Nineteenth Century Studies n "Feeling into Words" (1974), Seamus Heaney writes: "I began to get an idea of bog as the memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it. " 2 Although "all oppositions are harmonized" in the inscrutable muck and mire of the bog, it is the bodies preserved in the bog that inspire, coerce, and even demand Heaney' s poetic self-reflection. 3 Bog bodies "have a double force, a riddling power, " Heaney argues: "[O]n the

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... hand they invite us to reverie and daydream, while on the other hand, they can tempt the intellect to its most strenuous exertions. " 4 Heaney' s bog poetry, which articulates a "binocular view" of past and present Irish struggle, was inspired by twentieth-century bog body discoveries in northern Europe, led by remarkable finds in Denmark in the 1940s and 1950s. 5 ut in the nineteenth century bog bodies were already beginning to be examined, distributed, and put on display, not only in museums but also in literature. Nineteenth-century British writers were among the first to exploit the fascinating phenomenon of bog bodies, finding in their curious preservation a means to interrogate the present through evidence of the past. 6 The authors featured in this essay -I 1 [W]ho knows how to reverence the Body of a Man? It is the most reverend phenomenon under this Sun. -Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843) 1