Book “The Bog People”. It describes the archaeological discoveries in Jutland within the Denmark. The researchers found “preserved bodies of men and ladies within the bogs of Jutland naked, strangled or with their throats cut disposed under the peat since early Iron Age times. Heaney sees a similarity between the bog men and people Irish men who are killed during the warfare. He develops a myth out of this case and says that the mother has always demanded sacrifices from the people because the bog men were sacrificed to the goddess of the land similarly Irish men are being sacrificed for his or her motherland. 

It’s during this spirit that Heaney wishes to travel to the bogland to personally see what happened within the early Iron Age, or perhaps period, and what's happening now in Ireland. Therefore he says that he wants to travel to Aarhus—a place where the pinnacle of 1 of the bog men, called, Tollund man, is kept in a very museum. The researchers have found that the Tollund man at the time of sacrifice was fully fed and seeds of grain are found in his stomach. it's with relation to this incontrovertible fact that he has described his eye lids as pods, which are able to sprout. The Tollund man had only a skull cap on his head, otherwise he was naked. Besides the cap the sole two things on his body were a noose and a girdle, or a belt round the waist.

Heaney calls him the bridegroom to the goddess. This refers to the parable that the goddess of the land wanted the sacrifice of a male in order that she could conceive with him. Thus he's the bridegroom of the goddess who must become pregnant so the world may become fertile and also the crops may flourish within the next season. The goddess tightened the noose around his neck and therefore the bridegroom was sucked by the fen or the bog. The sacrificed man thus becomes the fertilizer of the land. The dark juices symbolise the transference of the sacrificed man to the planet. To Heaney, during this way, he becomes a martyr whose death is that the lifetime of others and whose blood is that the fertility of the land. Heaney then compares these martyred bodies to the beehives, the cells of which are filled with honey which face still exists within the museum of Aarhus

 

In the second section, Heaney feels that he has committed blasphemy by calling a Pagan a martyr and also the bog as cauldron made holy by the sacrifice. He believes that from this cauldron a brand new life may emerge. this can be the creativity of the martyr. T.S. Eliot explained the method of creativity to the action that takes place within the chemist’s crucible. When the ingredients are proportionately mixed, they're re-created in a very new form. Similarly, martyr’s blood also germinates or recreates life.

 

He, then, compares these sacrificed bog men to the labourers of eire whose dead bodies were found within the fields. These labourers were in their working dress. that they had their stockings on. Heaney means to mention that these people weren't fighters. They were ordinary labourers and were killed mercilessly within the warfare in Ireland. Numerous innocent those that had nothing to try and do with this war were killed.

Heaney also recalls the stories of men who were dragged from miles along the railway track. They’d been thoroughly skinned and their dead bodies were bare to the teeth thanks to this dragging. Heaney recalls, perhaps alluding to the scenes of condemned people carried in tumbrels to the guillotine during the French Revolution as described by Dickens in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

Heaney recalls these people name by name Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard. These are the names of the bog men. Yeats also gave the names of the Irish men in Easter 1916. this is often meant to indicate the close association of the poet with those that were killed during this war. They were his fellow countrymen. Though the bog men belonged to a special land and spoke a unique language, yet there's a archaetypal kinship between them (Archaetypal may be a term coined by Jung, a psychologist, to explain the thoughts and feelings common to all or any humanity in the slightest degree places and all told times belonging to all or any races and nations).

Heaney says that in Jutland he will feel reception because the bog of the Jutland isn't any different from the bog of the trendy Ireland. He are going to be very sorry the loss of such a large amount of lives but the thought that the tragedy is universal may be a consolation to him. this can be what he calls ‘the Redress of Poetry’. He will feel unhappy and reception simultaneously.

Heaney claims to be a pure poet. He believes that poetry should haven't any function beyond poetry. He believes in poetry for the sake of poetry. He condemns the heckler who wants to use the poetry for politics. Heaney feels that politics isn't the function of poetry. But, ironically, he cannot detach himself from the planet during which he's living. He sees men falling around him. He feels guilty that he's only writing poetry. He wants to search out a job for himself in this strife. He elaborates upon it in his essay “the Redress of Poetry”. This poem, as we are able to see, could be a political poem. But Heaney joins the tragedy of eire with the tragedy of pre-historic bog man. He creates a myth of misery. during this way he turns a political tragedy into an aesthetic tragedy. this can be how he combines politics in poetry.

Perhaps it consoles him but does it console the hundreds and thousands who are everyday massacred in Ireland?