the skin and soft tissues and all but stopped time. What were lakes and marshes in the past have often been transformed into peat bogs – and most of the discoveries of so-called ‘bog-bodies’ have been made by people collecting fuel for their fires.
The most famous bog-body of them all was unearthed in 1950 by two brothers cutting peat in the Bjældskovdal bog near the village of Tollund, in Jutland. They had brought their wives along to help and as one of them busied herself piling sods ready for loading onto their cart, she spotted a man’s face in the glistening wall of the cutting. So fresh did it seem, so newly dead, a call was made to the local police station, at nearby Silkeborg, and a murder reported.
Investigation revealed an unlawful killing right enough – but one committed sometime in the fourth century BC . Empires had come and gone while Tollund Man lay entombed and mummified within the peat. He is older than Christianity or Islam. He is on display now in the Silkeborg Museum and the only word to describe him is beautiful.
The flesh of Tollund Man’s hands and arms had mostly decomposed – likely a result of partial exposure to the air in the days and weeks before he was spotted. The rest of him, however, had been largely unaffected by the passing of two and a half millennia. The tannins that preserved him had darkly stained him too, so that he seemed made of polished stone, or coal. He was naked but for a pointed cap of sheepskin on his sorry head and a thin leather belt around his waist. Scientists found the contents of his last meal still languishing in his gut – a simple soup of vegetables and seeds.
Around 12 hours after he had finished eating that thin gruel, he was put to death. Still around his neck was a braided leather rope, and analysis by the local coroner determined Tollund Man had been killed by hanging. Not for him the mercy of a snapped neck and a quick death, however – rather the evidence showed he had suffered the special misery of strangulation.
Only his head survives today, fastened onto a skilful reconstruction of the body modelled from photographs taken in the 1950s; but it is a marvel just the same. His eyes and mouth are closed so that at first sight he seems peacefully asleep. Under his cap his hair is cropped short and as he had recently shaved, his chin and upper lip are covered with a light stubble.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was fascinated by him as well. In ‘The Tollund Man’ he writes:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap . . .
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Tollund Man is certainly the best known of the bog-bodies, but he is one of many. Grauballe Man, his hair stained red as a robin’s breast by the peat, was found just two years later and only a few miles away. Also naked, and after a similar meal of seeds and vegetables, he had his throat slit from ear to ear. His millennia in the mud have crumpled his face so it has the look of an old leather bag. Elling Woman was found in 1938 just 80 yards from the spot where Tollund Man would come to light a dozen years later. She was wearing a woollen cloak and had a cowhide wrapped around her legs. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail. Like her near neighbour, she had been hanged with a leather rope. Other bog-bodies have been unearthed there and elsewhere, and all in similar, gory circumstances. Two men’s corpses were found in Borremose bog, in Himmerland – the first in 1946 and the second the following year. Borremose Woman was found in 1947.
In the National Museum in Copenhagen I came face to face with Huldremose Woman, revealed by peat-cutting, at Ramten, in Djursland, in 1879. She was fully clothed when she met her death – possibly the result of
The most famous bog-body of them all was unearthed in 1950 by two brothers cutting peat in the Bjældskovdal bog near the village of Tollund, in Jutland. They had brought their wives along to help and as one of them busied herself piling sods ready for loading onto their cart, she spotted a man’s face in the glistening wall of the cutting. So fresh did it seem, so newly dead, a call was made to the local police station, at nearby Silkeborg, and a murder reported.
Investigation revealed an unlawful killing right enough – but one committed sometime in the fourth century BC . Empires had come and gone while Tollund Man lay entombed and mummified within the peat. He is older than Christianity or Islam. He is on display now in the Silkeborg Museum and the only word to describe him is beautiful.
The flesh of Tollund Man’s hands and arms had mostly decomposed – likely a result of partial exposure to the air in the days and weeks before he was spotted. The rest of him, however, had been largely unaffected by the passing of two and a half millennia. The tannins that preserved him had darkly stained him too, so that he seemed made of polished stone, or coal. He was naked but for a pointed cap of sheepskin on his sorry head and a thin leather belt around his waist. Scientists found the contents of his last meal still languishing in his gut – a simple soup of vegetables and seeds.
Around 12 hours after he had finished eating that thin gruel, he was put to death. Still around his neck was a braided leather rope, and analysis by the local coroner determined Tollund Man had been killed by hanging. Not for him the mercy of a snapped neck and a quick death, however – rather the evidence showed he had suffered the special misery of strangulation.
Only his head survives today, fastened onto a skilful reconstruction of the body modelled from photographs taken in the 1950s; but it is a marvel just the same. His eyes and mouth are closed so that at first sight he seems peacefully asleep. Under his cap his hair is cropped short and as he had recently shaved, his chin and upper lip are covered with a light stubble.
The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was fascinated by him as well. In ‘The Tollund Man’ he writes:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap . . .
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Tollund Man is certainly the best known of the bog-bodies, but he is one of many. Grauballe Man, his hair stained red as a robin’s breast by the peat, was found just two years later and only a few miles away. Also naked, and after a similar meal of seeds and vegetables, he had his throat slit from ear to ear. His millennia in the mud have crumpled his face so it has the look of an old leather bag. Elling Woman was found in 1938 just 80 yards from the spot where Tollund Man would come to light a dozen years later. She was wearing a woollen cloak and had a cowhide wrapped around her legs. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail. Like her near neighbour, she had been hanged with a leather rope. Other bog-bodies have been unearthed there and elsewhere, and all in similar, gory circumstances. Two men’s corpses were found in Borremose bog, in Himmerland – the first in 1946 and the second the following year. Borremose Woman was found in 1947.
In the National Museum in Copenhagen I came face to face with Huldremose Woman, revealed by peat-cutting, at Ramten, in Djursland, in 1879. She was fully clothed when she met her death – possibly the result of
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