Bog Irish

The bogs of Ireland are central to Irish cultural and national identity. Two early twentieth-century writers to express this centrality were H. P. Lovecraft in his weird tale ‘The Moon Bog’ published in the 1920s and Lord Dunsany’s The Curse of the Wise Woman published in the 1930s. Seamus Heaney, who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, followed in their boggy footsteps, expressed this centrality in his poetry published in the later twentieth century, risked blasphemy in a conservation counter-theology and is now the patron saint of bogs. In the present century, Kelly Barnhill in The Girl who Drank the Moon published in 2017 sings the song of the bog. All of this writing appreciates bogs as active participants with agency, as a pagan, pre-Christian wetlandscape, as well as the counter to Christian theology, to English colonization and to industrialization and modernization. These writers also feminize bogs as maternal figures and spaces with a fertile womb for the creation of new life. A supplement to this chapter of ‘Rebirth in a Bog’ complements the canon of the bog bible. It is excerpted from my book of detective stories, Swamp Deaths: Collected Cold Cases and Other Marshy Mysteries.