being throttled with the long woollen cord found wound several times around her neck.Her right arm had almost been severed as well, at the time of death, by a blow from some lethally sharp weapon. In her stomach were found the remains of a last meal – a soup of rye and seeds from the weed spurrey. While Tollund Man seems peaceful in death, there is something distressing about Huldremose Woman. Her feet, alarmingly well preserved, seem to bear witness to a final struggle. The toes are flexed, splayed and pulled upwards – rather in the manner you might expect of someone who has been pulled up off the ground by a cord around the throat. Perhaps it is only an effect of centuries in the peat, and then more recent drying in the air of the modern world, but she has about her an air of suffering.
The Iron Age practice of human sacrifice, followed by disposal of the body into a bog, was not limited to Scandinavia either. Similarly executed souls have been unearthed in Germany and there have also been several such finds in the British Isles – including the famous Lindow Man, in a bog in Cheshire in 1984, and two from Ireland in 2003. Lindow Man had been dispatched with two blows to the head, probably from an axe. One impact had been heavy enough to drive fragments of his skull deep into his brain and to shatter one of his back teeth. He had also been throttled, the rope left around his neck when his body was placed into the bog that preserved him. The luckless Irishmen – called Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man after the names of their last resting places – were victims of cruel violence. The former had been struck repeatedly on the head and chest with an axe before a blade was used to open a gaping wound across his lower abdomen; the latter was stabbed through the heart by someone standing in front of him and likely looking him in the eye.
It might seem reasonable to assume that those men and women were criminals in life, rightfully executed. This is not, however, the view shared by most archaeologists. For one thing,ancient writers including Tacitus noted the northern tribes were given to offering up their fellows to the gods. Despite the fact that he had been hanged, Tollund Man had been treated with some care. His last meal of gruel, unappetising though it sounds, was a mixture of wild and cultivated seeds that would have been hard to come by. Such an effort for a criminal seems unlikely and suggests instead a dish prepared for a special occasion – perhaps for a special person. Someone had taken the trouble to close his dead eyes and mouth so that he appeared peacefully at rest. He was also laid carefully down into the bog, curled into a protective foetal position. All of it paints a picture of someone selected to die – but accorded respect in death.
A world overseen by gods hungry for human sacrifice is hard for us to imagine. But those ancestors of the Vikings had, anyway, a fragile hold on life and surely a completely different understanding of the workings of the cosmos. There on the northern fringes of Europe they were at the mercy of nature, most of them battling every day to feed their families. If they had questions about the meaning of life, then in the absence of science and reason the answers doubtless involved the will of the gods. As farmers they depended upon the soil for all the stuff of life – food, fuel, shelter – and they accepted there were prices to be paid for all that was taken from the earth. If life came from the ground, then from time to time life might have to be returned to it.
For all that they were farmers now, living repetitive lives bound to the soil and the seasons, the continuum was also punctuated by interludes of warfare. Yet more finds reveal that long before the Vikings turned their murderous attentions on the wider world, their ancestors were acquiring the skills demanded by the raid, by attacking one another. In 1921 a party of peat-cutters working in the Hjortspring Mose
The Iron Age practice of human sacrifice, followed by disposal of the body into a bog, was not limited to Scandinavia either. Similarly executed souls have been unearthed in Germany and there have also been several such finds in the British Isles – including the famous Lindow Man, in a bog in Cheshire in 1984, and two from Ireland in 2003. Lindow Man had been dispatched with two blows to the head, probably from an axe. One impact had been heavy enough to drive fragments of his skull deep into his brain and to shatter one of his back teeth. He had also been throttled, the rope left around his neck when his body was placed into the bog that preserved him. The luckless Irishmen – called Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man after the names of their last resting places – were victims of cruel violence. The former had been struck repeatedly on the head and chest with an axe before a blade was used to open a gaping wound across his lower abdomen; the latter was stabbed through the heart by someone standing in front of him and likely looking him in the eye.
It might seem reasonable to assume that those men and women were criminals in life, rightfully executed. This is not, however, the view shared by most archaeologists. For one thing,ancient writers including Tacitus noted the northern tribes were given to offering up their fellows to the gods. Despite the fact that he had been hanged, Tollund Man had been treated with some care. His last meal of gruel, unappetising though it sounds, was a mixture of wild and cultivated seeds that would have been hard to come by. Such an effort for a criminal seems unlikely and suggests instead a dish prepared for a special occasion – perhaps for a special person. Someone had taken the trouble to close his dead eyes and mouth so that he appeared peacefully at rest. He was also laid carefully down into the bog, curled into a protective foetal position. All of it paints a picture of someone selected to die – but accorded respect in death.
A world overseen by gods hungry for human sacrifice is hard for us to imagine. But those ancestors of the Vikings had, anyway, a fragile hold on life and surely a completely different understanding of the workings of the cosmos. There on the northern fringes of Europe they were at the mercy of nature, most of them battling every day to feed their families. If they had questions about the meaning of life, then in the absence of science and reason the answers doubtless involved the will of the gods. As farmers they depended upon the soil for all the stuff of life – food, fuel, shelter – and they accepted there were prices to be paid for all that was taken from the earth. If life came from the ground, then from time to time life might have to be returned to it.
For all that they were farmers now, living repetitive lives bound to the soil and the seasons, the continuum was also punctuated by interludes of warfare. Yet more finds reveal that long before the Vikings turned their murderous attentions on the wider world, their ancestors were acquiring the skills demanded by the raid, by attacking one another. In 1921 a party of peat-cutters working in the Hjortspring Mose
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