Bogspeak: Biosemiotics and Bogland

Abstract

Bogland, like the Burren, was often depicted as uncultivatable wasteland, and considered metonymic for Irish character, as the Irish, too, resisted colonization and were thus defined as outlaws in their own countries. Bogs came to represent early on for Ireland’s conquerors the Irish lack of aspirations, their disinterest in cultivating the land, and moreover, their very lack of incentive to govern themselves. Giraldus Cambrensis remarks in Topographia Hibernica that “the Irish people attach no importance to castles; they make the woods their stronghold, and the bogs their trenches.” The very process by which bog acquired symbolic weight illuminates the range of associations that the bog continues to have in Irish environmental activism and ecocriticism. Today bogs are celebrated by writers and artists, and have emerged as the focus of competing environmental campaigns.