The Bog People: from Archeology, May/June 2010

I have a fascination with the Bog People. I am hungry for every bit of news about them. I'm in good company. Seamus Heaney, the noted Irish poet and writer, thinks one of the Bog People looks like his uncle.

I blog about the Bog People. I write essays about them. A lot of people feel the same interest, as evidenced by the many articles I find in magazines and other publications.

In the May/June 2010 issue of ARCHEOLOGY magazine is an article called “Bog Bodies Rediscovered”. The facts uncovered about the Bog People lead me to suspect that the pagan people of Europe, including the British Isles, were closely connected to each other by belief and customs, these connections being reinforced by the constant traveling, visiting, trading, and interaction of cultures.

Tollund Man, who appears on the cover of the magazine, was found naked as a stillborn child in the fetal position except for his hat, a “two-strand leather rope” around his neck that seemed to be the instrument of his murder, and a leather belt. This bog person has the most preternatural look of peace on his face, a curious thing for a strangled man to have. The article says “It was as though the dead man's soul had for a moment returned from another world, through a gate in the western sky.”

That's the thing about the bog people, they appear so strangely real, despite the strange coloring that the tobacco-brown peat juices give to their bodies. It makes time-traveling seem almost possible.

I had seen the Windeby Girl, another Bog person, before in photographs in books, and I always thought, no offense meant, that she must have been, well, a somewhat unattractive girl. It turns out that there is a good reason for that. The Windeby Girl is actually a boy. It is suggested that what appears to be a blindfold was probably a headband that has slipped down due to shrinkage and was probably used to keep his hair from his eyes. The Windeby person has his hair “half-shaved” on one side and the probably reason given for the lack of the other half to is “natural process of decay from greater exposure of oxygen on one side of her head than the other, or of trowel damage...”.

If you can see the little whisker hairs of Tollund Man still intact, isn't it possible to tell if the head of the Windeby Girl was shaven or not? The reason I ask is that there was a pagan goddess named Hel who had one half of her face shaded and one half in light, much like the faces shown on the cover of the Beatles' Meet The Beatles Album.

In the Scottish Outer Hebrides, the bodies at Cladh Hallan seems to give proof that they were deliberately mummified in a bog and then retrieved and buried elsewhere. If true, that would mean that not all the corpses found in the peat bogs were accidental victims who fell in due to bilberry intoxication. The article suggests that the burials give evidence of ancestor worship. One of the bodies seems to be a composite of several bodies, which fact gives rise to a lot of other questions.

I have a question about Red Franz on page 26 of the magazine. If he died as a young man, what is with his eyebrows? He has the eyebrows of an eighty year old man. It was interesting that he has “'riders' facets'” on his thigh bones. These are described as “protrusions caused by the increase of the muscles and connective tissues of the hip, which can occur from constant horseback riding.” Another question: Since it was discovered that “after decades of being displayed on his back, they turned him over onto his abdomen” and found his throat had been cut, what took them so long to roll him over?

More questions arise on reading page 28: Did you notice that some of the figures, both interior and exterior, on the Gundestrup Cauldron have their hands up as if the police had yelled “Freeze right there and keep your hands in the air”? Page 29 shows the partial torso and arms of a bog person called Old Croghan Man in just the same posture. There may have been ritual postures that signified different facets of pagan religious rites, and that may be one, just a gangs and secret societies today have secret signs and handshakes. Of course, there are also unicorns on the inside of the cauldron. Incidentally, this bog person as well as Clonycavan Man had their nipples pinched and cut off. Various speculations are thrown about.

The Clonycavan Man has a skull that had been opened with an ax and had also been clobbered in the nose, probably by the very same ax. This puts the theory that bog people were hopelessly lost in the bog or intoxicated and accidentally fell into the bog waters. They were undoubtedly murdered, possibly ritually. Clonycavan Man has combed his hair into a twist, thrown forward up onto his head and cemented with an "organic" hair gel. He is described as six and a half feet tall and a regular eater of meat. You can probably piece a picture together of this man and his personality.