Unearthing the past: The archaeology of bog bodies in Glob, Atwood, Hébert and Drabble

Textual Practice

Volumn 16, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 443-458

  Purdy, Anthony ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Archaeology; Bog Body; Chronotope; Memory; Mnemotope; Museum

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249366909     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502360210163417     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Peter Vilhelm Glob, Mosefolket. Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 aar (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1965);
2. Die Schläfer im Moor, trans. Thyra Dohrenburg (Munich: Winkler, 1966);
3. The Bog People. Iron-Age Man Preserved, trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford (London: Faber & Faber, 1969). Page references to the English translation will be given parenthetically in the body of the article.
4. The poetic charge of Glob's text is legendary. Commenting on his 'virtual invisibility' in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, which he directed, Richard C. Poulsen argues that 'Glob was too passionate, his readings too lively for the normal dust of archaeology. He was a scientist, but one open, at least in tone, to the passion always present in the readings of the folk.' As a writer, his influence was similar to that 'exerted by Frazer's The Golden Bough outside its specific discipline: a poetic influence' (Richard C. Poulsen, The Body as Text in a Perpetual Age of Non-Reason, New York: Peter Lang, 1996, p. 88).
5. After Glob, the most useful archaeological sources are: Wijnand Van der Sanden, Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe (Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1996);
6. Richard Turner and Robert Scaife (eds), Bog Bodies: New Discoveries and New Perspectives (London: British Museum Press, 1995);
7. Don Brothwell, The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People (London: British Museum Press, 1986);
8. I.M. Stead, J.B. Bourke and D. Brothwell (eds), Lindow Man: The Body in the Bog (London: British Museum Publications, 1986). A list of scholarly articles may be found in Poulsen, pp. 151-2, and Van der Sanden has a useful bibliography. Van der Sanden draws a clear distinction between the Danish school of thought, with its emphasis on human sacrifice, and German theories favouring the Wiedergänger interpretation, according to which the bodies were placed in bogs to prevent their returning to haunt the living (Van der Sanden, ch. 12). The nationalist stakes in bog body archaeology came to the fore after the discovery of Lindow Man, when British archaeology entered the lists in barely concealed competition with the more established German and Danish schools.
9. Poulsen, pp. 98, 81, 110-11. Similar sentiments animate Geoffrey Grigson's poem 'Tollund Man', in Collected Poems 1963-1980 (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), p. 56.
10. Walter Benjamin, 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 228.
11. For an early systematic catalogue of bog body finds see Alfred Dieck, Die europäischen Moorleichenfunde (Hominidenmoorfunde) (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1965). However, Dieck's inventory is unscientific and uncritical; the most reliable information about bog body finds is in Van der Sanden.
12. For a particularly sensationalizing and highly speculative account, see Anne Ross and Don Robins, The Life and Death of a Druid Prince: The Story of Lindow Man, an Archaeological Sensation (London: Rider, 1989). More breathless than breathtaking, Ross and Robins' narrative offers a wildly imaginative example of 'Zadig's method' - the art or technique of 'retrospective prophecy' that Thomas Huxley saw at work in the deductions of both Sherlock Holmes and scientists like Cuvier who explored deep time in order to make visible scenes and events that no human being had ever seen (Thomas Henry Huxley, 'On the method of Zadig: retrospective prophecy as a function of science', in Science and Culture and Other Essays, London: Macmillan, 1882). Zadig's method is discussed by Tony Bennett in relation to the stories told by the museum disciplines of archaeology, palaeontology, geology, anthropology and natural history (Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 177-9).
13. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 250. The 'Concluding remarks' (pp. 243-58) date from 1973 and constitute a late postscript to the essay proper.
14. The most famous literary treatment of bog bodies is, of course, to be found in Seamus Heaney's cycle of bog poems: 'The Tollund Man' and 'Nerthus' were published in Wintering Out (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 47-8, 49-50; 'Come to the Bower', 'Bog Queen', 'The Grauballe Man', 'Punishment', 'Strange Fruit' and 'Kinship' all appeared in North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), pp. 31, 32-4, 35-6, 37-8, 39, 40-5.
15. Given the political context of their publication, the poems were controversial and the critical response wide and varied. Useful starting points for thinking about Heaney's bog bodies from an archaeological point of view may be found in Jon Stallworthy, 'The poet as archaeologist: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney', in Robert F. Garratt (ed.), Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), pp. 172-86, and in Brian McHale, 'Archaeologies of knowledge: Hill's middens, Heaney's bogs, Schwerner's tablets', New Literary History, 30.1 (winter 1999), pp. 239-62. See also the companion piece to this article: Anthony Purdy, 'The bog body as mnemotope: nationalist archaeologies in Heaney and Tournier', Style, 36.1 (spring 2002), pp. 93-110.
16. Margaret Atwood, 'The Bog Man', in Wilderness Tips (Toronto: Seal Books, 1992), pp. 77-98. Page references for quotations will be given parenthetically in the body of the article.
17. Anne Hébert, Kamouraska (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 250. My translation. 'Dans un champ aride, sous les pierres, on a déterré une femme noire, vivante, datant d'une époque reculée et sauvage. Étrangement conservée. On l'a lâchée dans la petite ville. Puis on s'est barricadé, chacun chez soi. Tant la peur qu'on a de cette femme est grande et profonde. Chacun se dit que la faim de vivre de cette femme, enterrée vive, il y a si longtemps, doit être si féroce et entière, accumulée sous la terre, depuis des siècles! On n'en a sans doute jamais connu de semblable. Lorsque la femme se présente dans la ville, courant et implorant, le tocsin se met à sonner. Elle ne trouve que des portes fermées et le désert de terre battue dont sont faites les rues.'
18. McHale, p. 240. Few would object to McHale's contention that depth, in this double sense, is 'arguably one of modernism's master-tropes' (p. 239). For a close reading of Kamouraska as a late modernist text which privileges such a trope, see Anthony Purdy, 'An archaeology of the self: narrative ventriloquism in Anne Hebert's Kamouraska', in A Certain Difficulty of Being: Essays on the Quebec Novel (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990), pp. 109-33.
19. The archaeologist's elaboration of meaning, as exemplified in Glob's study, is a complex process, part scientific, part cultural. The technology of modern archaeology is indispensable to the accurate dating of the bodies, their analysis and proper preservation, but Glob's approach is also deeply cultural in that it involves a reading of the bodies that places the emphasis squarely on their aesthetic and literary qualities and aspires to an imaginative reconstruction of their world in terms of a unifying tragic vision of sacrifice and scapegoating (Poulsen, pp. 88-97). One is reminded of Heidegger's distinction between, on the one hand, technology as an act of enframing (Gestell) that reveals, unveils or 'unconceals' truth through a challenging forth (Herausfordern) that involves the ordering of nature as standing reserve (Bestand) and, on the other, the bringing forth (Her-vor-bringen) of poiesis that effects no such transformation of nature (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 10-21).
20. Margaret Drabble, A Natural Curiosity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 194. Page references for quotations will be given parenthetically in the body of the article.
21. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 217-18.