The Tollund man
...t gruel of winter seeds/Caked in his stomach’ is very graphic and describes that his body was so well preserved that the contents found in his stomach from his last meal could still be observed. The way he was found, ‘Naked except for the cap, noose and girdle’ makes it sound as though he was stripped of all his pocessions, defenceless, and suggests that he was strangled or hanged by the ‘noose’ around his neck. Later in the poem Heaney says that ‘The Tollund Man’, ‘rode the tumbril’ which was a cart that took people to their death by punishment for example the guillotine, this also backs up the idea that ‘The Tollund Man’ was killed in rather gruesome circumstances. The third stanza, ‘Bridegroom to the goddess’ is describing the bog as the goddess of fertility, this is personification. Glob argues that “some of the Iron Age people dug out of the bogs of Jutland were ritual sacrifices: their murder in winter, and the disposal of their bodies in bogs sacred to the goddess, would ensure the fertility of the crops the following spring”. This is why The Tollund Man’s burial and preservation is described in sexual terms, ‘open her fen’. ‘Those dark juices working/Him to a saint’s kept body’ describes how the bog preserves the body perfectly. Also, it suggests The Tollund Man is like a saint as in the Catholic religion, saints bodies are said not to decay. ‘I could risk blasphemy…our holy ground’ shows The Tollund Man’s power over Heaney, “he can compel a ‘religious’ reaction outside the norms of any conventional piety” and it suggests that Heaney wants there to be a different religion, and sees the bog as a holy place, an example of this is that Heaney by making the bog a new deity and worshipping that, people would then unite and sow the seeds for peace, ‘and pray/Him to make germinate’. Furthermore, it suggests that “he may make these recent dead ‘germinate’ again, as his original killers hoped he would make their next season’s crops germinate”. ‘Trove of the turf cutters’ incorporates alliteration on the t’s which evokes sharp images of turf being cut. ‘Honeycombed workings’ describes what turf looks like when it is raised from the ground. In the final line of the fifth stanza ‘reposes at Aarhus’ it contains sibilance, which also creates half rhyme, which brings finality to the first section of the poem. Heaney compares the sacrificial Iron Age Killing with the brutal sectarian violence dividing Northern Ireland, at the time of writing the poem, ‘stockinged corpses/Laid out in the farmyards’ and ‘your young brothers/Trailed for miles along the lines’. ‘Tell tale skin and teeth/Flecking the sleepers’ implies that the four young brothers were brutally beaten up by their bodies being distributed across a large area, ambushed and were sacrificed for religion. By doing this he is relating to the troubles in Northern Ireland with Catholics and Protestants, at a time when religious questions were a matter of life or a tortured death. In a radio interview concerning ‘The Tollund Man’, Heaney says, “I’ve tried to make a connection lately between things that come to the surface in bogs, in particular in Danish bogs, and the violence that was coming to the surface in Northern Ireland.” ‘Tollun...