The publisher’s blurb on the inside cover of North speaks of Seamus Heaney’s ‘idea of the north’, a myth allowing him to ‘contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly’. In this essay, I want to show how Heaney has derived this ‘idea of the north’ – more properly, his idea of northern pasts – from Old Norse and Old English literary traditions, and how both the sameness and the alterity of these pasts are related to his own, and our, present. I will look first at North, and then take the poem ‘Funeral Rites’ as a detailed case in point. An important duality will emerge: the individual’s engagement with an historical past, however it has been constructed, and the poet’s engagement with, and reuse of, earlier literature. This double relation is of course central to the subject of the second part of this essay, Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, an Old English poem on Scandinavian subject matter: the ‘big thing’, as Heaney himself has described it.

Not everyone has admired North. And even its admirers have not warmed to all the poems in it. But one glorious exception is the first of the two opening poems ‘in dedication for Mary Heaney’. ‘Sunlight’ is not only outside the body of poems in the volume, but also outside its central theme, the relation between past and present. Indeed, the picture of the poet’s aunt baking on a sunlit afternoon is located outside time itself: she sits patiently waiting for ‘the scone rising’ in the space – temporal as well as spatial – between ‘the tick of two clocks’ (N 9). Mary Heaney, in the poet’s memory, inhabits a no-man’s-land between two time systems, aligned to neither of them. The rising she awaits has nothing to do with political history, that connotation (surely unavoidable in any Irish context) evoked only to draw playful attention to its significant absence.