The late Seamus Heaney wrote a series of magnificent poems about human remains accidentally discovered in peat pits in northern Europe, bodies astonishingly well preserved in the tannic water of the pits.  These Iron Age remains, thought to be sacrificial victims to fertility gods, brought to Heaney’s mind the Northern Irish Troubles, the violent struggles between Catholics and Protestants which had persisted for much of his adult life.  Victims of the Troubles often went on gruesome visual display in newspaper photographs, 

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

and these images of murdered or tarred-and-feathered transgressors against tribal loyalty found their way into Heaney poems like “The Tollund Man.”   One of this poem’s passages used greatly to puzzle my students:

. . . The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed for miles along the lines.

“Stockinged”?  Perhaps because the victims were strangled with women’s stockings.  Or because, when they were still alive, the victims were hooded with stockings to prevent their seeing anything.  I could be of more definite help with Heaney’s word “sleepers.”  There, the poet seems to recall an act of torture when four young men were dragged for miles behind some kind of carriage or car along a railroad, and traces of their bodies, their skin and teeth, were left behind on the rail bed, specifically on the wooden beams underlying the tracks, the “sleepers.”  In the United States, we would say “crossties.” For us, the only railroad meaning of “sleepers” is “sleeping cars.”

“Sleepers” in the sense of track supports is a Britishism, not an Irishism, attested in the OED in quotations as far back as the late eighteenth century, when the technology of railways was brand new.  The term seems to derive from still older uses in building, where “sleeper” means a strong horizontal beam supporting a wall or roof.  It’s easy to imagine how this meaning came about.  One wants a wall support to be as fixed in place, as unmoving, as a figure lying in deep sleep.  “Sleeper” in the horizontally unmoving sense can be connected with still another Britishism, a slangier one: a “sleeping policeman” is the raised bump on a street meant to keep your car from driving down that street too fast, a “speed bump,” as we would say.

 As for “crossties,” it seems straightforward and self-descriptive, something lying at right angles to the rails and tying them together.  And yet the word has its poetry too, in an old folksong which is simpler than anything Seamus Heaney wrote, but in its way just as moving:

And the grave will decay you 
And turn you to dust; 
Not one girl in a hundred 
A poor boy can trust. 

They’ll hug you and kiss you 
And tell you more lies 
Than the crossties on the railroad 
Or stars in the sky.