The Bog Folk
Unearthing fear of the 'old ways' via Seamus Heaney and Andrew Hozier-Byrne.
There is a disturbing and ubiquitous fear nestled at the heart of folk horror that history might repeat itself; that past horrors lay dormant, waiting to be repeated. There is a sense that the only thing standing between us and the horrific realities of the past is a singular unearthing, a breaking of the terrestrial barrier between a ‘civilised’ modernity (that above the earth) and our barbaric history (that which lies beneath). This sense of ‘deep time’ sometimes comes from tangible objects or forces that are retained in the landscape, ready to emerge – such as the piece of fleshy skull unearthed in Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).
But sometimes, it’s less a literal survival of the past that is used to invoke fear and tension than a “disturbance of time: a revisiting or co-mingling of historical moments in the present”, facilitated by some retentive quality in an ancient landscape (Thurgill, 2020). One manifestation of both these unsettling concepts can be found in the enigmatic phenomenon of bog bodies, preserved individuals from ancient times hidden in peat bogs across Northern Europe, including Britain and Ireland. These bodies, bearing signs of ritualistic mutilation, serve as tangible connections to a violent past re-emerging into the modern world.
Seamus Heaney's 'Bog Poetry'
Time and landscape are intricately linked in folk horror narratives, and work together to produce an atmosphere conducive to fear and dread. In the archaeological imagination, land is not only a geological or pedological entity but a repository of history. Each layer of soil represents a different stratum of time, memory, and human-land interaction. The first of Seamus Heaney’s famous bog poems, ‘Bogland’, which follows peat farmers in the Irish countryside, outlines this very idea: each layer of sediment in the bog is a layer of history, establishing the bog as a source of memory and history: “every layer they strip / seems camped on before” (Heaney, 1969).
Heaney also makes material links between the past and the present through the preservation of ancient objects in the land: “butter sunk under / more than a hundred years / was recovered salty and white” (Heaney, 1969). Heaney captures the idea that the land has the capacity to ‘remember’ and preserve things from ancient times. Though butter isn’t horrifying, Heaney’s poetry does seem to mirror the distinctly folk-horrific anxiety about ancient things hidden in rural landscapes. Taking Blood on Satan’s Claw as an example, with its exhumation of that fleshy piece of skull, Haggard’s folk horror landscape demonstrates its ability to ‘remember’ and realises the potential for ancient horrors to emerge from rural landscapes. Similarly concerned with the looming threat of a brutal history, poet Seamus Heaney drew parallels between the victims of ancient bog sacrifice and the lives lost in the Troubles. This connection reflects the universal fear often found in folk horror narratives: the fear of being haunted by the horrors of the past.
Andrew Hozier (AKA. ‘Bog Man’)
Popular artist Hozier has expressed that he is a huge fan of Heaney, and during the writing of his first album he became fascinated with the idea of someone falling in love with a person they exhumed: a body ‘relieved, reborn, and somewhat suspicious of the motives of the gravedigger’ (Hozier, 2014). Like Heaney’s ‘Bog Queen’, Hozier's song ‘Like Real People Do’ was written from the perspective of a bog person being exhumed.
The song reflects the same Heaneyan and folk-horrific anxiety about unearthing a troublesome past, as the bog body asks, "Why were you digging? / What did you bury?". The speaker's unease about digging up the past, and potentially unearthing historical grievances, is palpable. Resolving not to press the subject, Hozier’s bog body backtracks on their questions and concludes instead, “I will not ask you where you came from / I will not ask you and neither would you”.
Embracing the ‘folk horror feeling’ of bog bodies
The subgenre of folk horror is marked by a preoccupation with the idea that the past, or the ‘old ways’ can resurface to haunt the present. This fear is often rooted in the relationship between time and landscape, with the earth itself acting as a repository of history – with the potential to preserve or ‘remember’ malevolent objects or ways of life. In essence, the subgenre serves as a powerful vehicle for exploring the anxieties surrounding our relationship with the past, the landscape, and the fear that the worst parts of history could be repeated. The sense of unease that the sight of a bog body instils is undoubtedly ‘folk-horrifying’, because it reminds us of the disturbing possibility that the brutalities of our collective past are never truly buried.
Bibliography
Andrew Hozier-Byrne, ‘Like Real People Do’, Hozier (2014).
James Thurgill, ‘A Fear of the Folk: On topophobia and the horror of rural landscapes”, Revenant Journal, 5, pp. 33-56 (March 2020).
Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975).
- ‘The man and the bog’ in B. Coles, J. Coles and M. Schou Jørgensen (eds.)
- Door into the Dark (1969)