The Tollund Man

Context
Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BC, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950 on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, buried in a peat bog which preserved his body. Such a find is known as a bog body. The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim.

The body is displayed at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark, although only the head is original. Because conservation techniques for organic material were insufficiently advanced in the early 1950s for the entire body to be preserved, the forensic examiners suggested the head be severed and the rest of the body remain unpreserved. Subsequently the body desiccated and the tissue disappeared. In 1976, the Danish Police Force made a finger-print analysis, making Tollund Man's thumb print one of the oldest finger-prints on record.

Action
The poem is divided into eleven stanzas, and three parts. The first part has five stanzas, and the second and third three. The first part of the poem is a description of what Heaney will see when he views the body. The second part is the relationship between the religious sacrifice and the dead Irish, and the third Heaney in the country of Denmark.

The Heaney wants to go to Demark to see the wizened remains of the bog-body at Aarhus. He was executed with his last meal still in his stomach. He wants to worship him, against all religious constraints. He wants to call upon his to raise the dead Irish. He wants to derive a sort of power from the body, from the country, from being alone.

Form
Structure

The poem is divided into eleven stanzas, and three parts. The first part has five stanzas, and the second and third three.

Speaker

The poem has a first person persona, an "I". The Tollund Man is never named except in the title, it is only "he". Despite this, the bog is personified as "she", the divine worship of the primitives takes on the same identity as the people themselves. The poem is narrated in the future tense - with a sense of a perhaps, a distant. Heaney never wanders in his conviction that he will go, and he will do exactly this and that, but it is not a trip he is contemplating with urgency. It is a "Some day" poem.

Rhyme

There is no obvious rhyme structure, but Heaney employs assonance and alliteration throughout

Tone.

The opening tone of the first part is "mild" - Heaney will passively "see", and "stand for a long time", the meticulous observer. The description of the primitive "goddess" to whom the man was sacrificed makes the tone more ominous, more fateful. She "tighten[s]", "work[s]", and only away form her can he "repose". Heaney's tone is more emphatic in the second part, his verbs and language becomes stronger. He "could risk", "consecrate", "pray". His voice is doom-laden.

The tone of the last stanza is mournful. "Freedom" is "sad", a man who is "a home" must also be "lost,/Unhappy". He is passive, accepting.

Mood.

The opening of the poem is expectant, determined - "Some day I will", and respectful, he intends to "stand for a long time" in the presence of the dead, the "bridegroom to the goddess". There is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the corpse, of larger forces drawing him along. He is consumed by the "torc" and "fen" of the "goddess". He is then left to chance, to the "turfcutters'/Honeycombed workings". He becomes anguished in the second part, calling upon words such as "blasphemy" to describe his impotent longings obliterate the wrongs of the past. In the third part the Heaney-persona feels quiet despair, quiet strength, "sad freedom".

Symbolism
The first image is that of the corpse, who is quiet and impersonal, the poem's victim of fate, caught in the "torc" of others. He is "mild", and everything is done to him. He is "dug... out", "worked", left as a "trove". He is exposed - "naked", and finally he sleeps. He is described in a wizened state, careful emphasis made on his brown skin, the workings of the fen. He is destroyed and yet elevated at the same time.

There is a bleak, harsh feeling associated with the surrounding country, the "cauldron bog", the "tumbril". They are the "old man-killing parishes", the larger for which the smaller is sacrificed. The "goddess" is part of the country - it absorbs and strangles, alone or destroyed at will. The only marks it leaves on its victims are the remains of their death "cap, noose and girdle".

The first victim of fate is extended to the others, "the scattered, ambushed/Flesh of labourers", of victims "trailed/For miles along the lines." Their fellow in the Tollund Man should be somehow spiritually akin, his preservation making him their saint. His paradoxical survival and "repose" should give him the power to raise the others.

Heaney's primary use of Denmark (and foreignness) as imagery is in the third part. The isolation from society is emphasised by dwelling on the strange names "Tollund, Graubelle, Nebelgard,", "not knowing their tongue". The "at home" is not supposed to be comforting, it is just the persona's normal state. He is always "lost,/Unhappy". But at the same time, the isolation from language gives a "sad freedom", too highly priced.