spite of this being ‘blasphemy’ in the eyes of the Catholic Church, the
ancient Pagan or Druid rituals with their attention to communal ‘holy
ground’ and the blood sacrifice of one man who brings forth renewal,
are not so far from the doctrines of modern day Christianity and Irish
nationalism. If the lines are read with attention to the speaker’s
conditional tense, the result is a poem that carefully questions the
legitimacy of age-old mythologies. Fear of ‘blasphemy’ or uttering
impious remarks against the dominant myth is shown to be part of an
ideological structure that attempts to control the cry of the iconoclast.
The lines alert us to the Pagan aspects of Heaney’s poem since as he
could risk blasphemy by praying to the cauldron bog, he turns to the
‘pagus’ or ‘pays.’ Blasphemy or ‘blasphemare’ in its ecclesiastical and
Latinate sense means to reproach, revile or to speak badly as it takes
the Lord’s name in vain. For the poet, bad language is anathema.
Heaney’s consideration of blasphemy risks excommunication from the
ground on which he stands as a Catholic and as a poet which is
evocative of Sweeney who was excommunicated by the clergy and
forced to live in exile away from his ‘pagus’, ‘pays’ or locale.
‘The Tollund Man’ connects the violence of colonial imposition,
sectarian murder, religious attention to blood sacrifice, and nationalist
preoccupation with what Longley would call ‘Christ-surrogates’.
While linking these different authorities, the effect of the poem is to
hold-up for examination diverse representational systems and it
becomes a working example of the way in which colonial, religious
and nationalist myths overlap helping to sanction acts of violence.
Rather than supporting the nostalgia for sacred origins, the poem
provides for readers a critique of the authority and violence implicit
within ‘authentic’ versions of culture and history.
It is not only the British army officer with his ësten-guní who
exerts a crippling influence over the colonial subject. In ëThe Tollund
Maní nationalism and religion are presented as constricting, and
comparable with colonialism if only in their tendency to mythologize.
Both colonialism and nationalism provide narratives of the past
whereby identity becomes consensus based and imaginatively forged.
Heaneyís early poetry may dig for original sources yet his digging is
self-conscious and the past he evokes is hardly wonderful. In a 1967
review entitled ëIrish Eyesí, Heaney notices how ë[t]o make a book
[...] about any place is to re-create it; to mythologise or distort; to
grace
(Grace)
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