From Antaeus to the Bog Queen: Mythological Allusions in Seamus Heaney’s North

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Addressing the Irish Troubles in his “North”, 1995 Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney makes mythological allusions and tells of the chaos by using symbolic language. His relevant poems, Antaeus and Hercules myths from Greek mythology are the stories of source power for the Irish and those of their dispossessions. His poems dealing with the cult of Nerthus, the goddess of earth in Scandinavian mythology, are the narratives underlying the cultural kinships between the two geographies, reflecting contemporary practices of cycle of violence. In this sense, the bog queens in ‘Come to the Bower’ and ‘Bog Queen’ appear to be as Nerthus, for whom people were sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the territory in spring, and as Mother Ireland, who needs the blood of her children to survive. While the first group traces back the reasons of hibernation of Ireland, defined as the ‘sleeping giant’, the second one picks the route of violence followed by her loyalties to awaken this giant. Heaney’s preference to hold a mirror to his locale through Greek and Scandinavian mythologies is a result of his desire to show the political and social chaos comprehensively.

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Seamus Heaney , poetry , Ireland , Irish Troubles , mythology , bog

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences

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Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences