The Bog Bodies: Were They Criminals or Gods?

In May 1950, two brothers were cutting peat in the Bjældskovdal bog, a few miles west of Silkeborg in Denmark, when their spades uncovered a face. It was calm, eyes closed, a day’s stubble on the chin, the expression of a man asleep. They thought they had found a recent murder victim and sent for the police. The police sent for the archaeologists, and the archaeologists worked out that the man had died around 400 BC, some twenty-four centuries before the spades reached him.

He is called Tollund Man, and he is the most peaceful corpse in European archaeology. He wore a pointed cap of sheepskin and a plaited leather cord drawn tight around his neck. The cord had hanged him. He had eaten a last meal of barley gruel and seeds, then was led or carried to the bog, killed, and laid in the peat on his side with his knees drawn up, as if someone had arranged him for sleep. Whoever put him there closed his eyes and his mouth.

That gesture is the question this whole subject turns on. The men who killed Tollund Man also tended to him. Across Northern Europe, for the better part of a thousand years, people did this again and again: they killed a person with unusual violence, and then they treated the body with a care that looks almost like reverence. We have their faces. We do not have the reason.

What a bog does to a body

A peat bog is a slow chemical accident that happens to work like an embalmer. The water sitting in a Sphagnum moss bog is cold and acidic, with almost no oxygen, which already discourages the bacteria that drive decay. The decisive ingredient is a sugar.

As the moss dies it releases a polysaccharide called sphagnan. In 1991 the chemist Terence Painter showed what sphagnan does to flesh. Its reactive groups bind to the proteins in skin and drive a Maillard reaction, the browning you get when you sear meat or tan a hide, which turns the skin dark and leathery and stops it rotting. At the same time sphagnan sequesters the nitrogen in the water and locks up the enzymes bacteria use to break tissue down. The bog does not so much freeze a body as pickle and tan it.

The result is uneven in a way that surprises people. Soft tissue lasts: skin, hair, fingernails, the soft organs, the half-digested meal in the gut. Bone often does not. The same acid that preserves the face dissolves the calcium phosphate in the skeleton, so a bog body can come out of the peat with a perfect set of features and a spine gone soft as rubber. Tollund Man’s skin was good enough to take a fingerprint. His bones were a wreck.

Timing matters too. For this to work, the body has to go into cold water and be covered fast, before warmth and air can start putrefaction. Almost every well-preserved bog body seems to have been placed in winter or early spring. Somebody chose the season.

The cast in the peat

Tollund Man is the famous face, but he is one of a small company of Iron Age dead whose deaths were strange enough to argue about.

Grauballe Man was found in 1952 in another Jutland bog, a few miles from Tollund. Radiocarbon dating of his liver places him around 300 BC. His throat had been cut in a single stroke, ear to ear, deep enough to sever the windpipe and the gullet. His last meal was a dense mash of more than sixty plants, and among the seeds were the dark sclerotia of ergot, the fungus that grows on damp grain and can cause hallucinations and convulsions. Whether the ergot was deliberate or simply contamination in damp winter grain has never been settled. Nobody can say whether Grauballe Man was poisoned, drugged, or just unlucky in his porridge.

Lindow Man came out of Lindow Moss in Cheshire in 1984, and his death was the most elaborate of all. He was struck twice on the head hard enough to drive fragments of skull into the brain. A cord of animal sinew was twisted around his neck like a garrotte. His throat appears to have been cut. Then he was laid face-down in a pool. Archaeologists call this overkill the “triple death,” and it is hard to read as an ordinary murder, because a robber or an executioner needs to kill a man only once. Somebody killed Lindow Man several times over, in sequence, as if each blow were a separate requirement. His dating has never been resolved. Two laboratories returned radiocarbon results centuries apart, and the published range for his death runs from about 2 BC to AD 119, which leaves open whether he died before or after the Roman conquest of Britain. The British Museum has held him since 1984.

The two bodies that changed the conversation came out of Irish bogs in the same year, 2003, a few months and ninety kilometres apart. Old Croghan Man was a giant for his time, close to two metres tall, with manicured fingernails that suggest he never did heavy work. Holes had been cut through his upper arms and threaded with twisted hazel rods, perhaps to pin him down. His nipples had been sliced. He had been decapitated and cut in half, and only his torso survives, dated to roughly 300 BC. Clonycavan Man, found nearby, was small, and he wore his hair raised in a high style held in place with gel.

Tacitus and the case for punishment

The oldest written explanation comes from a Roman who never saw a bog body. Around 98 CE, the historian Tacitus wrote the Germania, an account of the tribes beyond the Rhine. In chapter 12 he describes how they punished serious crime. Traitors and deserters they hanged from trees. A different class of offender met a different end: “the coward, the unwarlike, and those disgraced in body,” in his phrase, were pressed down into a bog or marsh with a hurdle of wickerwork laid over the top.

That single sentence has anchored the punishment reading for centuries. On this account, the bog bodies are executed criminals. The Latin phrase Tacitus uses, corpore infames, “disgraced in body,” was usually read to mean men shamed by unnatural vice, and the hurdle over the body looks like a means of holding a living person under the water to drown. Lindow Man’s broken skull and Old Croghan Man’s pinning rods can be made to fit this picture: a community killing and disposing of someone it had condemned.

There is a quieter version of the same idea that has nothing to do with Tacitus. A weight or a hurdle on a corpse appears across European folklore as a way of keeping the dangerous dead in the ground. That logic is the same one behind the medieval deviant burial at Račeša in Croatia, where a man was dug up after burial, turned face-down, and weighted with a stone so that he could not return as a vukodlak. The bog body and the deviant burial are not the same practice. One puts a body into the wet ground at the moment of death; the other reopens a grave years later out of fear. But both come from communities doing something deliberate and physical to stop a particular dead person, and both leave the archaeologist holding a body that was handled with intent.

The case for sacrifice

The trouble with the punishment reading is that Tacitus also describes the bog as a holy place. In chapter 40 of the same book he tells of the goddess Nerthus, “Mother Earth,” worshipped by seven tribes who kept her veiled wagon in a grove on an island. When her procession ended, the slaves who had washed the goddess and her wagon in a hidden lake were drowned in it. The lake “swallows them,” Tacitus writes, and the secret is kept by men who are about to die. Here the same act, a body sunk into the wet ground, is not a punishment at all. It is an offering.

The Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob made this the centre of his 1965 book The Bog People, the work that turned Tollund Man into a celebrity. Glob argued that the carefully killed, carefully placed bodies were sacrifices to a fertility goddess of the Nerthus type, given to the bog to secure the turning of the year. The last meals of winter gruel fit a midwinter or early-spring rite. The care fits an offering rather than a disposal.

The most specific version of the sacrifice argument is Irish, and it is where the subject turns strange. Eamonn Kelly, then Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, noticed that the Irish bog bodies kept turning up on ancient tribal boundaries, often near the hills where kings were inaugurated. Old Croghan Man was found on the edge of the territory ruled from Croghan Hill, the inauguration site of a local dynasty. Kelly’s reading is that these were kings, or men who had failed to become kings, killed and given to the land-goddess to whom a king was wedded in the inauguration rite. A failed reign, a bad harvest, a broken candidate: the sovereignty could be returned to the goddess by giving her the man.

This is where Old Croghan Man’s sliced nipples stop being a grisly detail and become an argument. Kelly points out that sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in early Ireland. To cut a man’s nipples, on this reading, was to make him incapable of kingship for good, in this life and the next. The mutilation reads as a constitutional act performed on a body. Kelly’s interpretation rests on his own reading of the Irish material, not on a single named law tract, so it stands as strong argument rather than proven fact. But it explains a wound that nothing else explains.

The motif of a man given to the ground for the harvest was not invented by archaeologists. It sits at the centre of the Irish god Crom Cruach, the gold idol on the Plain of Prostrations to whom, the medieval sources claim, the Irish gave their firstborn in exchange for milk and grain. The bog bodies and the Crom Cruach tradition are separate kinds of evidence, one in the peat and one in the manuscripts, and no one should collapse them into a single story. Yet they point the same way: toward a world in which the price of a good year could be a human life paid into the earth.

The bog also took offerings that were not people. The Gundestrup Cauldron, a great silver vessel worked with gods and beasts, was pulled from the Rævemose bog in Jutland in 1891, dismantled and laid in the peat with no body near it. Whole wagons and hoards of weapons have come out of Northern European bogs the same way. The bog was a threshold, a place where the living handed things across to whatever they believed was on the other side. Sometimes what they handed across was a man.

How we misread the dead

We have got this wrong often, and the errors tend to flatter the story we wanted to tell.

For decades, German schoolchildren learned about Windeby I, a slight body found in 1952 with a band across the eyes and half the head apparently shaved. The textbook account was vivid: a teenage girl, blindfolded, her head shaved for adultery, drowned by her community as Tacitus said the Germans punished unfaithful wives. It was a tidy morality tale, and almost none of it survived re-examination. DNA and fresh analysis identified the body as a boy of about fourteen, probably dead from an infection in the jaw rather than an execution. The “shaved” head was the result of uneven exposure in the peat. The “blindfold” was a hairband that had slipped down. The drowned adulteress never existed. We had drowned her ourselves, in ink.

Yde Girl, in the Netherlands, carried a similar fiction about a deliberately shaved head, later traced to the same uneven bog-bleaching rather than a punishment haircut. And the sheer number of bog bodies turned out to be partly invented: the German researcher Alfred Dieck spent decades claiming nearly two thousand of them, a figure that propped up textbooks until later scholars found that most of his cases were unverifiable and many were fabricated. The reliable count, from the 2023 survey, is large enough on its own, more than a thousand sets of human remains across the peatlands. We did not need the imaginary ones. We made them anyway.

A second life

These bodies disturb people in a way a skeleton cannot. A skeleton is anonymous; a face is a person, and the bog returns the face along with the unreasoning sense that the man might open his eyes.

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney felt it. After reading Glob’s book he wrote a series of poems about the bog dead. The first, “The Tollund Man,” appeared in 1972: “Some day I will go to Aarhus / To see his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin cap.” Heaney went on to use the Iron Age killings as a mirror for the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland in his own decade, a move that drew as much criticism as praise, because it is a heavy thing to lay a modern murder on an ancient one. But he had caught the real source of the discomfort. These were people who were killed, and they refuse to finish dying.

That refusal raises a question the museums now take seriously. Tollund Man, Lindow Man, and the rest are on display behind glass, looked at by millions, which is not what anyone did to them on purpose two thousand years ago. Whether killed as criminals or given as offerings, they were meant to vanish into the bog. Instead the bog kept them, and we dug them up, and now they spend their second existence as the most closely watched dead in Europe.

We are left with the face and without the verdict. Tollund Man was hanged and then laid out with his eyes gently closed, by people who could not have told a Roman whether they were punishing him or honouring him, because in their world the line we keep trying to draw may not have been there at all. The spade hit a face, the men called the police, and the dead man kept his peaceful expression through all of it. He still has it. He is not telling.

Image Sources

• Tollund Man (preserved body, 1950): photograph by Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark), licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Grauballe Man (Moesgaard Museum): photograph by Colin, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Old Croghan Man (National Museum of Ireland): photograph by Mark Healey, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Gundestrup Cauldron (National Museum of Denmark): photograph by mararie, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Hero image: generated for Crazy Alchemist in the dark-romanticism engraving style.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Glob, P.V. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. Translated by Rupert Bruce-Mitford. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. Originally published as Mosefolket: Jernalderens Mennesker bevaret i 2000 År. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1965
• Van Beek, Roy, Cindy Quik, Sophie Bergerbrant, Floor Huisman, and Pikne Kama. ‘Bogs, bones and bodies: the deposition of human remains in northern European mires (9000 BC–AD 1900).’ Antiquity 97, no. 391 (2023): 120-140. DOI 10.15184/aqy.2022.163
• Kelly, Eamonn P. Kingship and Sacrifice: Iron Age Bog Bodies and Boundaries. Archaeology Ireland Heritage Guide No. 35. Bray: Wordwell, 2006
• Painter, Terence J. ‘Lindow Man, Tollund Man and other peat-bog bodies: The preservative and antimicrobial action of Sphagnan, a reactive glycuronoglycan with tanning and sequestering properties.’ Carbohydrate Polymers 15, no. 2 (1991): 123-142
• Tacitus, Cornelius. Germania. Translated by M. Hutton, revised by E.H. Warmington. Loeb Classical Library 35. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. See also the translation by J.B. Rives, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999
• Stead, I.M., J.B. Bourke, and Don Brothwell, eds. Lindow Man: The Body in the Bog. London: British Museum Publications, 1986
• Asingh, Pauline, and Niels Lynnerup, eds. Grauballe Man: An Iron Age Bog Body Revisited. Højbjerg: Jutland Archaeological Society / Aarhus University Press, 2007
• Van der Sanden, Wijnand. Through Nature to Eternity: The Bog Bodies of Northwest Europe. Amsterdam: Batavian Lion International, 1996
• Heaney, Seamus. Wintering Out. London: Faber and Faber, 1972
• Heaney, Seamus. North. London: Faber and Faber, 1975