Bog King
On Thursday I went to the National Museum of Ireland (Archaeology) to see the bog bodies, in preparation for attending the Peatlands conference at UCC. I walked straight in without pausing or thinking it through, following my feet - stopping in my tracks at the side of Old Croghan Man.
Iron Age, once some 6ft6 in height he is now no more than a torso with manicured fingernails. Yet there was something indefinable about him; a familiarity, a sense of connection - a regality.
I felt summoned.
Found at the foot of an inaugeration hill in County Offaly in 2003, he would have been >25 years old, with a diet rich in meat - although his last meal, contained in perfect preservation, was one of gruel and buttermilk. He wears a plaited leather arm band, possibly a symbol of state. Beaten with many blows he was beheaded and dismembered, arms pierced through and threaded with withy rope, presumably to either restrain him for the torture or to tie him to a weight such that he would then sink into the sky dark depths of the liminal, shifting, bog.
His nipples had been sliced off. Suckling on the King's nipples was a symbol of submitting to rulership, thus to have them removed was to renounce his position. One theory thus, is that he was a king, sacrficed for his land.
Digesting all of this and haunted by something I couldn't quite reach, I went for a wander around the rest of the exhibition.
Old Croghan Man is one of a series of bogmen trapped in the museum's busy quiet. Their bodies are placed in a discreet series of spiral pods, the lighting low, information panels outside of the pods are bilingual and informative. There are small benches to sit and muse.
I sat and mused for hours. Going from one to another and back again. Observing the reactions of visitors. Trying to hear what was on the other side of a cold silence.
Some of the faces reminded me of people shrinking away from the paparazzi. I found myself pulled back again and again to the hands.
Then the silence broke inside my bubble...
I jumped as if struck by electricity, and promptly burst into tears: Old Croghan Man was un-kinged - why would you do that if your sacrifice had to be royal? There would be no point offering a goddess a disempowered man, the crux of the matter was the divinity of blood. That is something you would do to a foreign king, to minimise his might.
Additionally, he has a defensive wound, as if he attempted to fend off attack. Thus he clearly wasn't okay with the plan.
He also lost his head - and was unusually tall - and was found at the bottom of a hill.
Could he be...just maybe...perhaps...was he... Bendigeidfran?
And then the words came.
Bog King
You were waiting
Across the constellation's sea
Behind the spiralling dark
A floating keshe
(Following a crow)
A leather bag of a person
Drawn not into submission
Reaching for my hand
Sharing your final meal
With an open heart
Bearing witness
For always and a day
The bog velvet
A fairy cloak
Burnishing your skin with
A shadow's stain
I watch the people come
Unwitting and quick
Stopping on breath
Eyes filling with absence
And the creeping horror
Of familiar fingernails
They place their arms alongside
All colours being brave
Where your kin seem to turn away
Curious
Gazes slicing
Like a peat cutter's hungry spade
You are enthroned by the watching
A royal state
Gracious in your glass grave
Unsuckled by time
The withy
Threading you like a
Bead to the boundary's edge
- I wonder -
Are you my brother, giant?
Tall and headless
Your skull an elsewhere myth
In the cauldron depths of Wales
You were robbed
Of more than a shoe
And stripped
But for a plaited band
Which you wear like gold
A crown carved in the
Curling of a palm
Wedded to your land
2,000 years ago
I sit at your side
As if in vigil
Bandaging the blows
With torn and stolen words
Hacking at lines
And rolling down
The forgotten hills.
(A Macalla from 'Bog Queen' by Seamus Heaney:
I lay waiting between turf-face and demesne wall, between heathery levels and glass-toothed stone. My body was braille as a defensive wound, as if he attempted to fend off attack. He lost his head. He in the cavings of stomach and socket. 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 hides. 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 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).