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 the bog peoples of northern Europe enforced their moral code with capital punishment. Danish archaeologist Peter Vilhelm Glob in 1965 published Mosefolket, a book about these iron-age bog folk; and in it he placed some photographs of the body of the teenager by then named the Windeby girl

Seamus Heaney's "Punishment" famously compares the Windeby girl with Catholic girls in Northern Ireland, her "betraying sisters" (38), who consorted with British soldiers.

In the 1970’s, Heaney--born in 1939 to a pious, Catholic, moderately Nationalist rural family--felt himself uncomfortably caught between physical-force Republicanism, about which he was generally skeptical, and the discriminatory rule of entrenched Protestant political power, one of whose Paisleyite newspapers referred to Heaney as “the well-known papist propagandist.”

At about the same time as the tar-and-feather incident, at which it is possible Heaney might actually have been a bystander, he and his own young family decided to move out of Belfast, south to the less fractious Irish Republic.

The presence and fear of conflict and violence are a part of Irish history. Whether it is from ancient times or from around the time of 'The Irish Troubles', it is an ever present part of Ireland and consequently makes it in to Heaney's poetry.

In “Punishment” Heaney establishes a metaphorical connection between two extravagantly violent events: on the one hand, the execution of a young adulteress, whose body has been preserved for two millennia in a North European bog; and, on the other, in an analogous tribal ritual, the savage chastisement in 1972 of certain Belfast Catholic girls who, because they had dated British soldiers, were shorn, tarred-and-feathered, and chained in the city center by the IRA.

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.

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