The Windeby Girl

Heaney's poetry is concerned primarily with historical themes of Ireland. His poems also tend to mirror social and cultural divisions in contemporary Northern Ireland.

In 1952 the owners of a little bog near Windeby, in the vicinity of Schleswig, Germany, discovered the corpse of a 2,000-year-old girl, aged 14 at her death, as they cut up the peat for sale. Birch branches and a large stone covered the girl when alive, weighing her down so that she drowned in the bog. Photographed, analyzed, her well-known remains now rest in the Archäologisches Landesmuseum in Schleswig, vivid testimony that that bog people of northern Europe enforced their moral code with capital punishment.

Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob published a book in 1965 about the teenager, by then named the Windeby girl.

Heaney was attracted to P. V. Glob's 'The Bog People,' that deals with preserved Iron Age bodies of men and women that had been ritually killed. Heaney had been drawn to this book because it both served to focus a number of his traditional interests, and also offered him a particular frame of reference and set of symbols he could employ to engage with the present conflict in Ireland and its history. 'Punishment' is perhaps the most unsettling poem in North and describes a photograph of a young woman, the Windeby girl, who had most likely been shorn, stripped then killed and thrown into the bog as some form of punishment.

Why was the girl executed? The Roman historian Tacitus in his Agricola and Germania, indicates the reason in his description of how Germanic tribes punished adultery. Not only was the Windeby girl's hair cut off, but the position of the stone block, and the way her body is contorted, may show that she was put in her shallow grave to be stoned before being drowned. A punishment like that the Windeby girl suffered exists now in Nigeria.

Heaney projects a historical pattern of violence that unites the ancient victims with those who have died in contemporary troubles.

The Troubles (1969-1997) was the name given to a violent religious-political conflict that was centred on Northern Ireland and emerged as a result of perceived socio-economic inequalities between the two communities of Northern Ireland.

The poet expresses a sense of identification and empathy with the victim but soon becomes a voyeur and takes pleasure in the woman's exposed and subjected body. The conflict of emotion is given further expression in the poet's direct address to the dead woman 'My poor scapegoat', / 'I almost love you / but would have cast, I know the stones of silence'. Heaney juxtaposes pagan ritual punishment with Christian retribution. Focusing the killings of the past with the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland.

"Punishment" famously compares the Windeby girl with Catholic girls in Northern Ireland, her "betraying sisters" (38), who consorted with British soldiers. Facts on File (1971) reports that "Outraged Londonderry women Nov. 10 tied Martha Doherty, 19, to a lamp post, shaved her head, and covered her with tar for dating a British soldier. She subsequently married the soldier. Two other girls were seized by women in Londonderry and publicly humiliated Nov. 8 and Nov. 10 for dating British soldiers." One newspaper photograph shows a teenage girl tarred, feathered, and tied to a light standard in Falls Road, Belfast. Heaney lived there and, having just read Glob's book in English translation, must have associated the two girls, one with a face tarred by her sisters, and another with a tar-black face from the bog, both punished for adultery.

This paradoxical poem, it will occur to many, helps explain Ireland and its centuries-long "trouble," where Christians, in killing each other, simultaneously feel revulsion and sorrow, and vindictive triumph.