“Bodies”
Katie Ciaglo
As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.
So begins Seamus Heaney’s poem Grauballe Man, about the remains of an ancient body discovered in a peat bog. One of Ireland’s—and the world’s—most famous poets of the 20th century, Heaney elevates basic human subject matter to a level of lyrical beauty. As I pour over his words, I am struck by how eloquently the body is preserved in the poem. Grauballe Man’s spine is not a spine but an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The ball of his heel is a basalt egg. A man, dead for thousands of years, weeps as if he still knows pain. Heaney not only memorializes Grauballe Man but brings him back to life, and I drink up every word.
Though Grauballe Man was found in Denmark, there are several Irish bog bodies on view in Ireland’s National Museum of Archaeology. Located in Dublin, twenty minutes from where Heaney lived the last thirty years of his life, and only a three-minute walk from where I sit reading his poem, I decide to the pay the bodies a visit.
***
Moving counter-clockwise, I follow the bend of the cement wall as it curves inward, like I’m walking inside a snail shell. The circular path draws me naturally into its silent center, leaving me unprepared for the unnatural thing that now lies before me in the middle of the round room. A body. Dark brown, flattened, twisted, and screaming for help.
As I get closer to the display case, the individual features of the corpse come into focus. The body is severed at the waist, with two arms that protrude like warped branches from the petrified torso. His leathery skin lays wrinkled over his chest, pulled tighter in some areas by the faint rise of shoulder blades. Between the shoulders the skin gathers together and spirals upwards creating a neck. The head lies on its side—looking to my left—revealing a face that flattens his nose, eye, mouth, and ear into a two-dimensional profile. His hair, however, remains intact. Like fine wires of rusted copper, the strands coil together into a tidy knot on top of his head.
My lunch churns in my stomach but I can’t look away. I circle the display case once, twice, three times, viewing the perfect hair, twisted arms, and crumpled skin from every angle.
Who will say ‘corpse’
to his vivid cast?
Who will say ‘body’
to his opaque repose?
The poem rushes back to me, and puts words to this enigma of slick skin and fossilized face. Capturing the paradox of a human life trapped in a gruesome corpse, Heaney gives me space to examine the man in silence without shame, knowing that others have been left speechless at his side. Eventually I pull myself away from the body’s gaze and follow the curved wall out of the small room.
Back near the entrance, I notice a sign that I missed earlier. “Clonycavan Man,” it reads, “Early Iron Age: 392-201 BC. Discovered March 2003.” It goes on to explain what scientists have learned about the body. Two blows to the head indicate that he was killed by an axe, then deposited in a bog in County Meath. The acidic water, low temperatures, and lack of oxygen in the bog combined to preserve the skin and some internal organs, though the acid dissolved most of the bones. Over 2,000 years later he was discovered during peat extraction when a milling machine severed the bottom half of his body. An analysis of Clonycavan Man’s hair and stomach revealed a diet rich in vegetable and proteins, meaning he was most likely killed in the summer. He was in his early twenties when he died. He stood five feet, two inches tall.
Armed with this scientific obituary, I return to the display case. Staring again at the crumpled body, I cannot discern his age, his height, or his last meal. I can deduce where the axe probably slashed him in the face, but the head is already so flat I can’t be too sure. What else don’t I know about this remnant of a man, reduced to statistics and hardened leather? Suddenly I see my own body lying before me, barely recognizable, a sign overhead: “Colorado Girl. Early 21st Century. Five feet six inches tall. Three knee surgeries. Consumed large quantities of carbohydrates.” What else will anyone be able to discover?
I leave the corpses behind and return to the main area of the exhibit where I read more about the bog bodies. Clonycavan Man is one of four bodies in the Kingship and Sacrifice exhibit at the archaeology museum. All of the bodies, it turns out, are believed to be of ancient kings. Considered responsible for poor harvests, the kings were sacrificed by their tribes to please the goddess of fertility. Clonycavan Man’s protein-filled diet and fancy hairstyle indicate his wealthy status. Any other testimonies to his reign as king—whether benevolent or insufferable—are unknown and unrecorded.
As I approach the second bog body, I stop to read the sign. “Old Croghan Man. Early Iron Age: 362-175 BC. Discovered March 2003.” Another list of facts: Early twenties when he died, six feet six inches tall, rich meat diet indicates high status. But what about his family? His childhood friends? I wonder if he had time to say goodbye to the people he cared about before he was sacrificed, or if there was even anyone to say goodbye to. Before he was killed, I continue to read, Old Croghan Man was bound by branches threaded through holes in his upper arms, stabbed in the chest and neck, and then decapitated and cut in half before being discarded into the murky depths of the bog.
The display case holds what looks like a leather jacket forgotten on the ground. Without a head, it is barely a body. I search for the holes in his arms and other signs of his brutal death, but am struck instead by a single manicured hand, delicately curled as if its last act was holding the hand of another. The fingernails are perfectly preserved and the knuckles remain defined, veins still etched in the palm, his lifeline dying to tell a story. So many people this hand must have touched—connections that will never be remembered.
I move on to explore the rest of the museum but the unspoken stories of the bog bodies continue to haunt me. Their corpses provide exceptional evidence about Ireland’s ancient past, but their personal histories dissolved along with their bones into the acidic muck. I hurry through an exhibit about Celtic jewelry and another about prehistoric weapons, and find myself standing again in front of Clonycavan Man, hoping something will speak to me. He remains quiet.
Only Heaney’s words are left to fill the silence as I drift out of the museum.
I first saw his twisted face
in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,
but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity
The bodies’ toughened skin and distorted limbs still swim before my eyes, but I wonder how long it will be until I forget, and what images will be the last to go.
Some hair.
A hand.
When we die, what is remembered, and what is left behind?
