Bog Bodies: Sacrifice, Punishment or Something Else?

On 6 May 1950, the brothers Viggo and Emil Højgaard were cutting peat in Bjældskovdal, about ten kilometres west of Silkeborg, when Viggo's wife Grethe saw a face in the peat. He lay on his side as if asleep, knees drawn up, a pointed skin cap on his head and a plaited leather rope around his neck. His face was so calm and so whole that they thought they had found a recent murder, and the police were called.

He had been dead for about 2,400 years.

That is Tollund Man, the best known of the bog bodies, and most people begin with him. I begin with him too, because of one detail that is easy to miss. Whoever put him in the bog closed his eyes and his mouth. He was hanged, and then he was laid down with care.

Executions are rarely tidied afterwards. Offerings often are.

What is a bog body?

A bog body is a human body preserved in a peat bog. Some are skeletons. Some are only a head, a foot or a single braid of hair. A few, like Tollund Man, come out of the peat with their faces, fingerprints and stubble still there.

Denmark has more than its share: over 500 bog bodies and skeletons have been found in its bogs. The oldest Danish find is around 10,000 years old. Most of the famous ones belong to the Early Iron Age, which in Denmark runs from about 500 BC to AD 400.

Why are bog bodies so well preserved?

A raised bog is fed by rain, not groundwater. It is built slowly by sphagnum moss, and its water is cold, acidic and almost without oxygen. The bacteria that would normally break a body down cannot work there. Compounds in the sphagnum tan the skin the way a tanner treats a hide, and the same acid slowly dissolves the bones. That is why many bog bodies look flattened and soft, and why their hair has turned red. Grauballe Man's famous red hair is the bog's work, not his own colour.

In other words, the bog does not preserve a person the way a tomb does. It changes them into something else and keeps that. Hold on to that thought; it matters later.

The Danish bog people

Five of them are worth knowing by name. Each one died differently, and the bog kept something different from each.

The man who found Grauballe Man first thought he had found Red Kristian, a local man who had gone missing a few years earlier. The bog does that to people. Everything in it looks recent.

Why the bog?

A bog is neither land nor water. You can stand on it, almost. It moves when you walk. Mist rises from it on still evenings, and small lights were said to wander across it at night. The people of the Iron Age did not have to be told it was a threshold. They could feel it under their feet.

They gave to it for thousands of years before the bog people, and long after. Stone Age farmers laid flint axes and pots in the wet. Bronze Age people gave it their great curved lurs and, at Trundholm on Zealand, the sun chariot that was ploughed out of the bog in 1902. The Gundestrup cauldron, found in 1891 in Rævemose in Himmerland, had been taken apart before it went into the bog. At Illerup Ådal, a lake that later grew over into bog, people sank around 15,000 weapons and other pieces of war gear over a few centuries. Most had been burnt, bent or broken first.

Then there is the detail that tells you most. In the Early Iron Age, the ordinary dead of Jutland were cremated. The bog people were not. They went into the bog whole, which means somebody decided they belonged to a different category of death. They were not buried. They were given.

Sacrifice, punishment or something else?

Nobody knows for certain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. These are the three explanations that have held up best, and what each one rests on.

A gift to the gods

P. V. Glob, the archaeologist who examined both Tollund Man and Grauballe Man, believed they were offerings to a fertility goddess. He pointed out that the twisted leather nooses looked like the twisted neck rings worn by early goddess figures, as if the victims had been dedicated to her. The Roman writer Tacitus describes a goddess called Nerthus, washed in a hidden lake after her procession, and says the slaves who washed her were swallowed by that same lake. Tollund Man's last meal, analysed again in 2021, included threshing waste, which the researchers think may have had a ritual meaning.

A punishment

Tacitus also wrote that traitors were hanged from trees, while cowards and people guilty of shameful acts were pressed down into the bog under a hurdle. That matches the Haraldskær Woman uncomfortably well: she was pinned to the bottom with woven branch hurdles and poles. Some scholars read the hurdle as more than a weight. It kept the dead from rising again. But Tacitus never travelled north himself, and he was writing as a Roman about people he considered barbarians.

A death at the edge of the land

In Ireland, the archaeologist Eamonn Kelly noticed that almost every well-dated bog body lay on an old territorial boundary. Two of the best-known men were well fed, with hands that had never done hard work. His theory is that they were failed kings or candidates for kingship, killed and given to the goddess of the land whom a king married at his inauguration. Not everyone agrees with him, and Irish custom was not Danish custom. But the pattern of the boundary is hard to ignore.

What I think

The practice ran for centuries across half of northern Europe, so it would be strange if it had one meaning. I also suspect that "sacrifice" and "punishment" were not separate boxes to the people doing it. A person who had broken the peace with the unseen could be handed back to it, and that handing back could be justice and offering at the same time. The care with which so many were laid down suggests that, whatever they had done or been, they were sent somewhere.

The logic of the offering

This is where the bog stops being a history lesson for me and becomes craft. Strip away the horror and the bog finds follow a few rules, and those rules are still the bones of how I work.

The gift has to cost something. Nobody sank a cracked pot when they could keep the good one. They gave swords, a cauldron of silver, a sun chariot, and sometimes a person. A gift that costs you nothing is a tip, and the unseen knows the difference.

The gift is made useless to the living. The swords at Illerup were bent and burnt. The cauldron was taken apart. Nobody did that by accident. A sword that can never be drawn again can no longer belong to this world, so it belongs to the other one. In the old sense, the object was killed so that it could travel.

The place does half the work. Bogs, lakes, springs, boundaries. Offerings go where the world is thin, because that is where they can cross. In a working, the threshold is the door.

What is given stays given. You do not go back for it. The bog keeps its gifts, and it changes them while it keeps them, the way it turned skin to leather and hair to copper. You do not get the old thing back. If you get anything, you get the turning.

Nobody needs to give a life to work this way. But I do work by this logic: you give first, you give something with weight, you give it at a threshold, and you let it go. My Iron Age material on offering and exchange is gathered in Abundance, in the chapter I call The Law Beneath the Law, together with the rites built on it.

The bog in Danish folklore

The bog people were forgotten. The bog was not. Long after the last offering, Danes still treated it as a place where something else lived.

On still evenings, when a warm day turns cold, a knee-high milky mist settles over meadows and bogs, and Danes still say mosekonen brygger: the bog woman is brewing. She brews at the bottom of the bog, and the steam is what you see. Oddly, nobody tells stories about her. H. C. Andersen made her the aunt of the elf maidens in one of his tales, and admitted that all anyone really knew was that when the meadows steam, she is at her brewing.

The lygtemænd, the lantern men, are another matter. They were small figures carrying lights who walked the bogs and wet meadows at night, and anyone who followed them ended up in a bog hole. You could protect yourself by turning a piece of clothing inside out. You could also hire one to light your way home, but then you had to pay what you owed. Some said they were the drowned. Others said they were men who had moved boundary stones in life to steal a neighbour's land, and were now condemned to walk the edges they had cheated.

Two thousand years after Kelly's kings were given to the bogs on the borders of their kingdoms, Danish farmers were still telling each other that the bog and the boundary belonged to the dead.

If the beings of the Northern landscape are your interest, I wrote The Hidden Folk about them and how to behave in their territory.

Visiting the bog people

All five belong to Danish museums. Tollund Man and Elling Woman lie at Museum Silkeborg. Only Tollund Man's head is original; the rest of him dried out after 1950, and the body you see is a reconstruction made in 1987. Grauballe Man rests at Moesgaard near Aarhus, the Haraldskær Woman at Kulturmuseet in Vejle, and the Huldremose Woman belongs to the National Museum in Copenhagen. Check before you travel what each museum has on display.

Go quietly. They were people, with names someone once called across a field, and they did not choose to be looked at.

How to behave at a bog

If you visit a bog itself, a few rules. Some are mine. One is the law.

• Take nothing out. In Denmark, old objects of value or cultural importance are danefæ. They belong to the state and must be handed in to the local museum, which passes them on to the National Museum. The rule goes back to the Middle Ages, and finders usually receive a reward. The bog has kept its gifts for two thousand years. Let it, or let a museum.
• Put nothing in that does not belong. No coins, no candles, no plastic, no crystals from a shop. Many Danish bogs are protected nature. If you want to give, give what the bog can take back: a little bread, a splash of milk, water poured out, or simply your attention. Or leave the bog in peace and make your offering at your own threshold, with a bowl of water at the door.
• Stay on the paths. The lantern men were not wrong about the bog holes.
• Mind the mist. When the bog woman is brewing, it is a good evening to stay on the right side of the edge.

Bog bodies FAQ

What preserves a bog body?

Raised bogs are cold, acidic and almost free of oxygen, so the bacteria that break a body down cannot work. Compounds from sphagnum moss tan the skin, while the acid slowly dissolves the bones.

Were bog bodies human sacrifices?

Many probably were, but not necessarily all. Some may have been executions, and to the people of the time the two may not have been separate ideas. The careful way many were laid down points towards ritual rather than simple murder.

How old is Tollund Man?

Radiocarbon dating places his death between about 405 and 380 BC, so roughly 2,400 years ago. He was between 30 and 40 years old when he died.

Is Tollund Man's body real?

His head is. The rest of his body was not preserved after the find in 1950, and the body on display at Museum Silkeborg is a reconstruction from 1987.

How many bog bodies have been found?

In Denmark alone, more than 500 bog bodies and skeletons have been found over time. Across northwestern Europe the count runs to several hundred more, and many early finds were simply reburied or lost.

What is the oldest bog body in Denmark?

Koelbjerg Man, found on Funen in 1941, died around 8000 BC. He was long thought to be a woman.

Where to go from here

The beings of the land. The Hidden Folk covers the spirits of Northern places, and the old manners for living beside them.

New to my work? Start with Spirit Keeping for Beginners on the blog.

Next time the meadows steam on a still evening, you will know who is brewing, and what lies under her kettle.

~ Hazel