What was found in peat bogs in denmark

Scholars have come to call this overkilling, and it understandably provokes no end of speculation. We may never get a clear answer, and it now seems unlikely that a single explanation can ever fit all the victims.

But the question keeps gnawing at us and gives bog bodies their clammy grip on the imagination. For some strange reason, we identify. They are so alarmingly normal, these bog folk. You think, there but for the grace of the goddess went I. Seamus Heaney felt it, and wrote a haunting and melancholy series of poems inspired by the bog bodies. Before that, bodies found in bogs were often given a quick reburial in the local churchyard. To the extent that peat still gets cut at all—environmentalists oppose peat extraction in these fragile ecosystems—the job now falls to large machines that often grind up what might have emerged whole from the slow working of a hand spade.

The search for the origins of bog bodies and their secrets goes back a fairly long way, too. In , a peat-cutter found a skeleton and a plait of hair in a bog on Drumkeragh Mountain. The property belonged to the Earl of Moira, and it was his wife, Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, who pursued what we believe to be the first serious investigation of such a find, publishing her results in the journal Archaeologia. As more bog bodies turned up, more questions got asked. In the absence of clear answers, mythmaking and fancy rushed in to fill the void.

She was clamped to the moss with small staves through her elbows and knees. Danish historian and linguist Niels Matthias Petersen identified her as Queen Gunhild of Norway, who, legend tells us, died around , and was notoriously cruel, clever, wanton and domineering.

According to the old stories, the Viking king Harald Bluetooth of Denmark enticed Gunhild over from Norway to be his bride. This explanation was not only accepted when Petersen first advanced it in , it was celebrated; Queen Gunhild became a reality star. Nicholas in Vejle. Among the few dissident voices was that of a scrappy student, J. Worsaae, one of the principal founders of prehistoric archaeology.

Worsaae believed the folklore-based identification was hooey. Moreover, a second postmortem in the year found a thin line around her neck that had gone undetected. She had not been drowned but strangled. This changed everything, except perhaps for the victim. In the absence of hard evidence, the temptation to weave bog bodies into a national narrative proved hard to resist. By this time, two views prevailed. It was largely accepted that the majority of bog bodies dated to the Bronze and Iron Ages, but their murder was ascribed either to ritual sacrifice or criminal punishment.

This latter interpretation rested heavily on the writings of the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, whose Germania , written in A. On the whole, Tacitus thought highly of the local inhabitants. He praised their forthrightness, bravery, simplicity, devotion to their chieftains and restrained sexual habits, which frowned on debauchery and favored monogamy and fidelity.

To the researchers at the Ahnenerbe, bog bodies were the remains of degenerates who had betrayed the ancient code. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the cowardly, the unwarlike and those who disgrace their bodies are drowned in miry swamps under a cover of wicker. One of the few who dared was a historian of culture named Alfred Dieck, who perhaps felt himself protected by his own Nazi Party membership.

But the man who torpedoed the Aryan theory of bog bodies was prevented from working as an archaeologist after the war because of his Nazi past. Shortly after Tollund Man was discovered, the detective in charge of what was initially a missing persons investigation had the good sense to call in Peter Vilhelm Glob, who had recently been appointed professor of archaeology at the university in Aarhus, the nearest big city.

Glob, as everyone refers to him, has stamped his name more deeply than anyone else on the riddle of the bog bodies. However, analysis of the body soon indicated that whoever killed him was far beyond the reach of any justice. His body was laid in its grave in a foetal position, naked except for a belt and a cap, and a rope tied around his neck.

Even a layer of stubble remains visible on the body's chin. Bog bodies dating from the Iron Age in northern Europe are often thought to have been the result of human sacrifice, or else slain as captives or criminals, due to their lack of clothing and atypical body placement.

But Tollund Man's status as a human sacrifice is also built on the presence of food in his stomach, indicating a ritual last meal. In the s, analysis concluded that the man, before his death, had eaten a meal of barley porridge. However, since the majority of Iron Age people were cremated, we do know that these souls met a distinctly different end from their contemporaries. I wanted to visit these bog bodies to get a better insight into the mysterious world they came from.

My first stop was Vejle, a small city of about , in southeast Jutland, km west of Copenhagen. The gorgeous, hilly region is atypical of flat Denmark. The roads corkscrewed around gently rolling farm hills and undulating glacially sculpted valleys, pocked with kettle ponds and woodsy bogs lined with pink orchids and stiff umber cattails.

I was there to meet with Mads Ravn, head archeologist at the Vejle Museum , who oversees a fascinating collection of artefacts, including Roman coins, inscribed swords and swastika brooches an ancient symbol that existed before its association with the Nazi Party that were all found in the bogs and are thought to be votive offerings, possibly for Iron Age gods or deities. From a dark room in the back of the museum, I heard the gloomy call of the elk antler horn, piped in here by modern speakers, but often used as a distress call in Iron Age Denmark.

I heeded its call and entered. Grooves on her neck suggest strangulation. This may partly explain why peat cutting became more common in the Iron Age. They did retain an air of mystery and magic though, as reflected in folk traditions across north-western Europe.

In these tales, bogs are transcendental landscapes inhabited by otherworldly beings who may be friendly but could equally be dangerous. Moreover, although they did provide peat, the land covered by bogs could not be used for agriculture. It is therefore no wonder that people were not reluctant to destroy bogs, whether through drainage or by cutting peat on a large scale.