A really fun little read on the circumstances of various corpses found in Northern European swamps. Thematically divided in two, the first half focuses on the modern interpretation of the cadavers, which surprisingly can get quite controversial. The common folk around the sites of discovery usually have trouble believing that the preserved bodies are over a thousand years old and instead insist its a long lost relative who had mysteriously disappeared in the relatively recent past. This and more bureaucratic issues (do the bog bodies count as corpses or archaeological to the railway company and their fines?) lend a more mundane tone, and with the forensic descriptions of the bodies it can feel closer to something like crime lit.

The second half of the book is Glob’s attempt at establishing historical context for these bog bodies, which to him is a Germanic tradition of human sacrifice, specifically to ritually give the goddess of spring a husband (Glob in particular compares this to votive offerings also discovered in Germanic archaeological sites). Glob sells the story excellently but of course as anyone who has studied history and read through and about older monographs, there are hordes of corrections, arguments from new evidence, qualifications and critiques. In particular from the evidence presented in the books it seems particularly reasonable to assume some kind of ritualistic killing, several (but notedy not all) bodies have similar trauma and ephemera pop up again and again: slit throats, a meal of many coarse grains ground together into a kind of porridge , pollen indicating a death in later winter, branches and stakes added on top post-mortem. Yet if these are all for a kind of fatal marriage ceremony (reminiscent of the castrations of the male priests of Cybele), why are some women? Why are some of them murdered out of season, or have head trauma as opposed to neck wounds? And of course archaeological analysis on the mentioned bodies in the 50 or so years sinces publication have argued tiny details here and there. This makes no dent in the entertainment value of Glob’s theorizing but it is an unfortunate reality of historical writing. But I do not think of it as a total condemnation, human sacrifice is well attested throughout europe (the world as well) and it seems certain that some of these bodies were deposited as a result of those rituals, the issue is how much can we draft a narrative in the lacunae of information we have between these remarkably well preserved bodies and the silence on the information we have of these Neolithic to Iron Age communities as well as the trouble in crafting a singular theory covering evidence stretching thousands of years in time and hundreds of miles in location.

In a sense thats an inherent tragedy to history, we want to know but the dead don’t speak and what we have is what has survived in spite of everything. We can know these people’s faces, leatherly leached with even faint beard hairs and half digested meals intact but we will never know exactly why they’re there, we can only make educated guesses.

The Bog People

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